I am losing my battle with my friend who sees social networking and M2M as an opportunity.

His point was made by Jesse Schell, who sees the opportunity of combining the sensors that augment our reality with game theory to in effect shape our behavior.

Like a Skinnerian rate, the points add up for good behavior.

While this does not match up well to my efforts to think about the simple vertical opportunities that are so numerous in the market today, the reality is that any sensor that is being used is aimed at providing intelligence.  And if business intelligence is our goal that game theory has merit as the way to take the complex and make it manageable.

Star Trek always had a level of complex engineering that made it clear that people were going to have to be more brilliant than anyone I know to be on the crew. The Matrix series gave us a method for us to get that brain power, but all they wanted to do was play with guns.

Game theory can bring us to a different point.  Where the intelligence is embedded in a flow the user follows to make decisions the best known scenarios.

This premise is not without flaw.

Some companies are developing predictive systems, but they are not M2M players.

I tried to get a testing session for M2M and found that market of proprietary solutions has not allowed for testing to be rolled up.

However, the vision of taking the complexity of M2M and making it manageable is a good way to communicate regardless of the limitations.

Carl Ford (News - Alert) (News - Alert)is a partner at Crossfire Media.

Edited by Marisa Torrieri