CES and the IoT

This week, as 160,000 vendors, buyers, and spies roam the aisles of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it seemed like the right time to write about the Internet of Things (IoT) again, using examples from CES to illustrate the creative, exciting ways in which things will talk to, and work with, other things, often with little or no human input. Vendors have spent the last few years raising the war chant about the sheer size of this tsunami in intelligent products, with Ericsson (10B) and Cisco (50B and counting) vying for who can cadge together the largest numbers of new dumb / smart nodes on the Net. Everyone knows the numbers don't really matter, as long as there is a "B" in there somewhere. You can just about hear the cash registers clanging (or Apple Paying) in the background.