What is IoT ?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

Where is IoT?

IOT It’s everywhere 

Smart Home: The smart home is likely the most popular IoT application at the moment because it is the one that is most affordable and readily available to consumers. From the Amazon Echo to the Nest Thermostat, there are hundreds of products on the market that users can control with their voices to make their lives more connected than ever.

Wearables: Wearables have experienced a explosive demand in markets all over the world. Companies like Google, Samsung have invested heavily in building such devices. But, how do they work? 
Wearable devices are installed with sensors and softwares which collect data and information about the users. This data is later pre-processed to extract essential insights about user.

These devices broadly cover fitness, health and entertainment requirements. The pre-requisite from internet of things technology for wearable applications is to be highly energy efficient or ultra-low power and small sized.

Connected Car: These vehicles are equipped with Internet access and can share that access with others, just like connecting to a wireless network in a home or office. More vehicles are starting to come equipped with this functionality, so prepare to see more apps included in future cars.

Industrial Internet:Industrial Internet is the new buzz in the industrial sector, also termed as Industrial Internet of Things ( IIoT ). It is empowering industrial engineering with sensors, software and big data analytics to create brilliant machines.

Smart Cities: The IoT has the potential to transform entire cities by solving real problems citizens face each day. With the proper connections and data, the Internet of Things can solve traffic congestion issues and reduce noise, crime, and pollution.

IoT in agriculture:With the continous increase in world’s population, demand for food supply is extremely raised. Governments are helping farmers to use advanced  techniques and research to increase food production. Smart farming is one of the fastest growing field in IoT.

Energy Engagement: Power grids of the future will not only be smart enough but also highly reliable. Smart grid concept is becoming very popular all over world.

The basic idea behind the smart grids is to collect data in an automated fashion and analyze the behavior or electricity consumers and suppliers for improving efficiency as well as economics of electricity use.

The Smart Internet of things School

The IoT Market:
As of 2013, 9.1 billion IoT units
Expected to grow to 28.1 billion IoT devices by 2020

Revenue growth from $1.9 trillion in 2013 to $7.1 trillion in 2020
Why be concerned about IoT?
It’s just another computer, right?
-All of the same issues we have with access control, vulnerability management, patching,
monitoring, etc.
-Imagine your network with 1,000,000 more devices
-Any compromised device is a foothold on the network
Attacking IoT:
Default, weak, and hardcoded credentials
Difficult to update firmware and OS
Lack of vendor support for repairing vulnerabilities
Vulnerable web interfaces (SQL injection, XSS)
Coding errors (buffer overflow)
Clear text protocols and unnecessary open ports DoS / DDoS

Physical theft and tampering

The Future:

Software:

RIOT OS: is an operating system for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It is based on a microkernel and designed for: energy efficiency, hardware independent development, a high degree of modularity.

Thingsquare Mist: brings resilient wireless mesh networking and true Internet-connectivity to the Internet of Things. The Thingsquare Mist open source firmware is exceptionally lightweight, battle-proven, and works with multiple microcontrollers with a range of radios.

Sapphire os: is a full stack, open source, low power wireless platform from the hardware pin up to the web and beyond. Sapphire combines flexible low cost hardware, a lightweight but powerful embedded operating system, and network connectivity tools to help you connect anything to everything.

Nimbits: is a collection of software for recording time series data to the cloud.

When your systems send new numeric, json, or xml data into a Nimbits Data Point using the REST web services, new values can trigger cascading calculations, alerts, statistics and more.

Use Nimbits Server as a backend to your applications, generating charts and data visualisations with javascript using the public cloud, or download and build your own infrastructure.

ThingSpeak: is an open source “Internet of Things” application and API to store and retrieve data from things using HTTP over the Internet or via a Local Area Network. With ThingSpeak, you can create sensor logging applications, location tracking applications, and a social network of things with status updates.

All joyn: An open source project which provides a universal software framework and core set of system services that enable interoperability among connected products and software applications across manufacturers to create dynamic proximal networks so that products – for the home, automotive and the enterprise – can interact in new, exciting and useful ways that will engage and delight users.

openAlerts: is free, open source software to remotely monitor and control sensors over IP networks. With openAlerts you can configure, control and monitor sensors from a web browser, receive e-mail and text message alerts, and trigger control commands based on sensor conditions.

The IoT Toolkit: is an Open Source project to develop a set of tools for building multi-protocol Internet of Things Gateways and Service gateways that enable horizontal co-operation between multiple different protocols and  cloud services. The project consists of the Smart Object API, gateway service, and related tools.