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Cisco sees $19 trillion opportunity in Internet of Things

by on14 February 2014



Wearables are hot too, but people lose interest fast

Cisco CEO John Chambers thinks the Internet of Things is going to be, well, a thing. Chambers told the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference that Cisco started working on IoT technologies six years ago.

He believes the infrastructure behind the Internet of Things will be massive. Chambers estimates IoT could become a $19 trillion market over the next few years with $2.9 trillion for manufacturing alone. Needless to say, Cisco believes it is in a good position to make a few bucks on IoT, as it remains a network powerhouse.

In related news, wearables are slowly going mainstream, but according to a new survey by Endeavour Partners, there is a problem. Although consumers don’t mind buying wearable tech, many of them appear to lose interest in them.

The survey found that most wearables in the wild today are fitness trackers like Jawbone or the Nike Fuelband. They are quite useful and practical, but many consumers simply lose interest in a matter of months. Users point out wearables are easy to lose or break, yet they are hard to sync with other devices and their battery life is poor. Many also find them ugly and uncomfortable – but more importantly many users say they simply don’t provide any material benefit.

That is the crux of the issue. Smartphones are basically the Swiss Army knife of gadgets, they can do a lot of things and people always have them handy. They can be used as fitness trackers, cameras, music players, navigation devices and much more. That is why they wrecked the audio player market, and then they went after compact cameras.

However, wearables do the exact opposite – they force people to carry around more devices instead of less. The trouble with most of them is that they are very specialized and only have a handful of applications. In other words they are a tough sell, especially now that people have ditched their iPods, pocket cameras and various other gadgets in favour of smartphones.

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