A Twitter Chat on IoT and Data

By David G. Simmons / Developer
Dec 15, 2017

Yesterday (that would be 12/14/2017) I participated in a live Twitter Chat hosted by @rackspace that they call #cloudchat. Apparently this is a regular event that they host, but this latest one was focused specifically on the Internet Of Things, which is why they asked me to participate. I’ll say upfront that in general twitter live-chats, etc. tend to go pear-shaped pretty quickly. Hashtag pirates, spammers, etc. tend to find them fairly quickly and pollute them with garbage. That being said, this one was actually different. It had many great participants, and was lively, active, and almost devoid of interlopers. (If you search the hashtag now, however, you will see some later posts that did try to hijack the hashtag for publicity.)

Rackspace collected a ‘Twitter Moment’ of the chat and I’d encourage you to go read through it. It won’t take you long, but there were some very lively and interesting discussions happening around the Internet of Things.

The list of questions for the #cloudchat was as follows:

12/14 Chat: Future Looking #cloudchat: IoT

• Q1: Let's get started with a relatively easy one: what is the IoT device that you're most excited about? Why? #cloudchat
• Q2: Going beyond the consumer space of IoT, how is industry implementing connected devices to gain a competitive advantage? #cloudchat
• Q3: How do you think that IoT is shaping the on-going debate between features and privacy? #cloudchat
• Q4: We've heard about IoT devices being hacked and creating a bot-net that has taken down the web—how can people harden the devices? Is the Internet secure for all IoT apps? #cloudchat
• Q5: Mountains of data are generated by IoT devices—where do you think it should live? In the cloud or on "the edge?" Why? #cloudchat
• Q6: What do you envision for the future of IoT? What does our life look like in 10 years? #cloudchat

Here are some of my highlights though, in no particular order:

Again, I seriously encourage you to read through the entire exchange as there were some really interesting moments, as well as a few truly hilarious ones:

I also found it quite interesting—and more than a little bit coincidental—that we had some lively discussion about where IoT data should live, and where IoT data computation should happen on the very day that I posted a blog post on building an IoT Gateway that can do data analysis and downsampling.