The Internet Of Things
The cloud giants are trying to sell more than just a place to stash the data your sensors have collected. They're offering full IoT platforms, which bundle together much of the functionality to coordinate the elements that make up IoT systems. In essence, an IoT platform serves as middleware that connects the IoT devices and edge gateways with the applications you use to deal with the IoT data. That said, every platform vendor seems to have a slightly different definition of what an IoT platform is, the better to distance themselves from the competition . Essentially, anything that's capable of gathering some information about the physical world and sending it back home can participate in the IoT ecosystem. Smart home appliances, RFID tags, and industrial sensors are a few examples. This visualisation shows the total number of people employed in agriculture across select European, North American and Asian countries since the year 1800. Over this period – and in particular si