This Needs To Be Invented Before the Internet Of Things Can Take Off

Many enabling technologies have arrived which will make the internet of things ubiquitous, and, thanks to smartphones, the public is finally ready to accept that it will become impossible to escape from the Internet’s all-seeing eye. But a critical piece of the internet of things puzzle remains to be solved.

What engineers lack is a universal glue to bind all the “things” in the internet of things to each other and to the cloud. A lack of standards means most devices on the internet of things are going to use existing methods of connection -- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the like -- to connect to one another, and efforts like ioBridge’s Thingspeak are a first step to creating pools of data recorded from our things that can be shared by all our other things. But eventually, something like HTML, the language of the web, will be required to make the internet of things realize its potential. “Interoperability is critical,” says Bell. “Pretty soon this default method of using bluetooth is going to break down.” One thing standards bodies and companies wishing to influence them will contend with could be regulators. Already, the US Federal Trade Commission is taking an interest in what kind of data companies are gathering through the internet of things and what they’re doing with it. Aside from privacy, one reason regulators are poking around is that the security implications of the internet of things are truly frightening. Once our homes, cities and bodies are connected, hackers will be able to do a lot more than steal our financial data and shut down our online identities -- they’ll have the power to reach through cyberspace and hack our physical world.