The Internet Of Things...The Best Is Yet To Come

The Age has a great story about the "Internet of Things", or I like to call it Physical World Connection. It has been referred to as "Phase 2" of the Internet also.

Phase 2 will be infinitely larger than Phase 1 and some of these companies will make it possible.

This "internet of things" was the Supranet, where the physical world and the networked world would merge into one, and the internet would permeate our daily lives.

It is starting to happen. Already there are more devices, mobile phones mostly, attached to the internet than there are computers. And, increasingly, "things" are being connected.

As American futurist Roy Amara said, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Things take longer to happen than we expect, but when they do happen it's in a bigger way than we thought possible.

I usually say, the longer it takes for a new technology to get adopted, the bigger impact it usually has.

It is not fully appreciated just how big an effect bar codes have had on the retail industry in the past 20 years. RFID will do even more.