According to Wikipedia, the term Internet of Things was initially proposed by Kevin Ashton in 2009.  In less than five years, Internet of Things (IoT) becomes the hottest trends in the worldwide technology market.

Is IoT a marketing hype?  If it’s a marketing hype, it would have faded away in a short time.  In fact, IoT is not likely to fade away anytime soon.  In contrary, almost every key technology company in the world adopted an IoT business strategy.

As of 2013, IoT is a trend with real business opportunities, triggered new innovation, new technology and new approach to solve business problems more efficiently.

The IoT trend encompasses multiple markets, broad range of hardware and software technologies, which is not possible for any single business entity to provide all of the required components to serve this humongous market place.

What is Internet of Things?

• The simple answer:  Network enabled devices or systems that are attached to the Internet directly or indirectly through a private network, which may be connected 24x7  to a hard wired network or connecting through a wireless network that may routinely loss its connection.

To participate in this new IoT economy and better serve their customer, key technology companies must collaborate with each other, adhere to open standard and develop IoT devices with resources to support communication between devices built by other vendors, using different technologies and operating system platforms.

The IoT marketplace covers broad range of systems and devices, built on different hardware and software technology platforms with different level of computational capabilities, serving different purposes à There is not a one-size-fit-all technology platform or communication standard for the IoT market.

The contents in this book talks about developing IoT device application on Windows Embedded platforms, using MQTT, an open standard communication protocol.