Market

Internet Of Things: the spreading of a meme

In the past few weeks it appears that the concept of the Internet Of Things—or Web3.0, Spimes, or however one wants to call this important forthcoming development of the web where all objects become network addressable, and in turn send data back about the world—has suddenly become mainstream.

The first to take action was CISCO which announced a new Alliance for IP Smart Objects (IPSO), collecting industry heavyweights, and the week after snapping up Jabber, the maker of the XMPP protocol, on which OpenSpime itself is based.

The second was Vint Cerf, Google’s Internet Evangelist, and one of the original inventors of the fundamental TCP/IP protocol on which the entire Internet is based. Vint Cerf wrote a post on Google’s official blog entitles ‘The Next Internet’ in which he described his vision for the Internet Of Things.

The third, and for the moment last salvo in this barrage of announcements was coming from the European Union which issued a document on the “Future Of Networks And The Internet” (pdf) and launched a public consultation on the early challenges regarding the Internet Of Things.

Considering that the subtitle of last week’s Picnic conference was “Toys for hackers or a real business opportunity?” these three elements represent a rather sudden development that answers the questions without too much doubt: the Internet Of Things is for real.