Programming Tutorials

Internet of Things

By: William Alexander in Trends Tutorials on 2013-02-11  

Ever since computers were invented the collection of data and storage of data in digital format began. As more and more people started using computers, more and more data was stored. And a trend emerged where all things were converted from all different forms to digital form. For example, cameras started becoming digital and therefore photos and videos could then be stored in digital format. Even phones became digital and even voice could be recorded in digital format and stored digitally.

This gave rise to immense data being available in digital form but the data was still scattered in different storage media and computers. Innovative services such as YouTube gave rise to a common platform to store these otherwise scattered data. Meanwhile the web and the popularity and availability of Internet grew immensely and the web 2.0 made it possible to create and capture a different form of content which is 'user-generated'. As a result services like 'Facebook' gets terabytes of data generated gloablly by people sharing information, photos, videos etc.

With all these developments and innovations, the underlying fact of origination of data still remains the same. That is, people were the main source of these data. Real people typing it somewhere, real people uploading photos and videos etc. So the internet still relys mostly on people to geenerate content.

With 'Internet of Things', the focus is now moving from people to things, literally. Imagine if all things and people on earth can be uniquely identified and tagged (RFID) and if data can be gathered from these things by computers without the need for any human intervention, then the computers would know everything about these things which can give the ability to these computers to track and count everything and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacement, repair or recall, and whether they were fresh or beyond their best.

Now you can imagine that the 'Internet of Things' can change the world just as the Internet has done so far but only this time the change is going to be revolutionary.