With the Internet of Things gaining in media presence, big corporations realise that there’s something going on that they have no real stake in yet. And they come out rushing. Mostly, that’s in conjunction with creating a new term for that thing that nobody has a solid definition of, so they can own the space. Given that, here’s a quick, tongue-in-cheek primer of what corporations mean when they rebrand the Internet of Things:
- The Industrial Internet (GE):
- We’re talking about the Internet of really big Things
- The Internet of Everything (Cisco):
- If everything has an address, it’s like the Internet, but with everything on it
- Industry 4.0 (Siemens):
- The Internet is like steam – in that we’re thinking about how it affects our machines.
- Internet of Customers (Salesforce):
- It’s really interesting how your warranty claim is contradicted by your usage pattern.
- M-2-M:
- We’re putting our SCADA Systems online.
- Social Web of Things (Ericsson):
- Your toaster wants to be your friend!
- Embedded Internet (Intel):
- Yay, Microchips Everywhere!
- Hyperconnectivity (WEF):
- We hear this internet thing is really good at what we used to be good at.
- Networked Matter (IFTF):
- Because how are we going to act on the world if our brains are uploaded to machines after the singularity?
- Web of Things (W3C):
- There’s always room for one more standard.
- Web Squared (O’Reilly):
- Your Information Shadow isn’t restricted to Web 2.0 anymore.
- The internet of nature (ENEVE):
- Those trees don’t hug themselves.
- Industrial Internet of Things (Echelon):
- Like the Industrial Internet but with more Internet and more Things, presumably.
- IOx (Cisco):
- An intermediary enablement framework layer to leverage smart BYOI and BYOA on the network edge. Exactly.
I hope this clears things up. Oh, and if you come across more creative new names for IoT, please do let me know!