Jon: Welcome to episode 135 of The Digital Life. A show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings Jon. How are you doing?

Jon: Not too bad. I see you're enjoying our new microphone setup.

Dirk: Jon, our new microphone setup has me inspired. It's making me feel very bellicose.

Jon: All right.

Dirk: I'm ready to rock my friend.

Jon: Listeners today, we have three big predictions for 2016.

Dirk: By we, Jon means he. We are having a prediction episode, but I'm not feeling very predictive about the next 12 months for 1 reason or another, so we have Jon Follett's big three predictions for 2016.

Jon: All right. We need some sound effects of planes crashing there. My first prediction for 2016 is that the Internet of Things gets out of its America Online stage. Let me give a little background on it.

The 2015 Internet of Things hype has been so huge and majestic. At the same time, the results had been somewhat mediocre, and just the hype scenes unjustified. I think it's a keen to the America Online stage of the development as far as the technology goes, and I'll give a shout out, I saw online at another commentator was calling it the Geocities of things, I love that description.

Dirk: Jon.

Jon: Yeah?

Dirk: You're old.

Jon: I am not that old.

Dirk: Do our listeners know what Geocities is? Raise of hand. If you know what Geocities is, raise your hand right now.

Jon: Just don't do it if you're driving.

Dirk: There ain't many of you.

Jon: Or keep one hand on the wheel. The stage that we're at with Internet of Things is just really difficult, and that people are trying things out. It's very DIY in some sense. There aren't a lot of standards. A lot of the usage is setup to be cute demos, and not really embedded into our lives. If you recall, AOL felt like a quirk. It felt like a very expensive quirk, but it was a pop culture phenomenon, especially with all those CDs that they send to people.

The real potential of the internet was hidden there. There was a lot of goodness in America Online, but there is just also a lot of strangeness in this close system, really has very little to do with what the internet is today. By the same token, the Internet of Things is going to take a while to develop, and it's also going to be a bit under the covers.

It's going to be part of your shopping experience, you're not going to know it because the store is going to be monitoring where you're going, and what you're doing, and you're going to be unaware of that. It's going to become part of telemedicine, it's going to become part of the streets that you're driving on, walking on. All this is going to take time. I think that next step happens next year. We begin to see some real solutions that would probably get highlighted in the news, and heights to no end, but I think that part is coming. That's my first big prediction.

Dirk, what do you think?

Dirk: Yeah, I think the core analysis and analogy are interesting, but make it more concrete. I mean, what special is going to happen in 2016 because in past years, there's been hype around the nest for example, there's been hype around some of the health apps in certain way. What's going to be special and different about 2016 that makes this prediction, that makes this important as oppose to just some smart analysis and analogy?

Jon: There's going to be a city in the United States that has reduced traffic congestion in a major way as a result of an IoT implementation. I don't know if that's going to be Boston, or it's going to be San Francisco, but there's also projects going on right now to do those sorts of things with large tech providers like IBM. I predict, you're going to start seeing some positive results in terms of things like traffic flow, and also things like municipal services.