In this months issue of Electronic Products (and, truth be told, in many issues this past 12 or more months), you'll find several references to the Internet of Things, or IoT. For instance, what seems to me to be one of the more interesting symposia at the Sensors Expo show, Making the Internet of Things a Reality: A Toolkit for Designing "Smart," is discussed in the Outlook section of this issue. The IoT acronym has largely taken the place of MTM (Machine to Machine) as a way of describing technology that makes possible the direct, intelligent interaction among electronics and electromechanical systems without human intervention. Unlike MTM, what the term IoT recognizes is the key role of the Internet in making the interaction occur. In his blog, Eliot Lear's Ramblings, Lear - the Principle Engineer and self-described "unofficial Corporate Irritant" at Cisco - states that the Internet Protocol (IP) is "the only common protocol above which and below which all other protocols sit." Thus it is the thing that allows all kinds of systems to talk with each other, which indeed is what the name implies.
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