Imagine a river of information streaming from connected devices everywhere: your fridge monitors the items placed within, letting you know what’s about to expire; traffic sensors provide real-time notification of a slowdown on your route to work; the lights in your apartment signal whether they’ve been left on…the possibilities are limitless.  This type of information exists already and the reach of this Internet of Things grows exponentially each year. However, the information layer that’s spreading all over the world is often just data, unstructured and messy, that needs to be processed into something useful and functional. The key to leveraging this data is apps.

Apps leverage the information layer and process the data into convenient solutions for particular problems.  They provide the useful information and functionality you need, when you need it.  Take the example of the lights in your apartment.  In some sort of digital home environment, your lights are connected to the internet. Your lights send intermittent signals about their status, are they on or off?  That’s great, but the data itself isn’t enough.  That’s where apps come in.  If you’ve left home and can’t remember if you left the lights on, you can pull up an app on your phone and see that, yes, the lights in your kitchen are still on.  From there, just hit the off button on your phone, and your kitchen lights turn off, miles away.

The app I just described is a smart, efficient solution to a particular problem.  It turns all the data created by connected devices in your apartment into actionable information, that the kitchen lights are on, and offers the functionality to turn them off.  All this takes place wherever you have an internet connection.

As the information layer continues to spread, as connected devices become more and more ubiquitous, we will rely on apps to make that information useful and actionable.  The future belongs to those who can best leverage the information layer.  Thankfully, no matter what you want to do, apps can help–and Quixey can help you find the right one.