And Now I'm a Thing
Welcome
I successfully avoided buying an Apple Watch, but I've jumped headlong into the fitness band craze with a Withings Activité Steel watch, iOS companion app, and its Connected Blood Pressure Monitor. Every time I walk, I wear the watch. I swing my left arm purposefully during the walk to register each step so that I can track my 10,000 steps per day progress.
I've enabled Find My iPhone on my Apple iPhone 5 so that I can locate my phone if I misplace it and so that my family can locate me should anything happen to me on the road. When I participate in 10K and in quarter marathon races, I wear an RFID sensor on my chest that marks the time I cross the Start and the Finish lines. My Chrome browser tracks my Internet breadcrumbs and my cookies as I go in search of information and new opportunities. I'm tracked during my gym workouts – reps, weight, and the number of times I show up during a month. I'm a number generator. I'm a demographic. And I'm an endpoint. But, at the most empirical level, I'm a thing.
Ever since I first heard the term, "Internet of Things," in late 2013 I realized that a true revolution was about to happen. You see, things – not the Internet of Things, but just things – change in two ways in the IT world: evolution and revolution. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of those rare revolutionary changes that happens right before our eyes. And it happens so quickly that we have a difficult time pinning down when the revolution started and when the evolution of the technology began. For the early enlightened, the IoT revolution began back in 1999 when Kevin Ashton first used the term "Internet of Things" in public. For the rest of us, the revolution began in 2013. The zeitgeist must have been in a 14-year slump.
The zeitgeist has swept me along into the world of analytics but not with a bang or with a whimper. It was a matter of evolution. Participating in social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook,
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