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The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, is a trend that we've been actively tracking since early 2009. So far a lot of big technology infrastructure and solutions companies have gotten behind the trend, for the simple reason that they see a huge market opportunity. As more and more 'things' go on the Net, it creates more demand for network infrastructure like sensors and routers. Enter the likes of Cisco and Verizon Wireless. Likewise, more technology solutions will be developed to upload and manage data from real world objects. Enter the likes of IBM and HP.

Cisco has designed an infographic that offers a simple example of how Internet of Things will affect you in your everyday life. It also states that by 2020, there will be 50 billion 'things' connected to the Internet - everything from your body, car, alarm clock and even cows.

Machine to machine (M2M) communication, from automobile monitoring systems to card-swiping dongles to Web-connected home appliances, something many people have been excited about for years, is finally hitting mainstream markets in a big way. But connected devices could be surpassed in importance by passive tracking of connected objects, due to cost and scaling constraints.

Mark Roberti, founding editor of the publication RFID Journal, writes in an editorial this month that while M2M communication has great potential, the "real value" for sensor technology lies in machine-to-object communication. The costs associated with requiring machine devices to actively transmit data about their status back to another machine (power, broadcast, etc.) will likely limit the deployment of that type of communication to contexts where fluctuations in data are extremely valuable in-and-of themselves. Using low-cost transponders to passively monitor changes in the status of objects will become far more common and important, Roberti argues.

One of the primary ideas behind IBM's Smarter Planet concept is a web of sensors all over the planet, leading to a data explosion. But what if that web of sensors was more directly under the public's control? Strategic forecast consultant Chris Arkenberg hits on an interesting idea in a recent blog post. He muses on the idea of using mobile phones for grid computing, a la SETI@home, to create massive distributed supercomputers for processing all of this data. "Consider the processing power latent across a city of 20 million mobile subscribers, such as Tokyo," he writes.

Arkenberg takes the idea further by suggesting that sensors could be built into mobile phones that could monitor air quality or act as a sort of distributed surveillance system. The possibilities are endless. "Consider what could be done with an API for addressing clusters of mobile sensors," he writes.

Wall placards, museum docents and audio tours have all become essential technologies for many peoples' engagement with our collective culture as represented in the world's fine art.

Imagine what could happen if your enjoyment of art was augmented further by the kinds of social technologies that you already use on the internet. Thousands of visitors to the STRP art festival in Eindhoven, Holland this Fall got to experience exactly that. The festival's creative integration of its existing art exhibits with Twitter, Facebook, a recommendation engine, a print-on-demand service, tag clouds and RFID chips might represent the kind of experience that art lovers everywhere may be able to enjoy elsewhere soon. If life imitates art, such technologies could bust out of the museums and enter into the rest of our cities sooner than we think.

As the Internet of Things slowly becomes a commercial reality, led by industries such as food and logistics, the underlying technologies (RFID, sensors, QR codes and more) become less important than what is done with the data. As Bo Begole, Principal Scientist and Manager of Ubiquitous Computing at PARC, put it to me recently: "the algorithms are more interesting now than the sensors."

Begole's group at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox) puts more emphasis nowadays on technologies such as predictive analytics, context engines and "Behavioral Ware". It's much more about the software, than the sensors.

The Internet of Things, when objects in the real world are connected to the Internet, is adding a whole lot more data to the Web. The fascinating question is how that data will be used, by existing businesses and new startups yet to emerge. Take the food industry for example. With sensors, QR codes and RFID tags on food shipments, suppliers will be able to monitor and optimize the delivery of food from the place of production to its place of consumption. It's an open invitation for disruptive food businesses to utilize that data for competitive advantage.

Of course, consumers stand to gain too. Data from the food supply chain will enable consumers to more easily judge food quality.

Layar has had a busy week. The augmented reality software makers recently announced the inclusion of Skyhook Wireless' location SDK, a new local search feature called "Nearby" and a free embeddable AR viewer called "Layar Player" for iPhone apps. All the while, however, the company also showed off an experimental augmented reality technology called "sensor fusion" at Google Zeitgeist. The video below of the demo is pretty incredible, and could be beginning of a new generation of augmented reality.

The Internet of Things took a step closer to mainstream adoption today with the announcement of Pachube's first enterprise offering. Pachube (pronounced "patch bay") shares real-time sensor data and enables users to analyze data or trigger actions in a variety of ways through its SaaS. For example, temperature sensors could trigger an alarm if a temperature gets too high or low in your server room. See our coverage of Pachube's applications for more use cases.

Have you ever wanted to walk into a building and be automatically checked into Foursquare, without any action on your part? That's the promise of an intriguing DIY project from electronic engineering hobbyist, Casey Halverson. He has come up with a low-cost solution that involves a Nike+ sensor, a $25 breakout board and a Web service called Stumble.to that watches for electronic devices, then automatically checks you into your favorite places via Foursquare and other location-based social networking services.

One of the emerging trends of 2010 has been the Internet of Things, a term for when real-world objects get connected to the Internet. One of the key aspects of this trend is the data explosion that will occur when millions of objects send data to the cloud - mostly via very small sensors. Just as the 'web 2.0' era led to platforms for user-generated and 'social' content (think Facebook, Twitter, Google's OpenSocial), the Internet of Things era will lead to platforms for sensor data.

It's still very early in this era and the platforms we'll profile here are at this point more about experimentation than commercialization.