• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, September 11, 2015

Connecting things can be a bit more complex than it may appear.

The Clapper, a sound-activated electrical switch that lets people turn lights on or off by clapping, has been in the market for more than 25 years.

But it obviously wasn’t part of the Internet of Things, since it’s used without any net connectivity.

But there are now essentially networked versions of the same type of device, so that lighting can be controlled from a smartphone. Lights such as these have been displayed at CES for years now.

The catch is that many of these connected devices need Wi-Fi, which is not always as usable in every area of a house or building.

“Radio frequency technology is not reliable without repeaters,” said Joe Gerber, COO of SmartLabs, one of the companies that markets bulbs and other devices that can be run via smartphone.

Gerber was speaking at the Internet of Things Summit held in Boston this week, along with numerous other business execs working to navigate the Internet of Things.

He noted that houses in different areas of the country are built differently with some easier and some much more difficult to use Wi-Fi.

A key point Gerber made is that consumers will come to rely on central command hubs for managing connected devices. This also is where expectations from brands and messaging come into play.

“Customers trust platforms of brands,” he said.

In the course of the two-day event, I heard many different aspects of challenges, opportunities and innovations within the world of the IoT.

• David Klein, vice president of R&D of Duracell, owned by the Gillette division of P&G but recently sold to Berkshire Hathaway, spoke of the growth of short-range wireless appliances. He also described the new form factor of power coming in the shape of thin, flexible batteries.
• Bob Cohen, senior fellow at the Economy Strategy Institute, said IoT is coming in three phases: big data analytics, massive sensor networks and interactive sensor networks with wearable devices. This last is one of the prime areas for marketing messaging.
• Newsha Ghaeli, research fellow at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, described several of MIT’s experiments around IoT. In one, 170 million New York cab trips were tracked to identify ride-sharing opportunities. In another in Seattle, sensors were placed on trash to follow how it gets to where in a project called Trash Track.
• Sridhar Iyengar, cofounder of Misfit Wearables, described the coming uses of sensors in every aspect of daily life. One case study comprised sensors on asthma inhalers that matched when the inhaler was used with real-time pollution maps so that users could plot better routes of travel.

There were presentations on devices for smart kitchens, city-wide networking, including the LinkNYC sensor-loaded phone booths being installed in New York, and on all the obvious issues relating to security and privacy.

Getting millions of objected connected to each other and to consumers so that messaging can flow through will be no small feat.

But there is a virtual army of companies and institutions marching in the same direction.