ReadWriteWeb

Internet of Things (IoT) is a term for when everyday ordinary objects are connected to the Internet via microchips. The technologies include sensors, RFID and smartphone standards like NFC. The use cases are still evolving, but over 2010 we saw large organizations like HP and IBM build out impressive platforms for the Internet of Things. We also saw companies as diverse as Nike and Pachube enjoying success with consumer applications based on these technologies.

Here are our picks for the top 10 Internet of Things developments of 2010. On Page 1 of this post we detail 5 large scale developments (3 specific trends and 2 IoT platforms). On Page 2, we select the 5 best consumer products for IoT. These include a product that connects your car to the Internet, an internet-connected shoe and a self-described "Cisco for small things."

This month's online struggles between Wikileaks supporters participating in the ephemeral group called Anonymous and international corporations like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal, who have stopped allowing their customers to donate money to Wikileaks, have brought electronic disruptions like Distributed Denials of Service (DDOS) to the forefront of peoples' minds all over the world.

DDOS attacks happen daily, but these politically motivated instances are easy to imagine becoming more common in the future. What happens, though, when the network of the future is made up not just of websites to block, but infrastructure like power grids and traffic management systems? Smart grid and Internet of Things networks of the future would be a very different context in which to consider actions like Anonymous' online mischief making.

IBM and the City of Dubuque, Iowa have teamed up to launch the Smarter Sustainable Dubuque Water Pilot Study. This project involves the installation of smart water meters, that with the help of volunteer citizens, will allow the city to collect and analyze data about water consumption trends and patterns. The goal of the study is to demonstrate how informed citizens can help make a city sustainable by encouraging behavioral changes that will result in conservation, cost reduction, and leak repair.

"What our volunteer households are accomplishing is the first step to understanding waste and ultimately the conservation of valuable resources to sustain life quality for generations to come, " says Dubuque Mayor Roy D. Buol.

Imagine a small chip you could plug into any device in your home that would enable it to communicate with your web-based electricity and device management dashboard. Or it could be trained to simply turn the device off at times of day when electricity was particularly expensive.

Such is the vision of the USNAP consortium, a group of companies including GEand Google that seeks to create a standard for the meter-to-device in-home monitoring stage of the promised smart grid. ("Enabling the device ecosystem for the smart grid," is the group's tagline.) USNAP released this week a proposed 2.0 standard spec for small modules that can be connected to devices to render them individually instrumented - measurable and manipulable as discrete sources of data. Where there is plug-and-play data, there is a platform for online innovation.