Towards an efficient sales pitch with the Web of Things

Abstract

New innovations in the Web of Things (WoT) and the use of the social Web in business scenarios are paving the path for 'real-world commodities' or things to inherently sell themselves to potential customers on the Web. An important challenge to realize this vision of personalized sales initiated by things is the adoption of massive instances of potential things into the virtual world. We show in this paper how this issue is alleviated by creating community of things. We describe how the presentation of things on the Web as Web Smart things supports such synergies. We also describe how a cluster of things represented as Ambient Spaces (AS) increases the possibility of identifying potential customers on the social Web. The community framework is used to drive things into populating the Web to reach relevant customer profiles leading to friendships with things and people, which could nurture future adoptions and purchase opportunities. Hence, these social relationships between people and physical commodities are exploited to elevate their value, promote adoption and induce an opportunistic commercial transaction.