The “Internet of Things” will link you with the
stuff you really care about: your missing pants, a
new shoelace, and the city’s best produce stand.
AFEW MONTHS AGO, I WAS HANGING OUT AT A COOL-SOUNDING CONFER- ence in a gullible part of the country, tweeting to other attendees
about how the session on “How Twitter Is Changing Your Life” was
changing my life, when a thought occurred to me. I can effortlessly
keep ;;/; tabs on every atomic-scale movement of my Facebook friends,
but I still cannot go online to track down the things I really want to
find—like my car keys, my iPod, and my long-missing Lord of the Rings
embroidered-denim jacket.
It turns out I soon will be able to do exactly that, owing to the coming
of something called the Internet of Things. Instead of connecting online
with other people—who very likely are zombie spambots peddling preg-
nancy hormones as diet aids, or zombie humans insisting that the presi-
dent of the United States is an alien—we will link up with the objects we
he was working in Geneva for the
information-technology company Sun
Microsystems, now Oracle, helping
to spec out what was envisioned as a
global network that by now would be
tracking everything manufactured by
anybody. ;e idea was that every prod-
uct coming o; an assembly line, along
with the crate it was shipped in, would
be slapped with a radio frequency
identi;cation (;;;;) tag. Such tags,
costing just a few cents, carry a small,
non-powered chip that, when hit by
radio waves from a nearby “reader,”
converts some of the radio energy
into its own radio pulse in return. ;at
reply identi;es the tag to the reader
and thus to the global-things net-
work the reader is connected to.
David H. Freedman
is a freelance
journalist, author,
and longtime
contributor to
DISCOVER.
You can follow
him on Twitter at
dhfreedman.
own and love. Compared with our current “Internet of Whatever,” this could
be a real step up.
It certainly will be for me. I want all
my possessions to be networked so I
can get in touch with them via a Web
site or my phone. Please, network
my pants so I can go to my pants’
Web site and ;nd out if they’re in my
closet or at the cleaners, or if they
need to be brought to the cleaners.
Network my bike, my leaf rake, my
beer, and everything else so I can get
up-to-the-minute reports on their
location and status.
;en enable all my networked items
to communicate among themselves
so that, for example, my clothes will
self-color-coordinate, my favorite foods
will self-meal-plan and self-create
a shopping list, and my umbrella
and sunglasses will stop getting the
weather wrong. Plus, everything
from my toaster oven to my running
shoes will coordinate with my credit
card to replace themselves when
their “check engine” light comes on.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m
not even slightly ahead of my time. In
fact, I’m struggling to catch up with
scientists like Dominique Guinard,
who has been researching the Internet
of ;ings since ;;;;. ;at’s when
