Setting Standards for the Internet of Things

Fifteen years ago, one of the first major initiatives in the Internet of Things took place. In 1999, the Auto-ID Center was formed at MIT; it later became the Auto-ID Labs, a global consortium of researchers and practitioners. The goal of both organizations was to research and help implement radio-frequency identification devices (RFID). That same year also marked the first recorded use of the Internet of Things (IoT) term by an Auto-ID co-director. (While the concept of connected things goes back at least two decades, to our knowledge it was Kevin Ashton, a co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, who first used the appealing IoT term in 1999.) RFID was arguably the first major IoT technology of any scale.