Imagining internet of things

We barge into a pizza shop. My phone updates  my location in my social network channel. Pizza shop captures the same information and passes this along with my profile information to the CRM system and it flashes in the Point of Sale. And before i could talk to the pizza  man, he greets me by my first name and makes me an delicious offer of a sizzling pizza along with some cookies based on what i had ordered  earlier. And some discount options  are offered which becomes difficult for me to deny. That is the internet of things for me.

As per the definition at Wikipedia, it is  "A world where physical objects are seamlessly integrated into the information network, and where the physical objects can become active participants in business processes. Services are available to interact with these 'smart objects' over the Internet, query and change their state and any information associated with them, taking into account security and privacy issues"

Efforts are being made to standardize the protocols for efficiency. "Having a universally accepted and adopted M2M protocol will help get new devices and systems to market faster, since they often are built using many variations of hardware and software platforms, device types, and networks,  "

An interesting info graphic from CISCO suggests that in 2008, number of machines connected to the internet has already exceeded the number of people on earth.

There are plenty of resources available over internet but would recommend that you use this link as an starting point. The picture shows the evolution and project growth of Internet of Things