After years of struggling to make critical connections among devices, the internet of things might be about to turn a corner—thanks to organizations building standards that speak multiple computing languages.
The potential of connected devices to transform everyday life has been growing by leaps and bounds, but their ability to actually connect has been hampered by a stubborn challenge: a lack of consistent technical standards.
The problem has been the sheer number of incompatible approaches to the internet of things (IoT). Groups such as the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Zigbee Alliance, and others have built a variety of standards that haven’t always talked to one another.
That lack of communication has started to shift in favor of more interoperability. One example is Thread, a standard born from the popular thermostat product Nest that networks connected devices together. As The Register recently noted, the Thread Group—the organization behind Thread that counts Google, Apple, and Samsung among its members—took steps to open-source its device-networking protocol and complement other offerings, such as OCF’s application layer standards.
Click here to read the full article by Ernie Smith on Associations Now.