My POV:  In the Internet of Things (IoT), my dishwasher can be shut off remotely, I can check the temperature of my house from my office, and my doctor can get my body temperature from my bed. Yet none of these objects can currently have a dialogue with each other.

What bothers me now about all these mobile apps that cannot connect to each other also bothers me about ‘thing’ connectivity and interoperability.   You might ask why I want my toaster to talk to my refrigerator, but if I do not have bread, toast is not an option from breakfast.  Perhaps a silly example, but if we go to the example of data coming in from the different temperature monitors, and if this data cannot be correlated to a patient and a medical condition, and then acted upon without human intervention, then why gather the data?  Why have the object send the data (in heterogeneous standards from different types of beds) if it cannot be responded to in an automated fashion?

Seriously, we are becoming more disjointed in our data proliferation where we are generating more and more data, but having fewer dialogues.  Connectivity and interoperability are not just business phrases, but part of the way business processes succeed. Integration and efficiency are functions of data interaction, not data backlog.  We want information and knowledge, not just piles of data streams that cannot interact.

I know there are efforts to create standards around the internet of objects, but fear that brands and industries will slow, not speed up, the pace of these standards.   The AllSeen Alliance (with AllJoyn), the ITU (IoT-GSI), and the IEEE (Open Stand) are all working on standards basics, but  I suspect the heavy hitters per industry will be the ones really setting the pace.   I just hope we learned something from the evolution of IETF standards making and do not make the same errors again.