The core promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that everything that can be connected, will be.

That contextual data including location and proximity will become building blocks for our social channels and potentially a controllable way to capitalize on the complex reality of our mobile workforce.

This is a huge promise and one that is well under way with some 4.9B smart phones in peoples hands this year, and projections that within four years 213M geo-locations will be connected and 20.1B dynamic things networked and programmable.

What’s fascinating about IoT is that usually when we pioneer future-looking solutions we are invariably hacking our way around the newness of the ecosystem, the holes in the technology, the limitations or messiness of the data.

With IoT, it seems just the opposite.

Actually we have is a huge (albeit raw) capability and a massive market that can’t seem to connect in an interesting manner.

If you spend time talking to the enterprise, you will run into a multitude of proprietary single-point solutions addressing operational needs with bolted on new twists.

Instrumented shipping containers and connected fleet management systems. Every possible variation of asset management replacing the manual scanning of bar codes with connected systems tracking assets from heavy equipment on a job site to shopping carts in a Walmart parking lot.

An ocean of beacon companies, wayfinding and ad serving apps verticalized to campuses or airports, stadiums or security systems.

In some ways the Internet of Things is already part of the fabric of our lives yet it feels unfulfilled and unsatisfying. Or maybe simply suffering from a lack of imagination.

IoT defined as everything with an on/off switch connected to the internet, with includes people, becomes a lot more interesting –and formative–when you shift this to mean, adding trackable things to the broader mobile internet of people.

This is not simply semantics. It is a shifted point of view and where it gets interesting again.

Think about what Uber really does as IoT under a different flag starting with people first.

Connecting the location of users and cars–places, things and people–into redefining transportation in urban society. They take commoditized location data and make it useful not to where things are but where they are in relation to one another.

To me we should either bury IoT in a time capsule or redefine it in this more useful way.

In concept, every person (through their phones), every place (through their mapped geo-location) and every thing (dynamic objects) are trackable and always on. They are not static blips on a map but the dynamic piece of raw dynamic data to create solutions from.

In concept, it is possible to know where every person is, who they are with, what they are doing and where they are going. This is where the idea of location meets the dream of proximity, addressing location as not where things or people are but what they are near to.

Potentially this is the largest canvass for creativity built on both the reality of a connected world and the changes in our culture itself. This may be the defining piece of what the next generation of mobility looks like.

Imagine for a second:

-That every instance where there is a car crash, it is auto located and help instantly deployed.  (More on some one who is quietly doing this today in a future post.)

-That every emergency circumstance can instantly provide navigational solutions to each person, contextually-sensitive to where they are at the moment.

– That all communications to individuals, groups, specialized teams are by definition context sensitive. People only receive information that is relevant to them where they happen to be.

The internet connected us as one community of people, changed fundamentally how we lived and spurred a dramatic shift that flattened time and transformed shareable culture for all of us cross the globe.

Mobility flattened space on top of time. If everything is in motion, then location becomes a function of relevance and a component of design in everything we do.

IoT can become the step towards true relevance that uses where, when, what and for whom as building blocks.

This is a huge storm of change brewing.

This is a gift for marketers and developers. Management and the enterprise workforce alike. For cultural evolution itself.

How often do these align and get handed to us as an opportunity?