Tuesday, May 28, 2013: Ever since Internet came into being, we have had humans connecting to it from all kinds of devices. Consumers started tapping into the potential of the Internet through desktop computers and phone lines, but it soon transformed into a world of pocket-sized devices connecting to the web over the cellular network. One thing has remained common over the years, and that is the human element for communication. However powerful be the device that connects to the Internet, the transfer of information was almost always started and manipulated by a human.
The Internet of Things (IoT) changes that. Here, it is a group of hundreds, if not thousands of devices that keep on transmitting a trickle of data to a central system. The transmitting devices are mostly dumb devices that only know to convert analog signals into digital versions and transmit them wirelessly. True to the nature of technology, we have come a long way from the initial versions of the Internet of Things but that is another story.
The modern implications of the IoT are endless. It starts all the way from automated inventorying, to smarter farming, and a whole lot more. Indeed, there are a couple of confusing aspects of the IoT, like how it is different from cloud based applications, is it a peer to peer network for machines, or if the communications protocols are different. Kaivan Karimi, an IoT expert has answered some of these questions on the Internet of Things here.
In fact, we realised that there were so many different questions on the topic, that in the end, we had to set up a whole website just to tackle the question of what is really, the Internet of Things?
