New technologies often come along with new names to help the masses understand their purpose. We love nothing more than acronyms to help us digest new technologies. If you are trying to sell a new idea, you’ll need a catchy name and if you are lucky enough to find a pronounceable word by combining letters into a cool abbreviation, you are halfway to building a winning new idea.
Today we all want “Wi-Fi” at our coffee shop, no one bothers to burn “CDs” anymore and most people rather read the “FAQ” than the manual. It’s amazing how tech acronyms make their way into our daily lives; new words created solely to describe new concepts, ideas or technologies. One acronym that seems to be looming on the edge of mass acceptance lately is IoT for “The Internet of Things,” a computing concept created to describe networks of physical objects connected to the internet.
By connecting regular, everyday objects to the web, those objects become “smart” and a world of opportunities opens up, creating new ways for us to interact with those objects. These networks, in essence, connect the physical world to the information superhighway. Plans for deploying smart devices have been around for a while. Back in 1982, a Coke vending machine at Carnegie Mellon University was the first machine ever connected to Internet. I’m sure the stupid machine still stole your coins every once in a while, but at least now the machine was sending an email about it! Believe it or not, I’m not a big early adopter of many new technologies for my own personal use. Home automation, for one, does very little for me.
I have not bought into the IoT craze in home automation and today my fridge, microwave and thermostat are as “dumb” as all my other appliances. These ideas have been around for several years and I have yet to see them be accepted by the masses. At work, I’m lot more in sync with adding technology to help us do things better, quicker, cheaper. But, here, too, the IoT has failed to create the killer device for us to jump in. Shelving for sure is one area we would love to see get hooked up to the Web.
The idea of smart shelves is indeed captivating. You can search the web for a ton of articles on how different companies are planning to deploy smart shelving both in front and back of the house, to maximize inventories and create target approaches tailored to each individual consumer.
Soon the makers of Oreos will install ultra-smart shelves near checkout counters that can scan your facial expressions and determine general demographic details about yourself like gender and approximate age. With this information, Oreos’ army of marketers will create relevant content to share with you on the spot, on monitors installed right on the shelves.
If their sensors read that you are a teen, you will probably get an ad for double-stuff Oreos; instead of the one I will probably get, reduced fat Oreos! If you happen to grab an item off the shelves, weigh sensors will relay this info back to sellers via the web, and an instant coupon could be delivered just for you at the check-out counter.
When technology makes things easier, while saving users a bit of money, then adoption rates go through the roof. I see this being the case in our industry as well. Intelligent shelves that help consumers identify the right auto part for their vehicle could make the difference between going to one store or another.
When was the last time you walked in to a large auto parts retail store to buy an air filter from the self-service shelves in the back? It’s like panic alley for consumers back there. I always scout that area, and more times than not, I see consumers walking around like chickens without their heads waiting for someone to look up the filter fitment for them. Now, just imagine a soon-to-be-here future where you enter your vehicle info into your smartphone and as you walk through the air filter shelves, your phone sends the info to the shelf and the shelf lights up right under the SKUs that fit your car, just waiting for you. The technology to do this is available now. The adoption rates will increase across all industries. The convergence of Web data and the physical world will change the way customers buy at the store forever.
