Strategic innovation programme IoT Sweden Trend report: The Internet of Things in 2017 1
Introduction Background and purpose In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become more and more of a buzzword. Analysis firm Gartner predicted that the amount of IoT devices would increase with 31 precent from 2016 to 2017 and that by the end of 2020, there will be over 20 billion of connected devices world wide. 1 It is clear that there is an increasing interest in IoT, and with this report, we want to show how the interest is developing. The purpose with this report is to give the reader an overviews of the clearest trends regarding the IoT in 2017. We want to visualise how people are talking about the IoT and what kind of articles news agencies are publishing about IoT. IoT Sweden This report is written by the staff at the programme office of the Swedish strategic innovation programme 2 IoT Sweden. The strategic innovation programmes are a joint venture from The Swedish innovation agency Vinnova, The Swedish Energy Agency, and the Swedish Research Council Formas. IoT Sweden consists of member organisations, a board, and a programme office. The board is chosen among representants of the member organisations. The programme has a programme manager and a programme office which manages the operation of the programme. The programme office is a part of the department of Information Technology at Uppsala University in Sweden. IoT Sweden s overall goal is to make Sweden world-leading to take advantage of the benefits of the IoT. This is accomplished by financing innovation projects, coordinating and encourage collaboration between financed projects. IoT Sweden also arranges workshops and seminars, manages business intelligence and communicates project results. Data In this study, we have analysed 16,746,978 tweets and 317,624 news articles. For the Twitter data 3, we are looking at all tweets tagged with either #IoT or #InternetOfThings, including retweets. Unfortunately, we only have tweets from the first of March 2017. For the news articles 4, we are looking at news articles from different news media sources where the term Internet of Things or IoT is present. 1 https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3598917 2 The strategic innovation programmes are described in Swedish at https://www. vinnova.se/sip 3 All tweets have been gathered through Twitters API. 4 All news articles have been gathered through https://webhose.io/ 3
The overall IoT trend To detect how the interest of the IoT have developed during the year, we have visualised how the amount of tweets and news articles have varied. In Figure 1, the number of tweets and news articles regarding IoT for each day of 2017 is shown. 150,000 Number of news articles 4,000 2,000 0 Jan FebMar AprMay Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 100,000 50,000 0 Number of tweets News articles Tweets Figure 1: Number of tweets and news articles for each day of 2017 For both tweets and news articles, the number drops down for the weekends. For news articles, the amount drops down to almost zero during the weekends. The weekend drop indicates that tweeting about the IoT is job-related. As for the news articles, it is obvious that they are published during weekdays. As can be seen, there has been a steady rise of tweets during the year, which peaked in the beginning of November. At the same time, there is no indication that the production of news articles has followed the increasing trend of tweets. The number of news articles have been steady for the whole year, with the exception that there has been a slight decline in conjunction with the year end. The ninth October, there was a peak when a lot of people suddenly tweeted about industrial IoT and artificial intelligence. 4
Themes The IoT is something that is applied in several different areas and not something that is often spoken of on it s own. We have identified a set of themes that IoT is often mentioned together with. To get an understanding of how much people are talking about these themes, we have analysed how they have been mentioned during the period. The different themes are briefly described below. Data - data and data analysis including machine learning and artificial intelligence. FinTech - financial technology, industry that applies technology to improve financial activities. IIoT - industrial IoT, the use of IoT technologies in manufacturing. Security - related to security of IoT such as cyber security, cyber attacks etc. Smart City - urban development vision to integrate information and communication technology and the IoT technology in a secure fashion to manage a city s assets. Smart Home - a home equipped with network-connected products for controlling, automating and optimising functions within the home. Technology - technologies needed for an IoT system such as sensors and networks. Health - health and health care and technologies that can be used in these areas. Business - everything that has to do with business and marketing related to the IoT. In Figure 2, the different themes and how much they are mentioned over time is shown. Notable is that the distribution between the different themes is changing more for tweets than for news articles. The reason for this might be that the content of Twitter is user-driven and it is a quicker process to write and publish a tweet than to write and publish a news article. Data and industrial IoT have during the year taken a bigger part of the tweets. During May, there was an increased amount of discussions about Smart cities. For news articles, there is basically no change in the distribution between the different themes. Figure 3 and Figure 4 shows the overall distribution of the themes for the period. For tweets, the most common theme is data, followed by smart city, business, 5
1 Tweets 0.8 Proportion of themes 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 1 News 0.8 Proportion of themes 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Data FinTech IIoT Security Smart City Smart Home Technology Health Business Figure 2: How different themes have been mentioned over time 6
Health 3.6% Business 16.4% Data 23.4% Technology 15.0% Smart City 18.2% IIoT 16.2% Smart Homes 1.1% Security 5.1% FinTech 1.0% Figure 3: Distribution between the themes for the complete time period for tweets Health 3.8% Business 22.7% Technology 19.5% Smart Homes 1.0% Data 15.2% Smart City IIoT 13.6% 13.3% Security 7.9% FinTech 2.9% Figure 4: Distribution between the themes for the complete time period for news articles industrial IoT and technology. Something worth noting is that for tweets, there are a few users with a lot of followers that gets a large amount of retweets, meaning that the trends are often dependent on retweets rather than different users own tweets. For news articles, the most common theme is business, closely followed by technology. 7
Recurring terms We have identified which organisations and countries that are most frequently mentioned on Twitter and in news articles. To do this, we have used a technique called entity recognition 5. The top 10 entities that are mentioned on Twitter and in the news articles are shown in Table 1 and Table 2. As can be seen, IBM, Microsoft and Intel are all frequently mentioned for both tweets and news articles. Something that stands out is the frequently mentioning of CA Technologies in the news articles and its absence Twitter s top 10 of mentioned organisations. The United States is the country that is mentioned most in both tweets and news articles, followed by China and Japan for both tweets and news articles. Tweets IBM Microsoft Intel Apple Samsung Gartner Google AT&T GE Nokia News CA Technologies IBM Microsoft Intel Salesforce.com Samsung Apple Nokia Google AT&T Table 1: Top 10 mentioned organisations Tweets The United States China India United Kingdom Japan Australia Singapore Germany Dubai Canada News The United States China India Japan United Kingdom Singapore Germany Canada Australia Taiwan Table 2: Top 10 mentioned countries 5 Subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities in text into pre-defined categories. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Named-entity_recognition 8
Events During 2017, a number of different events related to the IoT have taken place. Below are the events that were most noticeable on Twitter. The biggest events are marked on the time line below. In Figure 5, the number of tweets related to each event is shown. This shows which events that have the largest impact on twitter. 2017 27 March Enterprise Connect 30 May Computex 5 April SIDO 20 March CEBIT 18 May OpenGov 08 May Dell EMC World 11 July SAP Leonard Live 12 September MWCA 6 November Dreamforce 27 February Mobile World Congress 22 May LiveWorx 17 May 19 March DevOps IBM InterConnect 1 September IFA Berlin 28 August OOW 24 April Hannover Messe The number of events are much higher during May than any other month. The conference Mobile World Conference is the first one and also the one with the most tweets connected to it. Below, each event is described further. Mobile World Congress - the world s largest gathering for the mobile industry, organised by the GSMA and held in the Mobile World Capital. Barcelona, Spain IBM InterConnect - the premier conference for security, cloud and mobile. Las Vegas, United States LiveWorx Technology Conference - premier global technology conference and marketplace for solutions engineered for a smart, connected world. Boston, United States Hanover Messe - a leading exhibition for industry-highlights, innovations and cutting-edge solutions in all core sectors. Hanover, Germany 9
20,000 Number of tweets 15,000 10,000 5,000 0 MWC IBM IC Worx HM MWCA SAP LL CEBIT SIDO BCW DevOps Dell EMCW Dreamforce GITEX EC IFA Berlin OOW Computex Figure 5: Number of tweets related to different events. Mobile World Congress Americas - targeting key influencers, top-tier media and decision makers from across the mobile ecosystem. Los Angeles, United States SAP Leonardo Live - bringing the people together who will connect the devices and digital processes of future businesses. Frankfurt, Germany CEBIT - Europe s business festival for innovation and digitisation. Hanover, Germany SIDO - the leading international showroom dedicated to the Internet of Things, with free access for all professionals. Lyon, France Bosch Connected World - the annual conference on the Internet of Things of the Bosch Group. Berlin, Germany DevOps - brings together IT-professionals to share knowledge and experience about both technical and organisational aspects of DevOps. Tallinn, Estonia Dell EMC World - the premier conference for IT practitioners and business leaders. Las Vegas, United States 10
Dreamforce - the largest software conference in the world. San Francisco, United States Gitex - the world s fastest growing technology hub. Dubai, United Arab Emirates Enterprise Connect - the leading conference and exhibition for enterprise communications and collaboration in North America. Orlando, United States IFA Berlin - the world s largest public exhibition of the consumer electronics and also the largest order for trade. Berlin, Germany Oracle OpenWorld - an annual Oracle convention for business decision-makers, IT management, and line-of-business end users. San Francisco, United States Computex - is the leading global ICT and IoT show with a complete supply chain and ecosystems. Taipei City, Taiwan 11
Global distribution of tweets To get an understanding of the geographic location of the Twitter accounts, we have collected the location of the accounts tweeting about the IoT. In Figure 6, we have visualised the origin of the Twitter profiles. In our data, Central Europe, the United States, and India are the three largest contributors to discussions about IoT. The location for a Twitter Figure 6: Distribution of tweets account is the location the user has filled into the profile and not necessarily the location from where the actual tweet was sent. Not all Twitter profiles have specified a location. The visualisation is done by converting the profile location to a coordinate. Some profiles have specified their location as a country as other has specified it as a city. In the case where the location is a country, the coordinate is the center point of the country. Some countries might use terms in their own language instead of Internet of Things or IoT which excludes them from the map. The United States, Europe, and India distinguish themselves on the map which was also the case when mentions of countries were considered (see Table 2). Since Twitter is blocked 6 in China, North Korea, and Iran, we can not see how these countries are talking about IoT. It is clear that especially China is involved in the use and development of the IoT since they are mentioned frequently in both news articles and tweets (see Table 2). 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/censorship_of_twitter 12
Summary In 2017, the IoT had an upward trend on the user-driven social media Twitter with a slight decrease at the end of the year. News agencies did not follow that trend but had a steady production of news articles during the year. The most popular theme on Twitter related to the IoT is data. News articles are written more evenly about different themes with business as the most popular theme, closely followed by IoT related technology. IBM, Microsoft and Intel are the most common mentioned organisations for both tweets and news articles indicating that these organisations are the ones most associated with the IoT. The most mentioned countries regarding the IoT are the United States, China and India. The United States and India are also the countries where most of the IoT related Twitter profiles are localised. The most Twitter influential IoT-related event in 2017 was Mobile Word Congress, held in Barcelona in May. 13
The purpose of this report is to show trends related to the Internet of Things (IoT) during 2017. The report is based on an analysis of tweets and news articles about the IoT from 2017. In this report, we present an overview of how the IoT is discussed, what themes that are related to the IoT, what terms that are recurring, events associated with the IoT and where people are talking about the IoT. https://www.iotsweden.se info@iotsverige.se