I enjoyed the Sprint (News - Alert) Open Solutions Conference very much last week and had several interviews with companies that will appear on the M2M Evolution site in the near future.

As always, when I get talk to many people in the industry, I get to hear the trends, the group think and the opportunities. Here are my thoughts for what they are worth.

First of all, Silicon Valley is definitely going to have a great impact on M2M. The Plug and Play Tech Center struck me as typical of the value of being at the Silicon Valley.

We may be past the age when Steve Jobs (News - Alert) and Steve Wozniak can hang out in neighborhood garages, but the community spirit is there. The apps community sees M2M as just another application with a few extra items to control. This means that a lot of the group - think about how HTML5 and device specific OSs are embedded in the conversations- however, most of the time the issues about this just gets pushed as “the cloud”. My friends at Google (News - Alert) remind me that the Cloud is the Internet and what the cloud folks talk about are their aggregation servers on the Internet which is “their platform.” 

Removing the rhetoric, what we have is the Internet connecting machines to good Web interfaces. The value of a platform has to be in the applicability of the system for multiple uses. 

The beer tap M2M system (known as Sprint’s Kegerator) may have some fun social networking aspects, but if the platform manages to show how gas and liquid tanks can be managed remotely, then the platform has a purpose. In this case, using Bug Lab’s platform to add a series of components to show that rapid prototyping can be done with hardware and software.

Which brings up the next question: if the systems are masking the machine / sensor issues, what makes the OS of a device important? It seems to me that HTML5 is going to be a clear winner in the development backend systems in HTML5 particularly where the systems involved media.

M2M solutions involving media are probably going to be a great growth spot.

• Monitoring tanks with the sensors does a lot but a picture tells another aspect of the story. 
• Remote Access that monitors goods in transport is good for tracking the movement, but knowing that the driver is still awake is probably also a good idea.
• Tracking Alzheimer’s patients movement is okay, but if you see what they see you may be in a better position to help them.

The point is that the platform that wins is probably going to have to be more about the integration with the human experience than the sensors. About a year ago, Mary Cronin and I were speculating on whether Apple (News - Alert) could jump ahead of everyone and be the platform for the future.

I think the answer is that it was not on their radar as much as we thought it was at the time. The platform players should, however, look at their phones and know where and when the Web will keep them ahead of the devices.