IOT 2.0

Just a few decades ago it was ample to precisely set its watch with a minute's precision. Today, ubiquitous mobile phones and computers provide secondary precision, but it will not be enough in the future, considering more researchers.

When the phrase “Internet of Things” was coined, probably in 1999 by Kevin Ashton of the Auto-ID Center, it was mainly about RFID technology and the early Internet impacting supply chains and logistics. In parallel,Neil Gerstenfeld talked about “When things start to think” while he was at MIT Media Lab. This can be read as an early take on artificial intelligence, or on IoT – or both. 

Around the year 2000, it somehow felt right to assume that things would follow humans into the Internet and that those things might be smart.

Among the most spectacular recent examples is a visualization from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which shows how cars can navigate through the city's intersection without having to stop for red light.

This is partly due to the fact that the MIT research group is based on self-propelled cars and, secondly, that the cars are able to synchronize their driving precisely because they all have watches with nanoseconds accuracy. But here the potential in so-called nanosynchronization stops far from.

"Imagine that my phone can tell me to leave home in two minutes and 31 seconds if I have to meet my Berlin meeting before kl. 15. It would be taken into consideration that I was through the traffic, checked baggage, etc. - all without needing to wait along the way because everyone had timed their arrival at security and at the traffic lights along the way, "Senior Specialist at GTS Institute Delta Carsten Thomsen.

Therefore, the size and price of GPS receivers has meant a significant difference in the ability to nano-synchronize devices.

"Today, these types of systems from the nerded scientific environment are becoming more widespread. The scaling of this type of system opens up a platform for millions of devices that can open to an impressive universe of applications when they are synchronous, "notes Carsten Thomsen.
What Then is IoT 2.0
Therefore, he is not late to baptize Internet of Things with nanosynchronization 'IoT 2.0'. Carsten Thomsen particularly sees the testing and measurement industries as the obvious areas to implement nanosynchronized meters in. But other applications are also spectacular. For example, some American cities already have synchronized microphones in the streets, which listen for gun shots. By comparing the times when the sound reaches different microphones, the authorities can quickly find out exactly where a shot has been fired.
This concept is called a passive acoustic radar and can be used to locate a number of sounds. Carsten Thomsen points, among other things, to the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013 as an example:

"There were hundreds of video and audio recordings of it. If they were timely enough, you could easily merge them and get a very detailed picture of where the bomb was located right away, "he says.

In addition, that kind of information would allow the creation of so-called virtual antennas that make it possible to listen to what was said in a particular location, for example, where a bomb ran just before the blasting - without a microphone being Located just there.