In this 25th anniversary year of the Internet, the World Wide Web connects more than two out of five individuals globally. Tim Berners-Lee’s idea to make the internet a universal medium of connectivity allowing people to share anything on the web has snowballed into a concept of connected everything. The early concept of interconnected computing first came into limelight in the year 1980 when programmers at the Carnegie Melon University connected a Coke machine to the internet. This allowed them to evaluate the possibility of cold drink’s availability, when they made a trip to the machine. Two decades later, in 1999, Kevin Ashton, co-founder and executive director of the Auto-ID Center, while making a presentation to Proctor & Gamble on the possibility of connecting company’s RFID technology to the internet, named this phenomenon as “Internet of Things (IoT).”
The evolution of internet to interconnect the physical world is revolutionizing the way we explore, observe, understand, and interact with our surroundings, on a daily basis. With the expected growth in the number of connected devices from 9 billion in 2012 to more than 50 billion in 2020, IoT presents an unprecedented business opportunity for global economic value of .9 trillion, according to Gartner. The penetration of connected device will increase from 0.6 percent in 2012 to 2.7 percent by 2020.