Internet of Things

'Internet Of Things'

    The Internet of Things (IoT), sometimes referred to as the Internet of Objects, will change everything including ourselves. This may seem like a bold statement, but consider the impact the Internet already has had on education, communication, business, science, government, and humanity. Clearly, the Internet is one of the most important and powerful creations in all of human history.

     In 1999, Ashton said it best in this quote from an article in the RFID Journal:

"If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things - using data they gathered without any help from us - we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best". 

    In a seminal 2009 article for the RFID Journal, "That 'Internet of Things' Thing", Ashton made the following assessment:

Today computers—and, therefore, the Internet—are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture, or scanning a bar code. Conventional diagrams of the Internet ... leave out the most numerous and important routers of all - people. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. And that's a big deal. We're physical, and so is our environment ... You can't eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today's information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.

—Kevin Ashton, 'That 'Internet of Things' Thing', RFID Journal, July 22, 2009

 According to IBM

"Internet of Things to work for you by giving you the ability to:

• connect millions of objects and millions of events.
• unlock information in systems of record.
• support new systems of interaction with people, mobile devices, sensors, machines and applications.
• conduct business virtually anywhere and anytime, using almost any device.
• receive and respond to events in near-real time."

The IoT is significant because an object that can represent itself digitally, becomes something greater than the object by itself. No longer does the object relate just to you, but is now connected to surrounding objects to share information and database server/s(which record data continually from smart sensors to become better and better in performance). When many objects act in unison, they are known as having "ambient intelligence."