IoT Day

We first celebrated Internet of Things Day in 2013 when we monitored the temperature of our IoT Day beers using proprietary IoT hardware and software that we largely created ourselves.

Yesterday, on “IoT Day Eve 2024” the world witnessed a rare total solar eclipse, and we monitored illuminance using an interoperable, open source IoT stack.

Back in 2013, we had to set all of that up in anticipation for the event, whereas this year, we didn’t have to set up a thing (pun intended). It was all there, just running invisibly in the background, making sense of the physical world.

And that’s something worth celebrating this IoT Day! Specifically, the fact that computers made sense of the physical dynamics of a very rare event—without the need for human intervention.

Just like how our collective understanding of the Internet transitioned from contrived examples to the expectation that computers can instantly exchange data from anywhere, in the foreseeable future, we may expect that computers can make sense of our physical reality, anywhere and everywhere, thanks to the Internet of Things.

That’s when we’ll know that the Internet of Things really is “a thing”: when we’ve come to expect it and to depend on it such that it becomes invisible in our daily lives—eclipsing the need for an IoT Day!