I can still see myself in 2011, so far into a pregnancy that I should not have been travelling, but with an important press conference to hold. Working for a company that specialized in "smart" shipping platforms, we were still trying to sell the benefits of sustainability and durability compared to wooden shipping platforms, and yet, the connected world beckoned as a much-needed value prop.
You see, these platforms were going to connect to the Internet of Things. In 2011, that wasn't exactly a term you heard in the pallet world. There were many questions from the media and even from the internal executive team that went something like, "Things? Internet? Huh? How would that ... ? What does it even mean?" But there it was in black and white, defined in a press release. How could I do it more justice — to explain the concept, much less the benefits, for a term that no one was really using yet?