But first my app will check my office calendar, the car’s servicing schedule, the fridge reminders, my medication schedule, your healthy dietary requirements, the restaurant pricing guide, your schedule, the weather and Reuters alerts. You won’t have to lift a finger, except to pick up the knife and fork. There isn’t an app for that, yet.

Now that there are more than 75 billion devices connected to the cloud (we don’t call it the web anymore), it’s useful to have an app that understands all your personal preferences and top priorities. Of course, these gadgets, devices and appliances can now communicate with each other directly. We used to call it the internet of things, because every device needed its own web address, but that’s transparently managed by the cloud these days.

Who remembers the ‘browser wars’, when you needed a special program to access the internet, and it made a difference which one you used? That seems quite quaint and old fashioned, now that the empty food container tells the recycling bin where to stash it, while alerting the collection service. Some devices need interactive apps, but many things just connect to the cloud and identify themselves, and the cloud does the rest.

So who runs the cloud? We all do; manufacturers, retailers, knowledge workers and plain old consumers. By participating in information and physical exchange, we all contribute to the global system for managing our data, and our things, in a way that makes life easier and adds value. Welcome to the ‘cloud of stuff’. Isn’t it great?

ANALYSIS >> SYNTHESIS: How this scenario came to be

The Internet of Things

This YouTube video by IBMSocialMedia provides a concise introduction to this concept.