The age of the Internet of Things is upon us
Thanks to a few technologies that have become, coincidentally, cheap, tiny, and widespread at about the same time, you are now able to bolt on sensors, computers, and communications to houses, cars, shoes, and anything else you can dream up.
As with the rise in web traffic, the rise in "thing" traffic will create a burden on infrastructure and development. The past 10 years have seen the management of cloud-scale hosting and applications improve to cope with traffic, and this will be mirrored in the next 10 years as we see more than 10 times that level of traffic added to already busy servers and sys admins.
These levels of growth always sound absurd when peddled by analysts. Cisco predicts 50 billion devices by 2020 compared with 12.5 billion in 2012. To get some intuition about this number, consider the devices per capita rather than the total number. In 2010, we had 1.84 devices per person, which is easy to see: At the moment, you have a phone, maybe a couple of tablets, a laptop, and perhaps a desktop computer. That's five things if you're geeky, so the global average being 1.84 makes intuitive sense.
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