Our industry is a slave to buzzwords. Remember 4GL? CASE? Bluetooth everywhere? I suppose the first step toward seeing if any product or standard has legs is to throw around some buzzwords and watch the stock ticker. As designers, you and I know that most of them make it no farther than a few banner ads and magazine inserts.

The latest buzzword is IoT, Internet of Things. This encompasses any embedded device connected to the Internet. We are told that everything 20 years hence will be connected. Everything. Washing machines. Refrigerators. Pill bottles. Toilet paper over IP (TPoIP). You get the picture.

Well, send a tweet to the folks in marketing: IoT is actually old news. I’ve been designing communicating embedded devices for decades. No, they have not had the opportunity to “tweet” or “text” until the last ten years, but they have been doing serious work, and delivering serious, profitable benefits.

Some aspects are new, such as the need for security tools to fill the gaping holes in open source code in 10 billion devices. But the basic idea is old, and I have the circuit board layouts and source code to prove it.

If you need an IoT device designed, call us. We’ve been thinking that way for literally decades. And that’s no TPoIP.