Currently, the concept “Internet of Things” is becoming hotter and hotter.

The concept refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environment, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time.
In short, everything is interconnected (cnn.com).

This subject was discussed by the IBM Cloud Computing Center Executive Ms.
Jinzy Zhu and Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization (SMCEI) Director General He Shouchang during our on-going “Training Course on IT Applications for Developing Countries” here in Shanghai, China.

What is Internet of Things?

The concept is attributed to the original Auto-ID Center, founded in 1999 and based at the time in MIT.

IoT is the combination of the physical and virtual worlds to drive improvements and benefits.
To simply declare, the physical things are embedded with tiny sensors, and these things can connect with each other by wireless or wired to create benefit from process change or data analysis.
The IoT is simply defined as the data flowing between things by IBM. The IoT is a part to SmarterPlanet initiative, everything is connected through to IoT.

There are other cool marketing name for it, called Cloud of Devices, Web of Things. But it can be best described by this scenario: the child is playing in the living room, the air conditioning will regularly change the wind direction to adapt the child when getting the position of the child from a camera which is monitoring the living room. When there are dangerous situation to child, parent can know from all the information from the central system based on the sensors. The devices are connected to each other to provide services of many application to human. In the broadest definition, IoT represents real world objects being connected and accessed through the cloud. Real world objects include all the usual suspects like cellular phones, laptop computers, pagers. It also includes HVAC systems, refrigerators, televisions, medical devices, sensors and the list goes on and on.

In China, IoT becomes China’s national strategy after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited to Wuxi last August, 2009. Now, China is playing great attention to the development of IoT and many national organizations have been established. All agree that IoT will be the next generation technology.

There are 11 fields, which the Chinese government will invest.
One field is about Intelligence Medical. This concept is very similar to Health 2.0. Because of the lack of informatization in most of hospitals in China. To implement the Intelligence Medical, it need times. But I believe that there is a huge market size for health 2.0 in China.

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