Drew Hendricks of Sys-Con recently wrote, “Over the course of the past decade, there’s been a lot of hype pertaining to the Internet of Things (IoT) and how China leads the U.S. in this technology — yet many who are active on the Internet are still unaware of its existence. In its simplest form, IoT is an evolving wireless network of objects and devices that will eventually all be connected with each other. Using RFID, Bluetooth, GPS and other emerging semantic technology, and working in tandem with cloud computing, Web portals and back-end systems, in essence our “things” will be be able to “talk” with each other.”

He continues, “The logistics of making inanimate objects digital with the capability of being operated remotely is going to take a lot work on a lot of products, from cars to household appliances to heating and cooling units to myriad others. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, believes 2014 will be the year of ‘things.’ At the Silicon Valley Summit, she indicated her company was predicting an aggressive adoption curve for making everything digital. ‘In 1984, there were 1,000 connected devices,’ she said. ‘That number rose up to reach a million devices in 1992, and reached a billion devices in 2008. Our estimates say… that we will have roughly 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020. That number is going to really accelerate over the next several years. Despite the fact, we estimate that only one percent of things that could have an IP address do have an IP address today, so we like to say that 99 percent of the world is still asleep’.”

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