• What we do
  • The People
  • About Us
  • Why Innovation Africa
  • Contact Us
Innovation AfricaCreating the Future Today
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
Menu
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
  • The next industrial revolution

    November 2, 2014 Editor 0

    Power_Mast_Framework_Markus_Grossalber_Flickr

    If you Google “next industrial revolution,” you’ll find plenty of candidates: 3D printers, nanomaterials, robots, and a handful of new economic frameworks of varying exoticism. (The more generalized ones tend to sound a little more plausible than the more specific ones.)

    The phrase came up several times at a track I chaired during our Strata + Hadoop World conference on big data. The talks I assembled focused on the industrial Internet — the merging of big machines and big data — and generally concluded that in the next industrial revolution, software will take on the catalytic role previously played by the water wheel, steam engine, and assembly line.

    The industrial Internet is part of the new hardware movement, and, like the new hardware movement, it’s more about software than it is about hardware. Hardware has gotten easier to design, manufacture, and distribute, and it’s gotten more powerful and better connected, backed up with a big-data infrastructure that’s been under construction for a decade or so.

    All of that means it’s an excellent way to extend the reach of software into the physical world, so people who have spent their lives in software are turning toward hardware now, hoping to build little rafts that will carry their code out of the comfort of the server room and down the unexplored rivers of the physical world.

    The problems of the industrial Internet are particularly interesting because they require an enormous amount of domain knowledge in addition to clever software thinking. Our first speaker at our Strata + Hadoop World Industrial Internet session, Daniel Koffler, described aluminum smelting pots that use 600,000 amps of current — enough to disable electronic equipment and magnetize cars nearby. Our second speaker, Ami Daniel, described the lengths that smugglers and savvy merchant captains go to in order to obscure the data streams that come from oceangoing ships, and the skepticism and precision that his team uses to outsmart them.

    In my closing panel with executives from Accenture, GE, and Pivotal, we spent the most time talking about integration and skills — how to draw together a lot of experts to work on extraordinarily complicated systems. If you approach these kinds of problems unilaterally as a software generalist, you won’t get very far.

    For a few more thoughts on the next industrial revolution, I encourage you to watch my colleague Jenn Webb interview Nate Oostendorp, a co-founder of Sight Machine (and another speaker in my industrial Internet program). Sight Machine uses computer vision and other software techniques to help factories and other physical environments improve their operations. (Full disclosure: O’Reilly’s sister firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, is an investor in Sight Machine.)

    The Strata + Hadoop World All-Access Pass includes the Industrial Internet Day all-day session and all sessions in the Connected World track. — get your pass here.

    Cropped image on article and category pages by Markus Grossalber on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.


    Go to Source

    Related Posts

    • New computing model could lead to quicker advancements in medical research, according to Virginia TechNew computing model could lead to quicker advancements in medical research, according to Virginia Tech
    • Technology that gets under your skinTechnology that gets under your skin
    • All things to all people: what the Internet means to our livesAll things to all people: what the Internet means to our lives
    • The Internet-Connected Engine Will Change TruckingThe Internet-Connected Engine Will Change Trucking
    • How to Ensure Long-Term Sustainability for a Computer Lab
    • Open Innovation Key for Modern Local AuthoritiesOpen Innovation Key for Modern Local Authorities
    Sovrn
    Share

    Categories: Technology

    Tags: Apache Hadoop, Cloud computing, Cloud infrastructure, Emerging technologies, Scientific revolution, Technology, Technology_Internet

    A quest for global entrepreneurs: the importance of cultural intelligence on commitment to entrepreneurial education Big data’s big ideas

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

Subscribe to our stories


 

Recent Posts

  • SL Crowd Green Solutions September 21, 2020
  • Digital transformation in the banking sector: surveys exploration and analytics August 3, 2020
  • Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey! August 3, 2020
  • 5 Tips for Crowdfunding During the Pandemic August 3, 2020
  • innovation + africa; +639 new citations August 3, 2020

Categories

Archives

Popular Post-All time

  • A review on biomass-based... 0.9k views
  • Can blockchain disrupt ge... 682 views
  • Prize-winning projects pr... 678 views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Y... 605 views
  • Test Your Value Propositi... 533 views

Recent Posts

  • SL Crowd Green Solutions
  • Digital transformation in the banking sector: surveys exploration and analytics
  • Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey!
  • 5 Tips for Crowdfunding During the Pandemic
  • innovation + africa; +639 new citations
  • SME Innovation: 10 Priorities for Support Post-COVID-19 
  • Africa RISING Annual Progress Report 2018 – 2019 now available
  • Fodder beet feed supplementation delivers dairy success for Ethiopian farmers
  • Using theory of change for outcome-oriented research
  • Africa RISING partners publish soil fertility management guidebook

Tag Cloud

    africa African Agriculture Business Business model Business_Finance Company Crowdsourcing data Development East Africa economics Education Entrepreneur entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship ethiopia ghana Health_Medical_Pharma ict Information technology Innovation kenya knowledge Knowledge Management Leadership marketing mobile Mobile phone nigeria Open innovation Organization Research rwanda science Science and technology studies social enterprise social entrepreneurship south africa Strategic management strategy tanzania Technology Technology_Internet uganda

Categories

Archives

  • A review on biomass-based hydrogen production for renewable energy supply 0.9k views
  • Can blockchain disrupt gender inequality? 682 views
  • Prize-winning projects promote healthier eating, smarter crop investments 678 views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Your Big Data Innovations in Agriculture 605 views
  • Test Your Value Proposition: Supercharge Lean Startup and CustDev Principles 533 views

Copyright © 2005-2020 Innovation Africa Theme created by PWT. Powered by WordPress.org