With that in mind, it's easy to see why insurance companies are interested in Helium. "If you're a restaurant insurer, and you have to pay off a quarter-million dollar claim because someone left the refrigerator open overnight, you'd want some way to detect that as soon as it as possible, so that claim can be avoided," Chandhouk says. "In the insurance industry, loss prevention is the name of the game." Alphabet's interest also makes sense. Not only is there potential to make huge money in enterprise IoT, but Helium could one day give Google the physical tools with which to make sense of the world. Consumers may still not quite understand the appeal of the IoT, but the bean counters sure do. Which is why Helium might be a sign of what's to come.

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