Every connected device creates a new opportunity to generate revenue for organizations savvy enough to leverage the data. These companies didn’t wait for competitors to build a prototype or for a larger company to build new infrastructure. They’ve already begun to generate revenue with businesses suited to the IoT industry.

Automatically Book Recurring Tasks, Services, and Deliveries

Everyday tasks and errands can be automated or streamlined in the IoT market to save time for everyone with connected devices. Car maintenance, grocery shopping, and other services tied to physical locations all fall under this category. They’re primed for disruption, which is where IoT services will be able to leverage a competitive advantage.

Companies like Adheretech use the IoT to prompt individuals to take certain actions at specific points in time. In particular, they’re helping people take their medication on time.  Adheretech’s product doesn’t just push reminders to mobile phones, as that wouldn’t be a fantastic product-market fit with the large number of elderly citizens who need help keeping track of multiple pill bottles.

Instead, the company has turned the pill bottles themselves into connected devices that remind the owner to administer the medicine at precisely the right time of day.  This kind of structure will streamline the process of taking multiple actions to do something simple, like booking an appointment with a mechanic. Connected devices like these have the potential to eliminate multi-step complexities for basic aspects of daily life.

Universal Passwords Via Facial Recognition Software

Around 3.2 billion people across the globe have access to an Internet connection, and each of them needs to juggle dozens of passwords as they accrue new accounts for emails, streaming services, credit cards, entertainment platforms, and work-related products. Nobody wants to keep track of tens of billions of passwords that could be mined through malware or a “hacktivist” PR stunt.

Trueface AI has created a unique—yet universal—password for everyone to use. Calling it “password” is actually a misnomer, as it’s facial recognition software that works with multiple devices across from different manufacturers. The solution is elegant in its simplicity, yet incredibly secure. The first companies in this space could corner the consumer market before the Internet of Things has matured to its fullest extent.

Why should consumers use dozens of passwords when they could unlock their devices with simple facial recognition for everything?

Using Behavioral Data and Machine Learning for Smart Energy Usage

Most consumers would opt for environmentally friendly energy usage then not, all other things being equal. The challenge for “green energy” initiatives has been affordability and mass market appeal, but the Internet of Things’ infrastructure can solve both of these problems at once.

One of the keys to reducing the population’s collective carbon footprint is to leverage big data and behavioural patterns in conjunction with machine learning. Smart home systems such as Nest have already begun to help consumers optimize their energy use in order to reduce costs and conserve energy at the same time. However, the consumer market isn’t the only one that can benefit from this kind of data.

Enlightened has devised a product that optimizes energy use for commercial real estate properties, ultimately scaling energy costs further per building. The company implements machine to incorporate personalized employee data into a facility-wide network to predict usage needs in real-time.

Delivering In-Home Marketing With Big Data

Marketing before the Internet interrupted consumer behaviour, while current digital marketing leverages consumer’s search intent to capture leads who are already looking for a product. The infrastructure and exchange of data that comprises the Internet of Things will let companies engage in native advertising right in the home, meeting customer needs without forcing them to search actively for products—or to leave home for them.

Voice search, machine learning, and behavioral data can be combined to deliver personalized marketing and sales campaigns for everyday needs. This can work for big-ticket items as well as household supplies. Personal assistants will become a new and crucial gateway to casual sales in the IoT.

Leaders in the technology space have been preparing for virtual assistants to come into the fold since before 2017, speaking to their importance as the link between enterprise marketing stacks and individual decision-making processes.

Wirelessly Charging IoT Devices

With tens of billions of connected devices comes the challenge of powering all of them on a massive scale. Connected devices couldn’t be relied upon if they needed to be charged manually with a cord on a daily basis.

Connected devices won’t help anyone if they aren’t charged, making wireless solutions a natural choice for the fledgling IoT market. This could also prove to be a highly economical option, lowering the consumer barrier to entry for IoT-related products and subscriptions. Wireless charging for everyday devices will let the entire industry workaround regional specifications for the multitude of devices that will appear on the market.

Humavox has devised a product to solve this precise market problem, creating a wireless charger for multiple people to use leveraging radio waves.  People could bring their devices around the world without worrying about charging compatibility, which could disrupt travel and tourism industries in unexpected ways.

Connecting Traffic Data, Weather Patterns, and News Alerts with Voice Search

Everyone has Google Maps and a pre-loaded weather app on their phones, but rarely do these apps work together to produce simple advice for people to follow (if ever). Audi Connect has decided to leverage various streams of data to guide drivers—and eventually its own vehicles directly—with integrated reports on weather, traffic updates, and news. It will all be wrapped up with a voice interface to help drivers operate hands-free.

This system only appears in Audi’s newest vehicles at the moment, but it will certainly make its way into economical models as the IoT industry matures and the technology becomes more affordable.  The auto industry will only become more competitive as time goes on, creating new opportunities for competitors or specialty software companies to emulate Audi Connect’s initiative.

Home Security Without Invading Privacy

Home security has never been more thorough than with connected devices, but it has caused the public debate of personal privacy to migrate to the home. Parents today sleep soundly knowing that their homes are under video surveillance to check on pets, babysitters supervising children, or even just to make sure everything is fine while traveling.

However, constant surveillance isn’t something that the average consumer wants while they’re home.  Vayyar developed a product-as-a-service to solve this exact problem in the IoT market. It records “events” in the home without resorting to intrusive video surveillance, providing a record of activity without recording residents uncomfortably.

Vayyar’s “events” could include any of these things:

• Opening doors
• Turning on lights
• Running water
• Opening windows
• Changing the heating or air conditioning settings
• Accessing a computer

This could become the industry standard for smart home systems in the future Internet of Things.

Building Smart Cities to Save Money for Municipalities

The IoT market doesn’t just interest consumers and businesses. Governments have already taken an interest in the industry for its potential to revolutionize infrastructure as we know it.  Miovision has created a product that adds data-gathering and traffic coordination capabilities to existing infrastructure, taking one of the first steps toward developing full-fledged smart cities.

Approaching this at the street level can improve the flow of traffic enough for a single, moderately sized city to save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in maintenance crew labor and truck runs. This also has the public-facing benefit of speeding up traffic for everyone who requires personal or public transit, reducing commuting times. It will also complement the connected car industry by exchanging real-time traffic data for mutual benefit.

Merging Office Communications with Wearable Technology

Coordinating hourly workers for large enterprises has never been a precise science: workers need to hear schedule updates, memos, crew changes, and notices about facilities they use on a regular basis. Some of those features can be accessed on smartphones—like schedules—but most existing solutions don’t go beyond that.

Theatro built an employee communication platform built specifically for voice rather than email. Large teams can use it to leave behind the speaker systems and the walkie-talkies in favor of unobtrusive wearable technology. This will improve the customer's in-store experience as well as the reliability of employee communication without the need to walk across an entire warehouse just to track down the guy with the product scanner.

Clothing That Tracks Biometrics

Smartwatches aren’t the only types of wearable technology on the market. Today’s watches can track heartbeats per minute, steps taken, and even how many calories are burned in a day. There will be more to wearable technology than that in the IoT.

What if socks could sense strain before a runner suffered an injury? What if jackets could make secure payments without risking a PIN?

The new era of wearable technology will dive deeper, adding new layers of complexity to the health vertical as well as touching on authentication, finance, and—of course—user data insights.

The Internet of Things provides a wealth of opportunities to generate revenue with the exchange of data, but each one of them requires the financial infrastructure to scale with thousands of users and billions of devices.

Take our report on deriving value from the Internet of Things to learn how you can scale that business model in a connected world.