Wearables Will Drive Half of All App Interactions by 2017?

Gartner predicts that by 2017 wearable devices will drive 50 percent of total app interactions, part of a trend that also will have mobile-originated apps by 2015, most mobile apps will be syncing, collecting and analyzing data about users and their social graphs.

Should that trend emerge, it will be one more inication that the lines that separate “machine-to-machine” or “Internet of Things” applications and devices from “connected devices” such as tablets, watches, game players and TVs are blurring.

Machine to machine apps, typically involving the collection of sensor data, would in such cases also be instances of sensor apps. In a similar way, sensor data from smartphones likewise might be considered part of the Internet of Things trend, even if the device itself is a "traditional" appliance, not an industrial sensor.

That is one reason why forecasts of IoT revenues are so disparate at the moment. Aside from the difficulty of forecasting the emergence of what most expect will be a big industry, delineating revenues is a problem.

Is sensor data collected from a mobile app on a wearable device an instance of IoT or an instance of traditional Internet use?

International Data Corporation has predicted that IoT technology and services spending would generate global revenues of $4.8 trillion in 2012 and $8.9 trillion by 2020, growing at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 7.9 percent.

By 2020, the installed base Internet of Things devices will be approximately 212 billion globally, including 30.1 billion installed "connected (autonomous) things" in 2020, arguably mostly

sensors.

Other forecasts are more conservative. Machina Research expects an installed base of about a billion devices by about 2022, with revenue of about a trillion dollars.