A concept where normal appliances, both household and official, bestowed with unique identifiers are connected to the Internet is called the Internet of Things (IOT).
This is done by embedding sensors in devices, such as TVs, wearable devices, vehicles, machine components, etc. It will not make sense to a non-IT guy right away, so some explanation is warranted here.
One of the first persons to foresee this phenomenon was Kevin Ashton, one of the founders of the MIT Auto-ID Center, in 1999. He was employed with Procter & Gamble then.
Using the IOT, it will be possible to run complex computing applications by incorporating devices with powerful microprocessors. This will endow devices the ability to handle applications that smartphones, PCs, and laptops currently take care of now! Then appliances will be able interact with one another through the Machine to Machine (M2M) communications.
ABI Research, a market research firm, expects more than 30 billion devices to be connected wirelessly to the IOT by 2020.
The first known Internet device is said to be a Coke machine in the early 1980s that was located in the Carnegie Melon University. It enabled the programmers to talk to the machine via the Internet.
This concept, of late, has caught the fancy of top IT companies like Bosch, Cisco, Intel, Google, among others, who have jumped on to the bandwagon of IOT.
What essentially IOT will do is to let devices do most of the Internet activities, and not traditional devices of computing. The extent to which IOT will invade our lives is not possible to imagine.
IOT’s growth owes a lot to the unveiling of IP Version 6 (IPv6) in 2012, as this caused the unique Net addresses to soar. This, therefore, has made many devices capable of being linked to the Internet. Cloud computing’s emergence has also encouraged IOT to become a reality, as it can store huge amounts of data released by the devices.
But IOT has its drawbacks too. Our personal information may become compromised when so many of our devices are connected to the Internet. This can lead to spread of worms, malware and other such security issues, causing our activities to be disrupted.
It can also cause loss of jobs as many manual tasks will be done remotely through the Internet. We will tend to rely more and more on technology, which has already been intruded into more than we had wanted it to.
This is done by embedding sensors in devices, such as TVs, wearable devices, vehicles, machine components, etc. It will not make sense to a non-IT guy right away, so some explanation is warranted here.
One of the first persons to foresee this phenomenon was Kevin Ashton, one of the founders of the MIT Auto-ID Center, in 1999. He was employed with Procter & Gamble then.
Using the IOT, it will be possible to run complex computing applications by incorporating devices with powerful microprocessors. This will endow devices the ability to handle applications that smartphones, PCs, and laptops currently take care of now! Then appliances will be able interact with one another through the Machine to Machine (M2M) communications.
ABI Research, a market research firm, expects more than 30 billion devices to be connected wirelessly to the IOT by 2020.
The first known Internet device is said to be a Coke machine in the early 1980s that was located in the Carnegie Melon University. It enabled the programmers to talk to the machine via the Internet.
This concept, of late, has caught the fancy of top IT companies like Bosch, Cisco, Intel, Google, among others, who have jumped on to the bandwagon of IOT.
What essentially IOT will do is to let devices do most of the Internet activities, and not traditional devices of computing. The extent to which IOT will invade our lives is not possible to imagine.
IOT’s growth owes a lot to the unveiling of IP Version 6 (IPv6) in 2012, as this caused the unique Net addresses to soar. This, therefore, has made many devices capable of being linked to the Internet. Cloud computing’s emergence has also encouraged IOT to become a reality, as it can store huge amounts of data released by the devices.
But IOT has its drawbacks too. Our personal information may become compromised when so many of our devices are connected to the Internet. This can lead to spread of worms, malware and other such security issues, causing our activities to be disrupted.
It can also cause loss of jobs as many manual tasks will be done remotely through the Internet. We will tend to rely more and more on technology, which has already been intruded into more than we had wanted it to.