• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, August 28, 2016

If nothing else, the Internet of Things is a global phenomenon.

When the commercial Web came along, people around the world had to become part of the network, one person at a time. It took a number of years for the masses of businesses and consumers to get online.

When mobile entered the picture, led by Apple, the adoption rate was much faster, primarily because the network was firmly in place, pretty much everywhere.

Now with both faster networks and mobile having penetrated most of the planet, creating and connecting other things to that network can be exponentially faster.

This also means that there are no inhibitions on IoT innovation based on geography.

If one country has laws or regulations limiting a particular IoT creation, that product or service can be launched and tested in a different market. This is now happening around the world. Some examples:

• Domino’s is set to test pizza delivery by drones in New Zealand. New aviation rules recently were modified to allow control and use of unmanned aerial vehicles for recreational and commercial purposes in New Zealand.
• The world’s first self-driving taxi service just started in Singapore. While Google, Volvo and others have been talking about and testing self-driving cars, the Singapore self-driving taxi is billed as the first to launch, allowing people to summon the taxi via smartphone.
• Malibu Rum, with its London agency SharpEnd, is rolling out 40,000 rum bottles with NFC tags so consumers (no pun intended) can tap a bottle with their smartphone to receive instantly-delivered content. The bottles go on sale this week in 1,600 Tesco stores in the U.K.
• Lighting leader Philips Lighting created LED bulbs with beaconing capability built in. In retail store, the lights can locate a smartphone-carrying shopper to an accuracy within inches. The lights were deployed in stores of the French retailer Carrefour.
• Uber teamed with Volvo to launch self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. Like the Singapore self-driving cars, the Uber vehicles also will require a person to still be behind the wheel, just in case.
• Chinese powerhouse Xiaomi has launched a smart washing machine in China. This follows the China launch of several other IoT products there.

There are more, but this is just a sampling.

The IoT’s global nature means that brands and marketers have to be on the lookout for innovations without geographic boundaries.

As these innovations are introduced and tested in any given market, a success could be followed by a full-scale launch elsewhere or even a global rollout.