You invented the term 'Internet of Things(IoT)'.
How did you invent it?
Do you have any specific story or episode?
The phrase “Internet of Things” started life as the title of a presentation I made when I was a Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1999.
Linking the then-unheard-of idea of putting wireless sensors on P&G’s products to the then-red-hot topic of the Internet was a good way to get executive attention.
Everyone was talking about the Internet.
I was part of a smaller group of people who were interested in sensors and embedding computer-like capabilities into things that weren’t computers, and we used the word “things” quite a lot.
So I connected the two concepts using the word “of,” to communicate my idea that everyday objects should connect to the Internet.
This was radical at the time.
A lot of people were still accessing the Internet using dial-up, nobody was using WiFi, and cell phones were still fairly new and quite primitive-there were no smart phones or Blackberries, and the most popular handheld device was probably the Palm Pilot, which had no radio and was synced using a cradle.
So, the idea of connecting anything but computers to the Internet was very new.
What is the IoT do you think?
How will the IoT technology change the world?
Today computers-and, therefore, the Internet-are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information.
Nearly all of the roughly 3 zettabytes (3 billion gigabytes) 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 include servers and routers and so on, but they 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.
The Internet of Things solves that problem by using machines-sensors, and other embedded computing- to capture all that real world data instead of relying on people to do it, or instead of not doing it all.
3.How will the IoT transform the individual lives?
In general, most technology either helps us to travel faster (e.g. trains, cars), or to communicate farther (e.g. cell phones, email), or it makes us healthier (e.g. medicine, plumbing), or it helps us to discover things (e.g. microscopes, telescopes) or it reduces manual and mental labor (e.g. washing machines, calculators).
IoT is mainly in the last two categories-it helps us discover things (for example, we left the light on or we forgot our keys) and reduces manual and mental labor (for example, manually checking inventory in a store or warehouse.) The result of all this is more efficient and accurate data capture, and many orders of magnitude more data about the real world.