Chevron Corporation, Gulf of Mexico, International Business Machines

A A

Kishore S Swaminathan: Aug 20 2012, 02:36 IST

If you haven’t already heard of Internet of Things, you soon will. There is considerable business and technological momentum behind Internet of Things, also known as IoT. Gartner has put IoT way up there in its hype cycle; practically every major technology company is in the process of developing an IoT product; a number of universities in the United States, Europe and Asia have launched big R&D programs in IoT; the European Union is funding the massive Internet of Things Initiative; and China has identified IoT as a technology of national priority.

The proponents of IoT imagine a world in which billions of objects of various sorts (cameras, pacemakers, RFID tags, sprinklers – you name it) are connected to the internet, communicating and cooperating with one another.

Why now? After all, this idea has been around for over a decade under different names – object internet and machine-to-machine (M2M) being two of the better known and has occasionally been the butt of jokes. So is this old wine in a new bottle? Or is this renewed interest based on some major new technological breakthrough?

As it turns out, it’s neither. Much as social networks came of age as more and more people got online, networks of communicating objects are proliferating as the world becomes filled with more and more sensors and other intelligent objects, supporting a broad range of applications. However, there isn’t any identifiable single technology called IoT that supports the wildly different scenarios lumped together

... contd.

Ads by Google

Single Page Format

1 | 2 | 3 | Next

Some fled to Mumbai to escape Assam fire Russia's Pussy Riot found guilty, await sentenceRussia punk band members get 2 yrs jail Raza Academy president’s statement recorded

Previous Story Big Blue gives analytics The big push Next Story Trefler makes his moves in India

Reader's Comments| Post a Comment

Be the first to comment.