Internet of Things encompasses more than just smart devices within homes. You have given some great examples of connected, smart devices that were once disconnected from IT and networks.
IoT brings new data into the world that can be leveraged for the purposes of automation, analytics and efficiency.
The Internet is changing because of IoT. There is greater availability of relevant data because of IoT. You can check your local weather conditions at
Weather Underground which leverages the data provided by over 250,000 personal weather stations on people's homes and businesses around the world. In Singapore you can plan your outdoor activity during Haze periods based on
air pollutant forecasts built from a network of country-wide air monitoring sensors.
It's April 2021, and your example scenario is almost complete:
Philips Hue and
LIFX are two of many light vendors providing connected lighting which can be automated based on movement and presence.
Nest and
Ecobee develop smart thermostats that learn your climate preferences and work to efficiently manage the temperature.
Samsung make fridges which have internal cameras allowing you to view what's inside from your phone. They also can send a shopping list created on the fridge's touch screen to your mobile device.
There are emerging standards for inter-device communication - see
Thread - but IoT has a head start and building new standards in to old devices is hard, if not impossible. Further more there is development in orchestration platforms which allow the consumption of IoT data and control of devices which allow clever interactions between devices that do not inherently communicate with each other. For the home environment
Home Assistant and
openHab are great examples of such platforms. At the industrial and global end of the scale there is even more choice - because the addressable market size and maturity is much more attractive - with platforms such as Azure IoT, IBM Watson IoT and Siemens Mindsphere. Gartner has brought out a
Magic Quadrant for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Platforms. 
Original Message:
Sent: Apr 26, 2021 07:28 PM
From: Twinkel Khan
Subject: What is the Internet of Things (IoT) ? How is it going to change the way we use the Internet ?
The internet of things is a REALLY bad name for a very simple comcept.
The idea is that there are lots of things in our homes that could benefit from being a little smarter. A coffee pot that is linked to my alarm clock so my coffee is always ready when I wake up (for example). Currently we can put a timer into a coffee pot but we can't make it talk to the other things in the house.
The internet of things is the process of putting a computer processor and a wi-fi connection into these kinds of everyday items so that we can use computer programing to control those devices. This allows us to create solutions where the devices communicate and work together.
It's not limited to coffee pots and alarm clocks. It's intended to allow all the devices in your home to work together to automate things and make your life easier.
Automatic lights, thermostats that know when you are home or away, a fridge and cupboards that keep an inventory of all the items in it. Combine those things and you get an alert just as you're leaving work with an updated shopping list. Your home knows you are going shopping so it delays turning the heat up until you leave from the grocery store. When you finally make it home the house it warm and the lights are on and waiting for you.
We're a long way from that place. The most difficult part is that all these little things need to talk to one another. So most of the current news in the IOT world has to do with standards and allowing devices to connect and speak the same language.
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Twinkel Khan
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