Lebron, Curry, Basketball Stars and the Internet of Everything
- Lebron versus Curry in the NBA Finals
- Learn basketball from a basketball on the Internet of Everything
- The potential of the IoE means new kinds of endpoints
- Virtually no enterprises can see their entire networks today
- Find all your endpoints, master the IoE
- Warriors in 7 games. There, we said it!
San Francisco, where Auconet is headquartered, is abuzz this month with exhilaration – after forty years, the once-obscure Warriors basketball team made it to the NBA finals. Everyone anticipates an epic showdown with the Cleveland Cavaliers, featuring the leadership of Lebron James, the NBA’s strongest and most intellectual player, against the “incredible lightness” of the world’s best shooter, San Francisco’s quicksilver guard, Stephen Curry.
Not every child can grow up to shoot like Curry, but with the Internet of Everything (IoE) in play, tens of millions could become better athletes at whatever sport they are suited to. Today we are in the age of IoE 1.0, and for about $180 you can pick up the 94Fifty Infomotion Smart Sensor Basketball that feeds data on a player’s shooting to an iPhone and through a coaching app, helps the player improve and refine his or her shooting.
It takes away the romance of a grizzled talent scout spotting the next Steph Curry in junior high school – speaking of which, could anyone miss how Curry’s little daughter steals the show at his post-game interviews? – but “coaches inside basketballs” could help children improve without hands-on coaches and participate more capably and safely in sports. It sure beats having them stare at Snapchat on their iPhones all day and night.
While the basketball example may seem trivial or gimmicky, it points to completely new services in the years ahead. Carried to its “IoE extreme,” commonplace sports equipment will upload data to identify 10-year-olds who can become professional athletes. Coaches can analyze the “Big Data” on how young players shoot to learn new ways to develop legions of Steph Curry-like shooters.
Beyond the wide range of IoE-connected health and fitness devices, new services based on them will lead to significant benefits for patients and profit opportunities in healthcare. That’s one small slice of the IoE spectrum, where many implementations have been in use for years. All share one characteristic: they join numerous endpoints to existing networks, creating a major challenge when it comes to detecting and correctly identifying those endpoints. IT managers are the first to admit they have never been able to discover all their endpoints (85% to 90% detection seems to be the norm), and the IoE ratchets up that difficulty.
Back to the basketball championship: Everyone hopes for a battle played on the highest level unmarred by injuries or Australian rugby-style tactics – a counterweight to the provocative but dreary revelations of bribery at FIFA – in other words, an event showing the best of sport. This year, that simply means Lebron James and Steph Curry doing what they do best. And 15 years from now, we may get to see shooters who grew up learning their game with the help of IP-connected basketballs and AI-based coaching.
