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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

I must admit I'm very confused by the "Internet of Things". It seems largely to be a ploy by big data and cloud infrastructure types to hype investment in their sectors to absorb information from dumb yet internet connected sensors, whereas what it should be is smart end devices, yet conspicuously there isn't much in the way of development in the edge devices, while the cloud services are all ready and waiting, to do . . . what exactly?

With the NSA stuff having tarnished the word "cloud" maybe the marketers are hoping Internet of Things will divert attention away from the fact that they're suggesting even more invasion of privacy.

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From my view, it's the chipmakers looking at the high-end of the market getting locked up by Apple, Samsung, and the like.

These chipmakers need the growth, but the low-end chips are too cheap to make the margins add anything substantial. So, hey!, let's see if we can get the low-end chips into EVERYTHING and sort it out later.

There are obviously industrial and commercial applications aplenty for this, but does every lightbulb in your house need to be networked?

You are as confused as I (still am) about the cloud :-). It's a cheap, stupid marketing ploy that honestly doesn't mean anything. Originally, it may have referred to IP(v6)-enabled small home automation devices, like smart light dimmers, distributed sensor-driven HVAC systems and the like, with obvious advantages. Half of the things marketed under the IoT mantra are too expensive and have way too much computational power to be of any use in this context.

It is a nebulous concept but I believe it is a combination of smart end user devices and data gathering sensors... obviously in the IT world any new (relatively speaking) concept gets hijack for marketing by vendors.

Cheap low power chips that could be embedded in everything from your clothes to your pills I believe is what Intel is aiming at.

Yeah. Of course, what they're actually achieving is - predictably - rather less low power than existing embedded ARM solutions. If you want a good laugh take a look at the spec page for Quark sometime.

Don't forget about the "Quantified Self" marketing push, and of course every device syncs only to your mobile device via bluetooth. No PC required (or supported), because then you might not let us harvest all your data invisibly through our app!

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