Why you should care about the Internet of Things?

Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine to Machine (M2M) is perhaps the hottest talk of town these days. It's a revolution of sorts that's gradually building up in the background, and has already started impacting our daily lives. Several smart devices were showcased at CES this year, which are a clear indicator of the times to come.
The concept of IoT is nothing new. In fact, a pre-cursor to the buzzword were RFID tags--widely used for warehouse management, attendance systems, bar code replacement in retail counters, asset tracking, and much more. With the IoT, that concept has taken a whole new meaning, wherein intelligence is being built into just about every object you can imagine, at home, in office, or any industry.
At home, how about having a toothbrush that tracks your brushing habits and gives you an analyses of whether you've brushing properly or not? Or a device that monitors your pet's activity? Or a device that attaches to your bed to track how long you slept, monitors your heart beat, breathing rhythm, and so on?
In office, how about wireless sensor tags that can be used to monitor and alert about temperature variations, movement, lost signal, etc to your smartphone?
Similarly, there's a whole range of devices that can impact just about every industry out there, be it healthcare, logistics, transportation, energy, education, hospitality, manufacturing, and so on.
It's not surprising then that according to Gartner, the number of IoT connected devices will reach 26 billion by 2020.
The ingredients for enabling IoT are already available, and have been around for many years. Smartphones for instance, are a key ingredient, for a lot of smart devices these days---whether you want to use it as a remote control for your home theatre system or your microwave oven. With their rich platforms, oodles of compute power, Internet connectivity, and all sorts of other connectivity options like NFC, Bluetooth, USB, etc, smartphones are the swiss army knife of the digitally connected world.
Cloud computing is perhaps another enabler of IoT, which provides the perfect medium for different devices to be integrated with each other. The telecom network is a third medium, which will allows SMS based communication with devices. Another key ingredient is your own internal network, which has to be optimized to handle the load of so many devices.
IoT may seem trivial at the moment, but then so did smartphones and tablets when they initially entered the market. Today, every organization is scrambling to understand how to deal with this onslaught that has completely re-defined the IT infrastructure.
With IoT, more devices will become smart and enter the network. Smart watches for instances, have only begun to make an entry. Pretty soon, you'll have smart wearable devices all over the place, and then smart objects will enter the fray.
Things in the digital world are happening much more rapidly than the industrial revolution of the past. It's therefore time to gear up for IoT now, so that you can use it to your advantage when it's all over the place.