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ShaythePanTransMan The reason why I call it a marketing term, is that it's an "umbrella", covering a whole bunch of stuff, to create the Internet of Things ecosystem. IoT has its origins in UpNP (Universal Plug and Play), an originally Microsoft effort, that the entire industry was recruited to participate in.
At the very core of IoT, is a concept called end point description. This would be something like:
I am a printer
I am an inkjet printer
I can handle 8.5x11 paper size
I have 4 color cartridges
My color cartridges can give me capacity level
I can produce 3 pages per minute
I can connect through a USB port
I can connect through a WiFi connection
My model is....
My serial number is....
Here's where you can download my Windows 10 driver:......
etc.
This is what allows Plug and Play to take place, where you plug something into your computer, phone, etc. and setup magically happens.
If you refrigerator is IoT enabled, it means it is capable of identifying itself, if it's a passive device, or communicate with other devices, by asking them to identify themselves, if it's an active device.
The most obvious use of IoT for a fridge, in a home, is maintenance, and in some not too distant future, next to machine vision, identify everything that goes in and out of a fridge. Let's say this is not a home application, and you run a chain of restaurants, and you have a contract with a company to service these fridges. A single person, at the company's headquarters in St Louis, is notified of a problem, with a fridge, at one of the restaurants, in San Mateo, California.
This is just a simple example. The power of IoT, is when all things can be discovered, and a higher level application can make use of it.
Let's say you walk into a conference room, and you would like to deliver a presentation. The room already has an LCD screen in it. The LCD screen is WiFi access point, to allow WiFi enabled devices to connect to it.
Your presentation is on the cloud somewhere.
You have a smart Phone.
The application, using the standardized IoT protocols, running on your phone, can discover everything in the room, ask for the presentation data, connect to the LCD screen in the room, and using either voice commands, or the phone app itself, allow you to deliver the presentation, using nothing but your phone.
In a future scenario, you will not need the phone. You will walk into the room, look into an IoT enabled camera, get identified, through biometrics, and use a passthrough, to get your data from your cloud, and display it to the LCD screen in the room.
This is how the cable company, for instance, manages your cable box, in your home, from an outsourcing office in India.
Hope this helps.
