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The Birth of Internet of Things

Menno van Doorn
September 06, 2013

Fourteen years after “Internet of Things” was coined there’s independent evidence about how widespread it has become. I see it as one of the data points to underpin our argument that there is a momentum, a turning point, and that the Internet of Things is speeding up. Our first report on this research topic is forthcoming “Things: Internet of Business opportunities”. The Internet of Things is now an official phrase. That’s the data point. Last week The Oxford Online Dictionary has added a few new words to its Bible of words, and “Internet of Things” is one of them. 1 Definition of Internet of Things noun a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data :if one thing can prevent the Internet of things from transforming the way we live and work, it will be a breakdown in security New words, senses, and phrases are added to Oxford Dictionaries Online when they have gathered enough independent evidence from a range of sources to be confident that they have widespread currency in English. Each month, Oxford Dictionaries Online adds about 150 million words to their corpus database of English usage examples collected from sources around the world. They use this database to track and verify new and emerging words and senses on a daily basis. On average, they add approximately 1,000 new entries to Oxford Dictionaries Online every year. By the way, some other interesting words made it to the dictionary too, like phablet (a smartphone having a screen which is intermediate in size between that of a typical smartphone and a tablet computer) and digital detox (a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones or computers, regarded as an opportunity to reduce stress or focus on social interaction in the physical world) We might need more of that now that the internet of things becomes more pervasive.

About the author

Director and Trend Analyst VINT | Netherlands
Menno is Director of the Sogeti Research Institute for the Analysis of New Technology (VINT). He mixes personal life experiences with the findings of the 19 years of research done at the VINT Research Institute. Menno has co-authored many books on the impact of new technology on business and society.

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