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In his 1964 book, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan stated that ”….by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies - including cities - will be translated into information systems” (McLuhan, 1964). In 1966, Karl Steinbuch, a German computer science pioneer also predicted that ”In a few decades time, computers will be interwoven into almost every industrial product” (Mattern & Floerkemeier, 2010, p. 242)
The World Wide Web (Web 1.0) - a network of linked HTML documents that resided on top of the Internet architecture - characterized the early days of the Classical Internet – the Internet as we know it today. This network of static HTML pages progressively evolved into Web 2.0, a term describing the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that enabled creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. With Web 2.0, two-way communication became ubiquitous and allowed user participation, collaboration, and interaction (Whitmore, Agarwal, & Da Xu, 2015). Web 2.0 technologies include social networking services, electronic messaging services, blogs, and wikis—technologies that have become indispensable to modern social interaction as well as for global business.
While Web 2.0 currently dominates the Internet, there has been the emergence of Semantic Web or Web 3.0. A technology that makes markup web content understandable by machines, allowing machines and search engines to behave more intelligently (Whitmore et al., 2015). Marking up web content in standardized formats would allow machines to process and share data on their own, without the need for human mediation (Whitmore et al., 2015). Alongside developments in the Internet technologies, technologies in Sensor Networks, Near Field Communication using RFID tags, synthetic biology, biotechnology, cognitive sciences, and nanotechnology have also been evolving. Convergence of Web 2.0, Web 3.0, and these technologies, has led to a paradigm being referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT).
IoT is maturing and continues to be the latest, a most hyped concept in the IT world. It was added to the 2011 annual Gartner Hype Cyclethat tracks technology life-cycles from ”technology trigger” to ”plateau of productivity,” and it hit the Hype Cycle’s ”Peak of Inflated Expectations” in 2014. As of August 2017, the term IoT was still at the “Peak of Inflated Expectations”. Gartner’s Information Technology Hype Cycle (Gubbi et al., 2013) is popularly known for representing emergence, adoption, maturity, and impact on applications of specific technologies (Ferguson, 2002). It was forecasted in 2012 that IoT would take between 5-10 years for market adoption and every indication now is evident it was predicted right.
Riggins and Wamba, (2015) grouped the level of IoT adoption through Big Data analytics usage to the following categories:
  1. Society level where IoT mainly influences and improves government services by reducing cost and increasing government transparency and accountability,
  2. Industry level in which manufacturing, emergency services, retailing, and education have been studied as examples,
  3. Organizational level in which IoT can bring the same type of benefits as those mentioned in society level,
  4. Individual-level where daily life improvements and individual efficiency and productivity growth are marked as IoT benefits.
The IoT has been referred to with different terminologies, but the objective of IoT is same in the broad sense (Madakam, Ramaswamy, & Tripathi, 2015). The taxonomical labels of IoT include Internet of Everything, Web of Things, Internet of Objects, Embedded Intelligence, Connected Devices and Technology Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent. In addition to these taxonomical labels, IoT has also been variously described as follows (Madakam et al., 2015):
There are varying definitions of IoT, and there is not a standard one agreed to by all. However, there is a common understanding of what it is and its prospects. “What all of the definitions have in common is the idea that the first version of the Internet was about data created by people, while the next version is about data created by things” (Madakam, Ramaswamy, & Tripathi, 2015, p.165). The thing in IoT can be a person with a heart monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder, a crop with a nanochip for precision agriculture, an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when the tire pressure is low—or any other natural or man-made object that can be assigned an IP address, and provided with the ability to transfer data over a network (Shin, 2014).
Fundamentally, the IOT can be described as a global network which facilitates the communication between human-to-human, human-to-things, and things-to-things, which is anything in the world by providing a unique identity to every object (Aggarwal & Das, 2012). Madakam et al., (2015) define IoT as “An open and comprehensive network of intelligent objects that can auto-organize, share information, data, and resources, react and act in the face of situations and changes in the environment” (p. 165)
Figure 2 . The Quantum of Internet of things