The Internet of Things will belong to the startups.

We now know the World Wide Web of the early 90's was a land rich in commercial opportunity to say the least. But it did not seem that way to large corporations of the day. Even when it was clear that it was the way of the future, it wasn't clear how to actually realise that potential.

Some of that failure to capitalise on the Web could be attributed to confirmation bias. When you're working for AOL or some other company with a vested interest in a given architecture, it's unlikely you'll be allowed to drop what you're doing and start experimenting with the technology of "the enemy". Upton Sinclair said it best:

But that's not the whole picture. Even given forward thinking companies brave enough to try and work with the Web, a new medium warrants extensive and determined experimentation, and there's always going to be more startups than large corporations doing that. You need people with nothing to lose and entrepreneurs will always win at that game. Innovation is a numbers game, which is why VC (and YC) makes sense.

In hindsight, we now know that the promise of the Web was not capitalised on by the incumbents of the era. For every Microsoft that managed to capture value after missing the ball several times, there was a Google, Ebay, and Twitter born. For every Apple that's still trying to make the fourth iteration of their cloud storage service work, there's a Dropbox, a Facebook, an Amazon, and a LinkedIn.

There's a lot of talk about the Internet of Things as the new land of entrepreneurial opportunity. While it's a mouthful, and a catchier name will hopefully come up soon, it doesn't change the fact that it will be everywhere, Real Soon Now.

If you suspect that computers will fuse with "non-computer things" to the point of indistinguishability over the next decade or so, then you see the vast seas of opportunity that are openning up for entrepreneurs and clued-in companies.

Chip manufacturers and telecoms companies are lining up to reap the infrastructure rewards, as they did in the era of the explosion of the Web and Mobile Web. But they know they won't be the ones to actually build the products.

But where is all this opportunity to be found? Marc Andreessen famously said that Software is Eating the World. It seems that the power of this pattern to create scalable businesses is so great, that whatever is not programmable will be made programmable, by hook or by crook. Which sums up the Internet of Things, in different words.

Look at every inanimate object around you, and think how it could be improved if it had embedded intelligence. Better to point the way rather than poison the well with concrete examples (there are many lists out there), because the best ideas haven't yet been thought of. When seen from that point of view, one could say that hardware, too, is eating the world. It's just that software got there first.

Investors know this. Paul Graham calls it the Hardware Renessaince. The list of IoT/Hardware Startup Accellerators is constantly gaining new members. Kickstarter is brimming with hardware startups.

There is a new field of opportunity opening up, and the only thing in the way is our own inertia. If you're looking for a startup idea, or considering doing another dating/photo startup, or another system to optimise some enterprise accounting business process by 5%, it may be useful to spend 5 minutes thinking what you could do if you could infuse intelligence into everyday objects around you. Because you can.

Move fast and make Things!

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