For modern technologies, convergence is the name of the game. We have reached the point wherein even common household implements or city infrastructures have some form of embedded computing and internet in them — including refrigerators, thermostats, household locks, cars, vacuum cleaners, traffic lights, and more.

1. From Internet-of-Things to
Internet-of-Everything
Computing technology is leading the convergence of technologies to
change daily life as it is.

2. Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Forbes
China, and has been translated into English.
For modern technologies, convergence is the name of the game. We
have reached the point wherein even common household implements
or city infrastructures have some form of embedded computing and
internet in them — including refrigerators, thermostats, household
locks, cars, vacuum cleaners, traffic lights, and more.
Statista has predicted that by 2020, we will have 30 billion connected
things online, growing to at least 74 billion by 2025.
“Our IoT data usage grows by almost 30 percent every year, and by
2025, we will be generating around 80 zettabytes of data from sources
like video surveillance, computer vision, audio, video, data from
sensors, and more,” says Kenny Au, Founder at Elevate Ventures and
Advisory. “For machine learning and artificial intelligence to

3. effectively use this metadata, sufficient processing power is required at
a cost effective rate.”
“The future of the IoT industry will be supported by three key
concepts: hybrid, convergence and machine-to-machine economy,”
says Jean-Charles Cabelguen, PhD, Chief of Innovation and Adoption
at iExec.
He stresses on how cloud computing would need to evolve in order to
support all this innovation: “The cloud computing industry has
reached a good level of maturity on the technical side as well on the
acceptance side. Today companies have tested the benefit and
flexibility offered by the cloud.”
Internet-of-everything is about convergence and resource
sharing
On the need to overcome technical challenges, Dr. Cabelguen says:
“Indeed to address issues like low latency or preprocessing, IT

4. infrastructures will need to mix solutions. Computing technology
based solutions might be an efficient answer to combine edge
computing and cloud computing. And when we think about resource
sharing, we will need layers of technologies recording how the
providers behave and how the resources are used.”
Thus, computing technology can add a layer of trust into converged
clouds, including tracking who provides, what is provided, how it is
used and how valuable the results are. This can leverage technologies
like Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and the Intel Software
Guard Extensions (SGX), which provide a secure and exclusive
environment for executing code within a device.
“Decentralized technologies allow computing resources deployed by
different entities to be composed into a single logical cloud,” says
Michael Reed, Computing Technology Program Director at Intel.

5. Smart cities will highlight the sharing economy
The most obvious benefit of computing technology is that it provides a
convergence layer across different clouds and cloud computing
platforms. However, on a deeper level, it also enables cost and benefit
sharing across these users and infrastructures.
“Computing technology can help make a sharing economy of
computing resources. Computing technology can be used to create a
marketplace of available resources, and digital assets can be used to
compensate compute resources upon use,” adds Reed.
This will be particularly effective when businesses and IoT data
providers do not necessarily have a well-defined relationship. For
instance, a city’s traffic management system might learn from
transportation data derived from a logistics provider — the data might
be shared and monetized even without the two ever directly dealing
with each other.

6. Dr. Cabelguen cites the smart city, for example: “In smart cities of the
future, we will have millions of connected devices, built and owned by
thousands of different companies. But, for both hardware and
software, there will not exist just one single standard. So we will need
solutions to allow those fragmented infrastructures to work together.
And here again computing technology based cloud platforms might be
the ideal bridge to allow IoT systems deployed by different companies
to collaborate.”
Computing technology will be the glue that holds it all
together
Intel’s Reed provides a parallel comparison, which is in how
businesses have learned to outsource their infrastructure to the cloud
— something that was unthinkable in the decades past. In future, even
these converged clouds will no longer be something businesses need to
directly engage. “IoT use cases often involve multiple entities without
established business relationships. In such an environment, the

7. edge-IoT solution can be thought of as a multiparty shared cloud that
can benefit from computing technology in much the same way as
traditional cloud computing environments.”
He adds that computing technology essentially empowers participants
to derive value from data without the complexities of formal
relationships. “Cloud computing technology will help democratize the
IoT industry by enabling participants to deliver services without
requiring a formal agreement with an established edge infrastructure
provider.”
The future of connected things is all about value
There is still much work to be done, however. Dr. Cabelguen concludes
that the key here is to establish value, so that people and companies
will be incentivized to participate in the data-sharing economy. “We
will need interoperability layers to coordinate edge to cloud processing
and also to rank the connected devices in the chain of value. As for

8. people and companies today, the idea is to incentivize connected
devices to behave well and to provide valuable services. This is the first
step into the machine to machine economy.”
Image Credit: Pixabay
Featured in the story
Dr. Jean-Charles Cabelguen (iExec)
Jean-Charles Cabelguen is Chief of Innovation & Marketing at iExec
and Chair at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Dr. Cabelguen has a
PhD in Science from ENSAM ParisTech and 12 years of experience

9. working on international business development interacting with big
players like EDF, Areva, and Cegelec. As a digital entrepreneur, he also
worked on go-to-market strategies and marketing campaigns with
more than 80 companies.
Michael Reed (Intel Corporation)
Michael Reed is Blockchain Program Director at Intel Corporation. He
is a corporate intrapreneur/incubation executive with experience
funding and driving technology ventures related to blockchain,
cryptocurrency, online payments, RFID, Internet of Things, cloud
computing and consumer electronics. With 20+ years of success

10. creating new technology businesses that command market-segment
leadership and $100M+ revenue, Reed is an agile leader, proven
successful in venture-funded startups and Fortune 100 divisions. He is
an outstanding people manager recognized for assembling talented
teams and leading them to unprecedented results.
Kenny Au (Elevate Ventures)
Kenny Au is the founder of Elevate Ventures. Elevate Ventures is a
Technology Ventures and Advisory firm.. The team at Elevate

11. Ventures has extensive experience in fintech and blockchain sectors
focused in South East Asia and China.