New Communications Opportunity: Things to Things

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – The next new communications frontier may be among inanimate objects, Motorola Inc. Chairman and CEO Ed Zander says here at the Management Briefing Seminars

With the advent of inexpensive RFID (radio frequency identification) chips and other devices, cars and their myriad components soon may spend more time yapping amongst themselves on mobile wireless connections than people do now.

Thanks to the digitization of information and imbedded technologies such as RFID, “everything is getting smarter,” Zandar says. The big opportunity in communications isn’t going to be people-to-people, he suggests, but “things-to-things.”

“Over this decade, everything imaginable is going to be digitized, and that’s going to have a profound impact, I think, on the automobile industry,” he says.

“The automobile (will be communicating with) its home-base computer systems, logging in, importing data back and forth, to your clients’ markets, your home markets and just about anything. I have an expression that says, ‘You’ll know the Internet has really arrived when it’s invisible, when we take it for granted in daily use,’” Zandar says.

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