Internet of Things Applications

Purportedly, the market opportunity for the Internet of things is gargantuan -- but development in the space clearly isn't paying off yet.

The Internet of things may be hot, hot, hot, according to the Valley, but it’s not paying the bills. In fact, less than 10 percent of IoT developers are making enough to support a reasonably sized team.

That’s one key takeaway from the latest VisionMobile Developer Economics report, released this week. It’s a sobering thought for the companies jumping into IoT as they chase IoT’s purported $11 trillion jackpot.

[ Get the scoop on the Internet of things at its most fundamental level and find out where it's headed, in InfoWorld's downloadable PDF and ePub. | Get a digest of the day's top tech stories in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ] As with every other business, the only way companies will realize this value in terms of revenue will be to attack the IoT market with a clear idea of what they’re selling and to whom

See more at: www.infoworld.com

Formed by ex-Apple AAPL +0.68% engineers, Nest Labs develops products designed to bring Big Data and the Internet of Things into our homes via its smart thermostats, fire alarms and security cameras.

The company was bought out by Google GOOGL +1.94% last year for $3.2 billion, which sees its products as central to the inevitable drive towards “smart” homes with connected data systems designed to make our lives more comfortable, while simultaneously cutting down on wasted energy.

This is all possible because of Big Data and analytics – algorithms in the software used by the devices to monitor and record how they are used, building up a profile which allows them to intelligently “set” themselves.

It has proven to be a successful model and the products have sold well since the first Nest thermostat was released in 2011. Now with the launch of its latest products, the Nest Protect smoke alarm system and the Nest Cam home surveillance camera, it is hoping to save lives as well as make us safer.

Uploading and comparing the thermostat data from all of its users can glean accurate pictures of energy use across communities and the wider world. However when dealing with data as personal as information about your home, the importance of maintaining customers’ privacy cannot be understated. Nest’s General Manager for Europe, Lionel Paillet, explained to me how fundamental this is to the company’s operations.

See more at: forbes.com

Sigfox plans to launch its low-cost Internet of things platform in the U.S. this year.

This fall a new kind of wireless network will launch in a metropolis near you. This network won’t connect to phones or tablets. Instead it will provide the wireless links necessary to connect devices, appliances and sensors that make up the Internet of things (IoT).

The company building the network is called Sigfox, and it’s based in Europe (Toulouse, France, to be exact) where it’s already set up networks in France, Spain, the U.K., and five other countries. Sigfox-powered sensors are being slapped on fire hydrants (to monitor water pressure), embedded in home alarms (to alert the authorities when they’re tripped), and even buried in the dirt (to monitor the soil density of farmland). This year, however, it’s moving to its largest country to date, the U.S., where it plans to build networks covering the ten largest cities.

Wireless connectivity that covers a wide swath of land is nothing new for the IoT. In fact, the Internet of things got its start in industrial machine-to-machine communications using mobile operators’ 2G networks to track vehicle fleets and monitor remote equipment. What Sigfox offers, however, is a much cheaper and more efficient alternative to cellular networks, said Thomas Nicholls, EVP of communications for Sigfox. It’s a platform that will make long-range wireless connectivity accessible for any company, device or application.

See more at fortune.com

Start-ups challenged to innovate as multi-million pound competition looks to harness the power of technology to create the cities of the future…

A £10 million Internet of Things (IoT) fund has been established by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Innovate UK, with the idea of encouraging UK businesses to envision how the IoT could benefit the general public. Forward-thinking entrepreneurs who wish to get involved are required to produce a research and development project, detailing how new technology could benefit the economy, local transport networks or healthcare services. To be eligible for funding the the project must involve at least one local authority, have a specific benefit to the general public and be workable across more than one sector.

"The Internet of Things is rapidly becoming part of our everyday lives. The UK technology sector is renowned for its creativity and pioneering research and development. This competition will be instrumental in discovering new connections between city services and their users," commented digital economy minister Ed Vaizey.

See more at virgin.com

Carnegie Mellon University’s campus could soon transform into a living laboratory for testing how Internet-connected sensors, gadgets, and buildings might change our daily life. Google has awarded half a million dollars to Carnegie Mellon and a broader university coalition to develop the technologies needed to make that vision a reality.

Google’s funding comes from the tech giant’s Open Web of Things initiative aimed at creating a “research and open innovation expedition… to enable easy development of smart and secure Internet of Things applications and services.” The $500,000 awarded to the university coalition will help create an Internet of Things (IoT) platform called GloTTO that aims to create a complete interoperable system of IoT technologies. The platform would also allow researchers to figure out how to create a secure system that protects personal privacy in a sensor-filled environment.

“The goal of our project will be nothing less than to radically enhance human-to-human and human-to­-computer interaction through a large-scale deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) that ensures privacy, accommodates new features over time, and enables people to readily design applications for their own use,” said Anind Dey, director of CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and lead investigator of the GloTTO project, in a press release.

See more at spectrum.ieee.org

The Internet of Things promises to transform the way humanity operates and while some wearables have disappointed, our personal existence and survival is going to depend on this technology, says Monty Munford.

The hype behind the Internet of Things (IoT) appears well-founded. According to the UK Department for Business, Innovation & Skills the world market for smart city technology services will be more than £250 billion by the end of the decade. Products, however, that come with fanfare means there is always a lot of space for disappointment. The ludicrous launch of Google Glass and the mounting desperation of smart people at a smart company when showing off an unfinished product was an early mistake.

Even earlier was the overused example of the ‘internet fridge’ that was supposed to transform grocery shopping and still hasn’t reached critical mass. We also have the latest anticlimax; sales of the Apple Watch are alleged to have been underwhelming and it may take a new version to catch consumer attention.

The IoT’s dazzling future appears to trailing a little behind, but there is one area where the hyperbole is justified and that is in the field of healthcare. The IoT is going to influence, even dominate, the way humanity will exist.

Take artificial pancreas, for example. Smart sensors inside the body will be able to monitor the blood-sugar level and be networked to an internal insulin pump, creating an artificial pancreas.

Similar applications can work with blood, endocrine and other systems in the body. This is likely to be the first step in having the IoT inside our bodies, like a co-processor network. It won’t even need to be surgically implanted, it can be swallowed orally, because these devices won’t need batteries; instead they will work from heat-exchange or movement and still be wirelessly connectable.

Remote monitoring is another interesting aspect. Take heart attacks, which are the number one killer in the western world. There is now a lot of work going on around how to detect a heart attack from simple sensors, attached to wearable devices. That is a giant leap from pacemaker technology.

Inside hospitals and not bodies, it will also have a huge beneficial effect. The IoT means patients will be monitored with greater accuracy and reliability. Sensors can transmit data about their blood, heart and temperature, and correlate it to prevent problems.

See more at telegraph.co.uk

In a lecture course that he delivered in 1929-30, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger identified boredom as the defining mood of the 20th century. Whereas the Romantics were enraptured with the world, modern people simply shrug at it. This ubiquitous, insidious ennui plucks at our sleeves– but technology steps in, and we bury our boredom under a heap of gadgets.

In a technologically saturated world, Heidegger argues that we never truly inhabit time: we either manage it or while it away. The physical world is treated as a “standing reserve” of resources to be plundered by the onward march of innovation. The distractions of technology must be resisted, for Heidegger – but doing so requires embracing solitude, which means confronting boredom. The road is hard, but the alternative is worse. “He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself,” warns Nietzsche: “he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.”

Solitude in the Internet of Things Even though Heidegger thought that technology was fundamentally aimed at distraction and self-avoidance, it doesn’t have to be. Technology does what we design it to do. And the internet of things could help us in our search for solitude.

The philosopher and the staircase Facebook Twitter Pinterest The philosopher and the staircase Photograph: Chris Waits/flickr In the homes of the future, the mundane tasks that can interrupt concentration – regulating the heating, or taking out the bins – could be fully automated. But smarthomes are only the start. Because the internet of things could help us not just to connect more objects, but also to disconnect ourselves when we need space to think.

Studies have shown that even spotting a notification on a smartphone is distracting. So what if all home offices were equipped with physical kill-switches for notifications, which could mute all but the most urgent messages? And what if we could work not on multi-function laptops, where the temptations of the internet are just a new browser window away, but on smart typewriters with only minimal email connectivity? The homes of the future could be like the great houses of the past, run discreetly and efficiently by considerate butlers – quiet havens where the need for solitude and privacy is respected, rather than disregarded by default.

Rethinking the internet means rethinking ourselves As the boundary between the physical and the digital grows increasingly blurred, imagining the internet of tomorrow just becomes an exercise in envisioning the future. Do we want to march onwards as mindless consumers – avaricious, fearful and jealous of our peers? Or do we want to reclaim creative space, gather our wits and face the world carefully, thoughtfully and with curiosity?

Montaigne thought that the most admirable way to live was not to seek to own more, to do more, or to be more. “The greatest thing in the world,” he wrote, “is to know how to belong to ourselves.” The internet of things doesn’t have to usher in the death of solitude. On the contrary: it could herald its return.

See more at theguardian.com

Your office knows to turn on the lights when you arrive and turn them off when you leave. Your copier knows when to order more toner. Your car knows the best path to your next client meeting. Your building management system detects who is where and the optimal environmental controls. These Internet of Things (IoT) devices are all great, until someone hacks them and turns them against you. From cars to buildings to medical devices to the infrastructure that supports all of it—as we become more dependent on technology, we become more exposed to those technologies being turned against us.

The revolution of the Internet was the catalyst that changed the future of communication forever. It allows for the transfer of information despite the geological barriers that separate the computers. As time has progressed, we have developed new technologies that have allowed us to move from the First generation of the Internet into the current transition into the Fourth generation. This generation has been propelled by the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT).

We cannot leave Hollywood Sci-Fi movies when we talk about AI and IoT. Billionaire genius Tony Stark created a “shield around the world” to protect humanity from an ever increasing universe of threats. Unfortunately, once Ultron has achieved sentience, he takes his prime directive (to achieve peace in our time) to hyperlogical, human-life-ending conclusions. Coming back to reality Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has revealed that he's increasingly worried about the threat that Internet of Things (IoT) poses to humanity.

"Computers are going to take over from humans," Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak the 64-year-old engineer told the Australian Financial Review. "No question." "People including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted and I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently." - Woz

The billionaire engineer/inventor and owner of Tesla Motors recently donated $10 Million to the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit group working to “mitigate the existential risks to humanity” inherent in developing A.I and IoT. These aren’t sci-fi fan-groups or fringe thinkers forming these organization. Smart, prominent people are committing their time to this threat.

We know smartphones and smart watches. Our TVs and appliances have gone smart; smartcars are starting to show up on streets. At what point do these machines go from smart to intelligent? And if this intelligence threat is legit, and yet so many scientists are pursuing it, what are the benefits they find that could possibly outweigh such risks?

According to HP's report,"Internet of Things Security: State of the Union", a total of 250 security holes have been found in the tested IoT devices — on average, 25 per device. The issues are related to privacy, insufficient authorization, lack of transport encryption, inadequate software protection, and insecure Web interfaces. The report shows that 80% of the tested devices, including their corresponding cloud and mobile apps, raised privacy concerns regarding the collection of user data such as names, email addresses, physical addresses, date of birth, financial and health information.

When it comes to authorization, many of the products fail to enforce strong passwords, allowing customers to set passwords like "1234" not only on the devices themselves, but also on websites and mobile apps.

Three of the main concerns that accompany the Internet of Things are the breach of privacy, over-reliance on technology, and the loss of jobs. Also, companies could misuse the information that they are given access to. This is a common mishap that occurs within companies all the time. Just recently Google got caught using information that was supposed to be private. Information, such as the data collected and stored by IoT, can be immensely beneficial to companies.

See more at

Your office knows to turn on the lights when you arrive and turn them off when you leave. Your copier knows when to order more toner. Your car knows the best path to your next client meeting. Your building management system detects who is where and the optimal environmental controls. These Internet of Things (IoT) devices are all great, until someone hacks them and turns them against you. From cars to buildings to medical devices to the infrastructure that supports all of it—as we become more dependent on technology, we become more exposed to those technologies being turned against us.

The revolution of the Internet was the catalyst that changed the future of communication forever. It allows for the transfer of information despite the geological barriers that separate the computers. As time has progressed, we have developed new technologies that have allowed us to move from the First generation of the Internet into the current transition into the Fourth generation. This generation has been propelled by the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT).

We cannot leave Hollywood Sci-Fi movies when we talk about AI and IoT. Billionaire genius Tony Stark created a “shield around the world” to protect humanity from an ever increasing universe of threats. Unfortunately, once Ultron has achieved sentience, he takes his prime directive (to achieve peace in our time) to hyperlogical, human-life-ending conclusions. Coming back to reality Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has revealed that he's increasingly worried about the threat that Internet of Things (IoT) poses to humanity.

"Computers are going to take over from humans," Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak the 64-year-old engineer told the Australian Financial Review. "No question." "People including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted and I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently." - Woz

The billionaire engineer/inventor and owner of Tesla Motors recently donated $10 Million to the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit group working to “mitigate the existential risks to humanity” inherent in developing A.I and IoT. These aren’t sci-fi fan-groups or fringe thinkers forming these organization. Smart, prominent people are committing their time to this threat.

We know smartphones and smart watches. Our TVs and appliances have gone smart; smartcars are starting to show up on streets. At what point do these machines go from smart to intelligent? And if this intelligence threat is legit, and yet so many scientists are pursuing it, what are the benefits they find that could possibly outweigh such risks?

According to HP's report,"Internet of Things Security: State of the Union", a total of 250 security holes have been found in the tested IoT devices — on average, 25 per device. The issues are related to privacy, insufficient authorization, lack of transport encryption, inadequate software protection, and insecure Web interfaces. The report shows that 80% of the tested devices, including their corresponding cloud and mobile apps, raised privacy concerns regarding the collection of user data such as names, email addresses, physical addresses, date of birth, financial and health information.

When it comes to authorization, many of the products fail to enforce strong passwords, allowing customers to set passwords like "1234" not only on the devices themselves, but also on websites and mobile apps.

Three of the main concerns that accompany the Internet of Things are the breach of privacy, over-reliance on technology, and the loss of jobs. Also, companies could misuse the information that they are given access to. This is a common mishap that occurs within companies all the time. Just recently Google got caught using information that was supposed to be private. Information, such as the data collected and stored by IoT, can be immensely beneficial to companies.

See more at linkedin.com

The Capitol is awash in articles about the Internet of things. Here’s what politicians really need to know.

The Internet of things has gone to Washington and the Capitol has responded with confusion and fear. This week Politico devoted an entire issue of its new magazine to the internet of things, and the content vacillates between trying to get politicians to understand the issue and making sure they are scared out of their minds at the technological change headed for us all.

Add to the Politico issue a column that ran Monday in the Washington Post by Vivek Wadhwa that claims that when your fridge stops ordering you cheesecakes because your scale told it you were overweight, the internet of things will have gone too far. Apparently it’s open season on scaremongering in D.C.

These stories suss out how much politicians know about the internet of things (some are confused and some have FitBits!) and tell us that our privacy – or in Wadhwa’s case, our free will – is about to disappear. But what’s lost is the nuance of how governments should respond. Not only do these articles paint a somewhat unrealistic sense of what is likely to occur using the internet of things, they neglect to offer concrete solutions for managing what is an inevitable shift in how our society will operate.

In the 15 stories the Politico mag The Agenda offers, more than half are designed to scare with headlines like “Your Fridge is Spying on you” (what is with the fear of fridges?) or “I coined ‘Internet of Things.’ Now I think it’s the first big tech race the U.S. might lose.” Only one is designed to offer any actual solutions and is a Q&A with a lawyer on how to regulate the Internet of things.

See more at fortune.com

The emerging consensus view of humanity’s imminent future is that just about everything will soon be interconnected with just about everything else.

In a recent report on Digital Life in 2025, the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project predicted that the internet would soon become a “global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment built through the continued proliferation of smart sensors, cameras, software, databases, and massive data centers in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things.”

Like big data and the smart grid, the Internet of Things (IoT) concept has become a buzz word in the technology trade press. The IoT is predicted by many technology experts to be as – if not more – transformational than the internet itself on the way we live.

Apparently, nobody bothered to mention this to the folks out in Silicon Valley.

See more at forbes.com

In the first of our series on the IoT we take a look at connected devices that are available today, the privacy and security issues of using them – and how Britain can play a key part in its future.

Chores are boring. Get home from work, let the dog out, put dinner on, start a load of laundry and write a list for your next grocery order. What if rather than doing housework when you get home, you could do it on your commute – or better yet, not at all?

That’s the promise of the internet of things: hand your commute over to a smart car, let your pet out via his web-connected dog door, open up an app to pre-heat the oven and start the laundry, and click to approve the shopping list your smart fridge automatically generated.

This all sounds like a futuristic life, and parts of it do remain years away, but the foundations are being laid now – and much of the work is being done by British firms. We need to decide now what the IoT will look like, how it will protect our privacy, and just how much help we really want from it.

See more at: theguardian.com

IBM is wasting little time when it comes to the Internet of Things. The company outlined a major Internet of Things strategy tonight with a series of announcements that included a $3B investment to establish an Internet of Things unit inside of Big Blue along with a partnership with The Weather Company.

The Internet of Things refers to the growing network of sensors on everything from smartphones to jet engines. Instead of an Internet of connected computers, it’s an Internet of connected devices (or things) broadcasting loads of data about the devices.

The intent of the new initiative is to put IBM at the forefront of the Internet of Things and provide a common platform on top of which customers can build useful applications to take advantage of all that data. IBM suggests that partnerships like the one with The Weather Company and the one announced last year with Twitter are the cornerstones of a strategy to put them on the cutting edge of a burgeoning technology.

They are not alone in this endeavor, however. GE has its own Internet of Things platform aimed at the industrial internet, called Predix. The two giants are battling it out for the hearts and minds of developers.

See more at: techcrunch.com

A few months ago I had a chat about the Internet of Things with the design head of a well-known home appliance manufacturer. Gartner had just published 2014’s hype chart,, and with the Internet of Things sitting at the very peak of the hype cycle, he reckoned it might be an interesting way to differentiate his firm’s products in a market filled with cheap Chinese appliances.

After our chat, I had a thought: I could teach him about the Internet of Things with some broad-brush product designs. After reviewing the line of products manufactured by his firm, I found two that I could reimagine, using the pixie dust of intelligence and connectivity.

Nearly every home in Australia has a clothes iron. The major difference between models is how much steam they can put out on demand. Every iron has a dial to set its temperature - and if you don’t set it just right, you can damage your clothes.

See more at: theregister.co.uk

I’ve written about the Internet of Things in several past articles. One explained everything you need to know about IoT along with an infographic and the other provided a simple explanation of IoT. Today I wanted to explore IoT even further in the latest episode of the #futurein5. We’re all familiar with people connecting to the web — we can go online on our phones, computers, etc. But, what happens when devices start to go online? For example, I have a Fitbit Surge, a smart watch that goes online and connects to my scale, my computer, and mobile phone.

Conservative reports estimate around 26 billion devices will be connected by 2020 with some estimates as high as 100 billion to 200 billion devices. What sort of devices are we talking about? Literally, anything — phones, lights, fitness trackers, toasters, toothbrushes, small devices or big devices such as jet engines and turbines.

See more at: forbes.com

Every morning it’s not my buzzing alarm clock that jiggles me out of my dreams; it’s a sweet notification that will keep repeating itself until I am out of my bed, quite similar to what my mother does. And then there are little devices around me which help me stay fit; whether it’s my treadmill, or the health band around my wrist tracking all my calorie intake and utilization; I feel like being surrounded by well-wishers all the time. While learning about IoT I came across different opinions and each was equally convincing in its own way. However, what excites my inquisitive mind is that will the Internet of Things be able to amaze its users i.e. in this case the worldwide population; simply because the audience these days cannot be fooled with propagandas. They will reject your concept if it does not fit into their User Experience. A lot of changes are being anticipated with the evolution of IoT and it promises a more organized method of device interactions. For those closely following the developments, the big moment is somewhere around. See more at: netsolutionsindia.com

First there was 'the internet of things', denoting the abundance of cost-effective technologies that can be applied to almost anything in order to collect data. Then, towards the end of last year, the phrase 'the internet of customers' was coined by Salesforce as a prompt to marketers that individual consumers should be the focus, rather than technologies. The brand was certainly successful in generating a buzz, which was surely a motivating factor behind creating the expression. Added to this, it is key to remember that, over recent years, the art of marketing has picked up speed in terms of technology; Gartner has predicted that by 2017 a brand’s CMO [Chief Marketing Officer] will be spending more on IT than its CIO [Chief Information Officer]. But what does this really teach us, asks Bo Mattsson, CEO of Cint? The new phrase serves as a reminder that technology and big data are not the be-all and end-all of a marketer’s activity and this warning may have come at the perfect time if Gartner’s study is accurate. There is a danger that this proliferation and sprint to have the biggest, best or newest tools or apps means that spending is not carried out with the true end goal in mind: how will it assist customers, improve products or services and is there a beneficial ROI to be had from implementing the said technology? See more at: biz-works.net

Smart appliances that communicate with each other and share information using the internet are already available. Indeed, the Internet of things has featured on lists of game-changing technologies for years, and is arguably one of the most hyped tech innovations around. With sensors getting cheaper by the day, more and more physical objects are becoming part of a network of things changing the way we live and work. For businesses of the future, this should lead to a huge cut in costs since these new tools help us see exactly what is going on where. “The Internet of things – which is really about the connecting of devices and the acquisition of data – ultimately creates much more visibility: the visibility of the performance of the grid, visibility of where we lose energy, and where the savings potential really is,” says Gerd Kortuem, professor of ubiquitous computing at the Open University and energy leader for Milton Keynes’ smart city initiative. See more at : theguardian.com

The internet of things – are all the great things we read about real or hype? Can this be compared to when cloud appeared on the scene, and everything changed being “in the cloud”? We invited some industry experts to discuss a number of questions that are commonly asked. Here are their opinions. See more at ee.co.za

THE INTERNET OF Things means different things to different people. To vendors, it’s the latest in a slew of large-scale trends to affect their enterprise customers, and the latest marketing bandwagon they have to consider. To enterprise organizations, it’s still a jumble of technical standards, conflicting opinions and big potential. For developers, it’s a big opportunity to put together the right mix of tools and technologies, and probably something they are already doing under another name. Understanding how these technologies work together on a technical level is becoming important, and will provide more opportunities to use software design as part of the overall business. See more at: wired.com

UX design is a unique mix of art, craft, and science. Designing the interaction between a human and software requires intuition, attention to detail, and an analytic approach that facilitates both gathering and interpreting data. Until recently, app designers and developers only had to consider what’s happening on the screen of a device. With the advent of beacon technology, contextual computing, and the Internet of Things, it’s becoming much more complex. This post only scratches the surface of how location-based services will impact interaction design. Beacons are still a fresh technology and Internet of Things is in early stages of mainstream adoption. New best practices and principles of UX design for the physical spaces and contextual computing will emerge and become more visible as projects and apps go live. We’re eager to see ideas and rules we wouldn’t have thought about otherwise. So if you have any in the works or simply on your mind, share them with us! We’re waiting for your comments and will be happy to answer them. See more at: uxmag.com

The saying “Everything old is new again” applies in spades to the Internet of Things (IoT), as the IoT is really just the evolution of automation systems we’ve been using for decades. But there is a key difference in today’s IoT applications, one that presents a significant challenge to service providers seeking to profit from IoT-related applications and services: the scale of their systems. IoT technology dates back at least to SCADA systems used in industrial automation applications for decades to control machines on the factory floor. It then expanded to point-of-sale technology used in retail stores as well as fleet tracking systems used in transportation. All of these systems involve relatively small computers that communicate among one another with no human intervention, while producing valuable information that humans ultimately consume. That’s exactly what today’s IoT technology involves, but on a much broader scale. Now the “compute” technology can be as simple as a sensor that does nothing more than track some variable – temperature, humidity, motion or what have you – and communicate it to some central computer. See more at: sevone.com

Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that considers pervasive presence in the environment of a variety of things/objects that through wireless and wired connections and unique addressing schemes are able to interact with each other and cooperate with other things/objects to create new applications/services and reach common goals. The Internet of Things applications drive the intelligence to the edge of the system by sensing/actuating the environment using intelligent sensors/actuators (analog and digital) that are communicating using IP to improve performance and efficiency by collecting and processing the information and coupling massive sensing and control with big data and analytics to accomplish advanced levels of optimization and efficiency. The IoT makes use of synergies that are generated by the convergence of consumer, business and industrial internet consumer, business and industrial internet. The convergence creates the open, global network connecting people, information, and things. This convergence leverages the cloud/fog to connect intelligent things that sense and transmit a broad array of data, helping creating services that would not be obvious without this level of connectivity and analytical intelligence. .ien.eu

Experiencing The Real Internet of Things: Company to Provide Live Demonstrations of Award-winning ZANO Autonomous Drone, Tools and Solutions to Accelerate IoT Deployments. Lantronix, Inc. (NASDAQ: LTRX), a leading global provider of smart IoT (Internet of Things) connectivity solutions, today announced it will be providing live demonstrations of its xPico® Wi-Fi® and PremierWave® product families, its support for Python scripting language, and more at the Embedded World 2015 show to be held from February 24-26, 2015 in Nürnberg, Germany. Lantronix' booth will be located in Hall 5, Booth 451 at the M2M Pavilion in Nürnberg Exhibition Centre. The company will also showcase several Lantronix IoT-enabled product applications, including the award-winning xPico Wi-Fi-powered Torquing ZANO autonomous drone and a PremierWave EN-powered humanoid robot. Additionally, Lantronix will demonstrate factory provisioning of the xPico Wi-Fi module in a manufacturing floor setting, as well as the integration into a cloud-based device management platform. See more at: lantronix.com

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an all-encompassing trend that affects all areas of our lives. Especially for a strong economy like Germany, the IoT offers major business opportunities and a historic opportunity to improve its competitiveness as an industrial location. Around the world, engineers are developing solutions for the IoT. At present developments are very much driven by technology. But in an area like this, technological know-how and excellent work alone are not enough. We have found that the right systemic understanding is decisive for the IoT.  When developing connected solutions, therefore, Bosch takes three levels into consideration: the first is connected things, which use sensors to collect data and in this way help create a virtual image of the real world. The second is secure software platforms that connect these things with the internet and with each other, that analyze data, and that make new services possible. The third is the applications and services that are developed on the software platforms and create value-added for customers See more at.blog.bosch-si.com

The Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to grow significantly, as consumers, businesses, and governments recognize the benefit of connecting inert devices to the internet. In an all-new report from BI Intelligence, we examine what is currently driving growth in the Internet of Things and how various sectors of the economy will embrace IoT innovations. The IoT will result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy in 2019. The main benefit of growth in the IoT will be increased efficiency and lower costs. The IoT lacks a common set of standards and technologies that would allow for compatibility and ease-of-use. See more at : businessinsider.com

In the internet of things, the Federal Trade Commission sees the possibility of flourishing new markets. But it also sees a prologue to Black Mirror: in a new report that probes the privacy implications of connected devices, the commission surveys a landscape of possible dystopian futures. Get ready for invasive marketing, unending consumer surveillance, invisible nudging, and new potential for government spying and novel forms of hacking. The report seeks to identify the dangers to consumers presented by the internet of things. How might information gleaned from a car GPS, fitness tracker or smart refrigerator lead to negative effects on your creditworthiness, employability, or insurance premiums? As a prelude to the development of best practices, and perhaps new legislation, the FTC aims to establish industry standards for data gathering and use. See more at : theverge.com

Tim O’Reilly has been at the cutting edge of the Internet since it went commercial. In fact, he helped take it there: In August 1993 he released the Global Network Navigator, a web page containing information, catalogs and a marketplace, which may have been the first site with advertising. The IoT is really about human augmentation. The applications are profoundly different when you have sensors and data driving the decision-making. Uber is a company built around location awareness. An Uber driver is an augmented taxi driver, with real-time location awareness. An Uber passenger is an augmented passenger, who knows when the cab will show up. Uber is about eliminating slack time and worry. People would call it “IoT” if there was a driverless car, but it already is part of the IoT. You can measure, test and change things dynamically. The IoT is about the interpolation of computer hardware and software into all sorts of things. Reed more at: nytimes.com

When it comes to building up clout in an emerging industry, Google pulls out all the stops. And doing that usually involves spending lots of money. Google Research, Google’s portal to the academic world, is making major investments right now, building up an innovation and research program dedicated to the nascent collection of products and technologies collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT). It's created a research grant program called Open Web of Things to attract talent to the company, as well as to fund and give technical support to promising research groups in academia. The application process is now closed, and Google will choose the recipients by this spring. Reed more at : fastcompany.com

I did not attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show two weeks ago, but I eagerly read about the prototypes for new consumer gadgets and services that debuted there. From all accounts, the Internet of Things was a major theme of the show. Yet, to my dismay, the coverage I saw coming out of the event was decidedly ambivalent, even dismissive, when it came to the potential of the Internet of Things. How can this be? The Internet of Things (IoT) has been heralded far and wide as the next great revolution in technology. Gartner is predicting that the Internet of Things will include 26 billion connected devices by 2020, and Cisco forecasts $19 trillion in economic value over the next decade. Yet when top tech companies put their most exciting ideas for IoT devices in front of the savviest tech writers and consumers, the reaction is lukewarm. See more at: venturebeat.com

The Internet of Things is not a ways down the road, it’s banging on the door. According to Gartner, there will be about 4.9 billion connected units in use this year; by 2020, that number will grow to 26 billion. Another study said that nearly 20 percent of the planet’s developers are working in some capacity on projects related to the Internet of Things. That kind of far-reaching, fast-growing technology has a lot of people seriously worried about privacy and security. Eugene Kaspersky even calls IoT the Internet of Threats because of the potentially catastrophic danger of the ever increasing number of smart devices connected to the Internet. See more at: gcn.com

The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, together with Microsoft Israel R&D center, launched a special initiative in a lab for developing software and systems at the Technion’s computer science faculty. The initiative will focus on the field of Internet of Things and will be used by students for developing innovative technologies during their computer science studies. The physical appearance and technology infrastructure at the lab are designed to resemble the work environment of a startup company, with all the latest computer equipment, including smartphones and tablets for running applications during their development. The clean design lines of lab simulate those of a real high-tech company, and give the students the feel of an authentic development environment of an R&D center or a startup company. See more at jewishbusinessnews.com

The Internet of Things (IoT) is heralded as one of the biggest technological advances of our age. The idea that literally billions of devices and sensors will be connected to the network and that we’ll be able to derive meaningful and valuable insights from the data those devices transmit is an exciting one. But the reality of building IoT applications is pretty complex – there are no standards, little consistency in terms of how things are done and few solid case studies to go by. There’s also a plethora of startups aimed at making IoT development easier. But in the race to capture mindshare, there is lots of movement in the startup space. Witness the case of IoT platform Octoblu which was acquired by Citrix only months after launching. See more at: forbes.com

For consumers, the advent of "smart" TVs, home automation gear and other web-enabled products offers a wealth of new capabilities. But the "Internet of Things," as this emerging technological ecosystem is known, also poses serious security risks. In a new report, the Federal Trade Commission lays out just how vulnerable that makes us, urging consumers and businesses to make safe use and design of the gadgets a priority. See more at: cbsnews.com

The Internet of Things is set to infiltrate every area of our lives, but with so much investment required to deliver the devices, infrastructure and standards, who is going to pay? asks Sophie Curtis. Cupboards that order groceries for you when you're running low, cars that automatically drive to the nearest available parking space, and central heating systems that warm up the house and have a hot bath waiting for you when you get home from work – this is the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT). The term has been bandied around for years, but now the hype is reaching fever pitch. According to some forecasts, there will be 50 billion everyday objects connected to the internet by 2020, and the UK Department for Business, Innovation & Skills claims the global market for smart city technology solutions and services could reach over £250 billion by the end of the decade. See more at: telegraph.co.uk

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly taking over from Machine-to-Machine communications (M2M) as the trendy new buzzword. However, these terms are often used interchangeably, and neither of these two popular terms is well defined or standardised, with many organisations and companies operating with their own internal definitions. So, what’s the difference between IoT and M2M? In a basic sense, the definition of Machine-to-Machine communications (M2M) is that it’s communication between one remote machine and another. M2M is basically about communicating with a remote machine in the field in order to manage that machine or collect machine and sensor data. See more at: lxgroupteam.wordpress.com

2015 is shaping up to be the year of the Internet of Things (IoT). According to a study conducted by Gartner, there will be approximately 4.9 billion connected devices in use in 2015. This number has climbed 30 percent since 2014, and is forecasted to reach 25 billion by 2020. However, this trend also has security experts and consumers highlighting privacy issues that come along with the convenience of Internet connected devices. See more at: forbes.com

Fifteen to twenty years ago we were in the middle of another frothy, technology-hyped revolution — the Dot-Com era. Mass adoption of the Internet promised radical changes in business and our everyday life and a new social and economic Utopia. In those halcyon days, stock prices were on a tear, venture capital money flowed like water, and countless start-ups greedily chased the pot of gold. Could the most recent technology revolution, the Internet of Things, be another Dot-Com experience? See more at: blogs.cisco.com

You think you know the Internet pretty well, right? You go online every day, maybe watch some videos on your phone, upload some pictures to Instagram, and message your friends and family. That's a good start, but it's a just a fraction of the Internet's influence over your life. Over the next few years, and even now, the Internet is connecting parts of our lives in ways we never could have imagined just a few years ago. It's called the Internet of Things (weird name, I know), and it's going to transform the next 10 years of our technological lives. See more at: fool.com

Is there anything that can’t be connected to the Internet? For example, where I once wore a $10 pedometer clipped to the waistband of yoga pants, I now wear a $130 fitness tracker on my wrist. In the past, I just took a look at the numbers on the pedometer to see how many steps I’d taken; now I need to log onto an app on my smartphone to see how far I’ve walked and how many calories I’ve burned and even how well I’ve slept. Or, if I wanted to, I could turn on any light in the house from the comfort of my couch rather than get up and do so manually. And that’s just a small scratch on the surface of the phenomena that is known as the Internet of Things (IoT) See more at: forbes.com

The world of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is becoming more complex. Solutions are moving from single-purpose devices that transmit data to an application in the network and receive commands from a network application to the Internet of Things (IoT). However, solutions permitting multi-purpose devices and collaborative applications can become chaotic. See more at: The Internet of Things — Time for standardization

Power companies read meters through tele-metering systems instead of visiting houses; doctors remotely monitor the conditions of their patients 24/7 by having the patients use devices at home instead of requiring the patients to stay at hospital; vehicle-mounted terminals automatically display the nearest parking space; sensors in smart homes turn off utilities, close windows, monitor security, and report to homeowners in real time. These are scenarios that only existed in science fiction previously. With the coming of age of the Internet of Things, however, they are becoming a reality. See more at: Internet of Things and its future