WTF is... Weightless?

Says the toaster: "Whoops, I over did that"

Replies the fire alarm: "Okay, I'll hold on for a minute... can you ask the TV to bring this to the attention of the meatbag?"

Lots of people would happily pay money to be free of that nagging thought "I am sure I turned off the gas hob?", as they are their way to the train station.

Another would be a telephone that turns down your TV or stereo when a call comes in (Bang and Olufsen do this already).

I can imagine many uses that this 'internet of things' will be put to have already been pioneered in making kit for disabled people (blinking lights to alert deaf people to their doorbell, for example)

Vibrating fork? Nah. FILFs.

Cart before horse?

It's an interesting idea but - and I may be being thick here - this is still a method for transmission and not a new protocol, right? So until IPv6 is actually used in anger, there are going to be no addresses for the cooker or any other device to use anyway.

Re "A wireless car, for example, becomes useless if it moves beyond range of a base-station."

Does it?

Since this is supposed to be Machine to Machine, not Machine to base station, the implementation should surely be that which maintains its usefulness so long as the two *machines* that wish to communicate are in range of each other.

All of which makes perfect sense. Only the particular traffic light I'm approaching (and maybe the next one down the road) needs to know that I'm approaching and in which direction I'm heading. That's enough tor it to optimise the junction priorites (no more long green lights to the only route that doesn't have any traffic) and tell my car it should slow down to conserve fuel, so that it doesn't reach the junction before it turns green. And traffic lights are rarely so far apart that they can't pass on messages about jams further along my route and suggest a better route.

What's that I hear? Even though its supposedly M2M, it has to be designed to go via a base station so that some mega corporation can *charge* for the service?

Does the..

Fridge, other appliance, clean itself?

It'll all be OK when

My lawnmower can tell my Microwave to wake me up because the neighbour's pretty daughter is sunbathing topless again.....

Eh? Oh... just me then!

M2M and IoT proponents talk not only of driverless cars and smart cities, but

Sure, like they talked of how records, telephones, movies, television, and the internet would revolutionize education.

Promoters and salesmen always talk of how technology will fix our problems, but our problems are not technological.

Deja-vu all over again

My first job 25years ago was at a Philips spinout that was going to connect all your household appliances (or at least all the Philips ones) with a network that ran over mains wiring.

After all the bold visions of your washing machine talking to your cooker to find out what you had spilled on younr shirt, the only non-laughable application anybody could come up with was having everything sync its clock correctly ever spring/autumn

I can predict one application - home meters

electricity, water etc. That would be useful, although not necessarily welcome.

The IoT is inevitable

There comes a time where the economies of scale make it cheaper to build network aware devices entirely rather than have two production lines producing smart or dumb devices.

Provided we do things sensibly, we should already be able to start the process of switching to smart devices. Some devices, such controllers for heating, lighting, etc should be near or beyond the point where the savings they create pay for the devices. That is, the net operating cost, including accounting for amortization of capital cost of the smart devices will be less than the net operating cost of dumb ones.