Humans have evolved the machines in various dimensions for the past 100 years to empower themselves. We learn from what we observe in nature and we gave them classified interfaces(Input & Output) through which, we can communicate effectively. Visionaries saw the power of computational engines and they came up with the idea of Personal Computers that revolutionised the world. PCs had incredible potential to store large amount of data and so, naturally the need of sharing data or integrating data arose to take decisions or make more meaningful information. Thus Internet, the common network of the world came into existence.
PCs when integrated with Internet, a new Information sharing platform was born and it gave rise to an new era, An era of Information Technology, which is today seen as the first wave of Internet. Soon the size of machines came down and it began to take various forms. Scientists and Engineers understood how Internet changed the world when integrated with PCs and came up with an idea of connecting people. That is when the second internet wave started. Advancement in tech, allowed us to reduce the size of the Machines/ PCs drastically and gave us hand held devices that people can carry with them where ever they moved and Internet was integrated with it to connect the the people.
As the computing power of the machines grew, we started to personify them and started integrating senses(sensors) and actuators into them and gave them the ability to sense their environment, understand and make decisions with their computing power, then act or make an impact in the environment when necessary.
Now, we are in the beginning of the era of things ie) we have started to integrate computational power into things, evolved it to smart things and now connect it to Internet. This would create a smarter environment that learns, adopts itself and aids us.
Smart Thing = Thing +Sensors + Computing Power + Actuator
IOT = Thing + Sensors + Computing Power + Actuators + Internet
IOT = Smart Thing + Internet
This Phenomena is today widely called as Internet of Things(IOT) or Machine to Machine(M2M) Communication. Literally every industry in the world would adopt this phenomena in the next few years. Giving Things the power to sense, think, act and communicate would open huge possibilities that an individual may not be able to understand today. After all every individual would use the same thing(object) for different use cases and would hold very different perspective.
Today no individual or a group is able to give any standard for this phenomena, not even the name is actually standardised. Some people call it IOT while other call it M2M. This is going to be the The opportunities are truly limitless and we can start even from giving a more appropriate Name for this Phenomena Like ThingsNet, Things2.0, EveryNet etc..
I welcome more names from the readers so please leave ur ideas for the name as comments here.
In the Next Article I shall write about the Technologies that are enabling this phenomena, Biz opportunities and give few examples how our future might evolve around this.
