40 Fun Facts About Internet of Things

Which US vice president had a heart implant's wireless function switched off for fear of hackers?

Dick Cheney's doctor disabled the defibrillator's wireless link in 2007, fearing an assassin could trigger a fatal heart attack.

Which kitchen appliance did John Romkey famously connect to the Internet for the 1990 Interop show?

A toaster went online at the networking trade show thanks to John Romkey and Simon Hackett, and is often billed as the first Internet appliance.

Which wireless standard borrows its name from a 10th-century Danish king?

Bluetooth began as a codename proposed by Intel's Jim Kardach, who had been reading about the Viking king Harald and his knack for uniting tribes.

Which country told parents in 2017 to destroy the internet-connected doll My Friend Cayla?

Germany's Federal Network Agency classed the talking doll as a concealed espionage device, which made owning one illegal as well as selling it.

Which video doorbell company, pitched on Shark Tank as Doorbot in 2013, was later bought by Amazon?

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff declined an investor's offer on the show, then sold the company for about $1.15 billion five years later.

Which British former Procter & Gamble brand manager coined the phrase 'Internet of Things' in 1999?

Kevin Ashton said he preferred the wording 'Internet for things', but the earlier phrase stuck and he went on to co-found MIT's Auto-ID Center.

Which SUV was hijacked over the Internet by researchers in 2015, triggering a 1.4 million vehicle recall?

A Jeep Cherokee had its steering, brakes and transmission taken over by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, who could also work its radio and wipers.

The Trojan Room coffee pot, subject of the world's first webcam, sat in which university's computer lab?

Cambridge researchers aimed a camera at the pot in 1991 to spare colleagues a wasted trip to an empty machine; it stayed online until 2001.

Which smart thermostat maker, founded by two former Apple engineers, did Google buy for $3.2 billion in 2014?

Nest grew out of Tony Fadell's frustration with every thermostat on the market while he was building a vacation home.

Which low-power mesh protocol, built on the IEEE 802.15.4 radio standard, links many smart bulbs and home sensors?

Zigbee is named after the waggle dance that honey bees perform on returning to the hive. Its devices relay data through neighbours to reach distant ones.

Which voice assistant did Amazon introduce in 2014 alongside the Echo smart speaker?

Alexa grew largely out of two acquisitions: the British question-answering system Evi and a Polish speech synthesizer named Ivona.

Which single-board computer, created to teach computing in schools, became the best-selling British computer ever?

Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 and outsold every earlier British computer within four years; its low cost made it a staple of home sensor projects.

Which open-source microcontroller board, begun in 2005 as a tool for design students, is named after a bar?

Arduino takes its name from the Bar di Re Arduino in Ivrea, Italy, where some of the project's founders used to meet.

Which tagging technology, unlike a barcode, needs no line of sight and is implanted in pets as microchips?

RFID tags can be read while buried inside a product or under an animal's skin, so factories use them to follow cars along the assembly line.

Which wireless technology behind tap-to-pay phones works only across about four centimetres?

NFC, co-invented by NXP and Sony, also lets a phone read electronic tags and simplifies setting up other wireless connections.

Which robot vacuum, introduced by iRobot in 2002, can now map a home and obey smart speaker commands?

Roomba models from the sixth generation on use an upward-facing camera to spot landmarks and correct the floor map they build.

Which coin-sized Apple tracker locates lost items through the crowdsourced Find My network?

AirTag owners with a recent iPhone can home in on an item using ultra-wideband radio; the wider network was put at about a billion devices in 2021.

Which smart bulb range, first sold through the Apple Store in 2012, is now made by Signify?

Philips Hue was pitched at launch as the first lighting you could control from iOS; its maker Signify is the renamed lighting division of Philips.

Which botnet of hijacked cameras and routers knocked the DNS provider Dyn offline in October 2016?

Mirai, from the Japanese word for future, broke into gadgets by trying a table of about 60 factory-default usernames and passwords.

At which university did students wire a Coca-Cola vending machine to the ARPANET in 1982 to check stock remotely?

Carnegie Mellon's machine reported its inventory and whether newly loaded drinks were cold yet, and is remembered as the first ARPANET-connected appliance.

Which addressing standard uses 128-bit addresses, enough to give every connected gadget on Earth its own?

IPv6 was developed by the IETF because its predecessor was running out of addresses; the new space holds about 340 undecillion of them.

Which smart home standard began in 2019 as Project Connected Home over IP, backed by Amazon, Apple and Google?

Matter comes with a royalty-free software development kit, though certifying a finished product still means paying membership fees.

Which search engine, launched by John Matherly in 2009, finds webcams, routers and other Internet-connected devices?

Shodan takes its name from a character in the System Shock video games, and its filters can lead straight to a camera's live video stream.

Which web service, launched in 2011, lets users write applets that tie smart home devices to online events?

IFTTT, an acronym of if this, then that, reached the physical world in 2012 when its applets began controlling Belkin Wemo devices.

Which lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol was first written in 1999 to monitor oil pipelines?

MQTT was written by IBM's Andy Stanford-Clark and Arlen Nipper; the MQ comes from an IBM product line, where it stands for Message Queue.

Songdo, a smart city built on reclaimed land with a pneumatic waste disposal system, is in which country?

South Korea raised Songdo on an artificial island off Incheon, southwest of Seoul, in one of the largest private real estate developments in history.

Which US state's Senate Bill 327, in force since 2020, requires connected devices to have reasonable security features?

California approved the bill in 2018; it tells makers to fit protection suited to a device's function and to the information it collects.

Which e-paper smartwatch became Kickstarter's most funded project in 2012 before selling its assets to Fitbit?

Pebble, created by Eric Migicovsky, went back to Kickstarter for its colour-screen Time watches in 2015 but filed for insolvency a year later.

Which sensor, also used by phones to store a photo's correct orientation, lets a fitness tracker count steps?

Accelerometer chips let a phone double as a pedometer, and a low-power coprocessor can keep counting while the main processor snoozes.

Which chip designer, bought by SoftBank in 2016, licenses the designs inside virtually all smartphones?

Arm originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine, after Acorn Computers, the British firm whose Archimedes desktops first used the chips; most now go into embedded systems.

Which computer worm, aimed at Siemens industrial controllers, made Iranian nuclear centrifuges tear themselves apart?

Stuxnet reportedly destroyed almost one-fifth of Iran's centrifuges by hijacking the programmable logic controllers that run factory machinery.

Which term names a live virtual replica of a machine, an idea NASA pioneered by modelling the Apollo missions?

Digital twin thinking was already at work when NASA used simulators to investigate the failure of Apollo 13's oxygen tanks.

Which networking giant introduced the term fog computing in 2012 for processing data close to the sensors?

Cisco went on to found the OpenFog Consortium in 2015 with Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University to promote the idea.

Which company introduced the Internet Digital DIOS, an internet-connected refrigerator with a display, in 2000?

LG Electronics launched it in the same month that Kaspersky Lab warned connected fridges could one day become targets for computer viruses.

Which home automation standard, developed in Scotland in 1975, sends its control signals over household power wiring?

X10 came from Pico Electronics of Glenrothes, which turned to consumer products when prices for its calculator chips started to fall.

Which low-power radio technique uses chirp spread spectrum to link battery sensors across miles of countryside?

LoRa, a name taken from 'long range', can reach about 3 miles in cities and 10 miles or more in open country with a clear line of sight.

The ESP8266 Wi-Fi microchip, a maker favourite since 2014, comes from Espressif Systems, based in which Chinese city?

Shanghai-based Espressif saw the chip take off among English-speaking makers through the ESP-01 module, built by third-party manufacturer Ai-Thinker.

At which research centre did Mark Weiser coin the term ubiquitous computing in 1988, inspiring later IoT thinking?

Xerox PARC made Weiser its chief technology officer in 1996; his 1991 paper 'The Computer of the 21st Century' shaped today's vision of the IoT.

Nabaztag, an early Wi-Fi smart object that read out emails and weather forecasts, was shaped like which animal?

A rabbit with two motorised ears, the gadget was made by the company Violet, and its name is Armenian for hare.

Which name did a 1997 DARPA proposal give to swarms of wireless sensors that later shrank below a grain of rice?

Smart dust motes can detect light, temperature, vibration or chemicals, and the project's larger test devices kicked off the TinyOS operating system.