THE “INTERNET” OF “THINGS”

We’ve looked at a number of examples of the Internet of Things, so what is 

the common thread that binds them together? And why the name? All the 

cases we saw used the Internet to send, receive, or communicate informa-

tion. And in each case, the gadget that was connected to the Internet wasn’t a 

computer, tablet, or mobile phone but an object, a Thing. These Things are 

designed for a purpose: the umbrella has a retractable canopy and a handle 

to hold it. A bus display has to be readable to public transport users, 

including the elderly and partially sighted and be able to survive poor 

weather conditions and the risk of vandalism. The sports bracelet is easy to 

wear while running, has a display that is large enough and bright enough to 

read even when you are moving, and will survive heat, cold, sweat, and rain.

Many of the use cases could be fulfilled, and often are, by general-purpose 

computers. Although we don’t carry a desktop PC around with us, many 

people do carry a laptop or tablet. More to the point, in almost every 

country now, most people do carry a mobile phone, and in many cases this 

is a smartphone that easily has enough power for any task one could throw 

at a computer. Let’s see how well one could replicate these tasks with a 

smartphone.

Viewing your bus provider’s timetable with a smartphone web browser 

seems to fulfil the same function at first glance. But just consider that last 

phrase, “at first glance”. On arriving at the bus stop, one can simply glance at 

the computerised timetable and see when the next bus is due. With a 

smartphone, if you have one and can afford the data use (which may be 

prohibitive if you are a foreign tourist), you have to take the phone out of 

your pocket or bag, unlock it, navigate to the right website (this may be the 

slowest and most complicated part of the process, whether you have to type 

the URL or use a QR code), and read the data from a small screen. In this 

time, you are not able to fully concentrate on the arriving buses and might 

even miss yours.

You can track your runs with an app on your smartphone, and many people 

do: the phone has GPS, many other useful sensors, processing power, an 

Internet connection, and a great screen. But it turns out that such a phone 

isn’t easy to carry on a run without worrying about dropping it or getting it 

wet. Plenty of carrying options are available, from a waist bag to an arm 

strap. The latter, in theory, enables you to read the device while you are 

running, but in practice reading details on the screen can be hard while 

you are jiggling up and down! To get around this difficulty, apps such as 

RunKeeper provide regular audio summaries which can be useful (www.

runkeeper.com). Ultimately, a phone is a perfectly capable device for tracking your run, and most runners will find it a sufficient, comfortable, 

and fun way of logging their running data. However, others may well prefer 

a device worn as a watch or wristband, designed to be read on the move, 

worn in the rain, and connected to peripherals such as heart monitors.

Of course, no mobile phone (or even tablet or laptop) is large enough or 

waterproof enough to use as an umbrella. However, you could pair a 

smartphone with a normal “dumb” umbrella, by checking an app to see 

whether it is likely to rain later, before you leave the house. Unlike a calm, 

subtle light in the umbrella stand, glimpsed from the corner of your eye as 

an ambient piece of information to process subconsciously when you pass it 

on the way out of your home, an app requires you to perform several actions. 

If you are able to establish and maintain the habit of doing this check, it will 

be just as effective. Rather than having greater capabilities, the smart 

umbrella simply moves the same intelligence into your environment so that 

you don’t have to change your routine.

So the idea of the Internet of Things suggests that rather than having a small 

number of very powerful computing devices in your life (laptop, tablet, 

phone, music player), you might have a large number of devices which are 

perhaps less powerful (umbrella, bracelet, mirror, fridge, shoes). An earlier 

buzzword for roughly the same concept was “ubiquitous computing”, also 

known by the ugly portmanteau “ubicomp”, and this also reflects the huge 

number of possible objects that might contain computing technology. Now 

that the Internet is a central pipe for data, it’s hard to imagine, for example, a 

PC that doesn’t have an always-on broadband connection. Younger readers 

may never have seen such a thing. As technologist and columnist Russell 

Davies joked at the 2012 Open Internet of Things Assembly in London:

I can’t understand why teddy bears did not have wifi before. A 

bear without wifi is barely alive, a semi-bear.

—http://storify.com/PepeBorras/opent-iot-assembly

The definition of ubicomp, however, would also include the Glade air 

fresheners which release scent when they detect movement in the room as 

part of its domain. That is to say, such a device is an intelligently pro-

grammed computer processor, driven by sensors in the real world, and 

driving output in the real world, all embedded into an everyday object. 

These factors make this ubicomp, and it is only differentiated from the 

“Internet of Things” by the fact that these days most of the really interesting 

things done with computing also involve an Internet connection.

But what does it mean to “connect an object to the Internet”? Clearly, sticking 

an Ethernet socket into a chair or a 3G modem into a sewing machine doesn’t 

suddenly imbue the object with mysterious properties. Rather, there has to be 

some flow of information which connects the defining characteristics of the 

Thing with the world of data and processing represented by the Internet.

The Thing is present, physically in the real world, in your home, your work, 

your car, or worn around your body. This means that it can receive inputs 

from your world and transform those into data which is sent onto the 

Internet for collection and processing. So your chair might collect informa-

tion about how often you sit on it and for how long, while the sewing 

machine reports how much thread it has left and how many stitches it has 

sewn. In subsequent chapters, we talk a lot about “sensors”.

The presence of the Thing also means that it can produce outputs into your 

world with what we call “actuators”. Some of these outputs could be triggered 

by data that has been collected and processed on the Internet. So your chair 

might vibrate to tell you that you have received email.

We could summarize these components in the following appealingly simple 

(though, of course, also simplistic) equation:

An equation for the Internet of Things.

Note that in all the cases we’ve looked at, the form of the object follows the 

function of the Thing: your chair is designed to sit on, the sewing machine to 

sew at, and so on. The fact of also being connected to the Internet and having 

general-purpose computing capabilities doesn’t necessarily have an impact 

on the form of the object at all. (One might argue that current-generation 

smartphones and tablets are in forms optimized for use as general-purpose 

computers, not as portable telephony devices. Certainly, on seeing the number 

of phones with scratched screens, one could ask whether they are designed to 

be easy to hold securely and resistant to drops and the impacts of everyday use.)

See also:

The-internet-of-things

The-flavour-of-internet-of-things