The number of wearable devices hitting the market continues to rise but not by as much as earlier projected. A new forecast projects that 102 million Internet-connected wearable devices will ship worldwide this year. While this is an increase of 29% from a year ago, the projections are a decrease from only a few months back, when growth was projected at 38%.

The Internet of Things means different things to different people. This is understandable, since there are aspects that impact people individually based on where they are and what they may be doing. For example, home automation may impact a family while various forms of connectivity in a car are most visible to the person who drives a lot.

There are connected devices and then there are connected devices. With many billions of coming Internet-connected smart objects, devices, ranging from appliances to home-assisting services, marketers may think there's a window to lie back and wait. In five years, there will be 28 billion connected devices, according to the recent Ericsson Mobility Report. Of those 16 billion will be IoT devices while 9 billion will be mobile phones.

The potential upsides of beaconing are pretty well known. The small radio-transmitting devices in a store can provide a pretty good idea that a person is in a certain department. An ad, coupon or other message could be sent to the phones of shoppers who want such things or the location data could be passively captured by a marketer for various uses later.

Indoor beaconing is going wall to wall. Or more accurately, it's going from ceiling to floor, as store lighting joins the Internet of Things. The ultimate effect is that the location of in-store shoppers can be very precisely identified and retailers or marketers can then deliver highly targeted, location-based offers, on the spot.

Consumers walking on busy streets in major cities are likely being beaconed, though most likely have no idea. Since their inception, beacons have been an insider sort of technology that just makes more accurate the location information of an individual for a brand or marketer. Most of the beaconing implementations involve fixed locations, like in stores, shopping centers and stadiums.

Marketing messaging via robots is on the way, even if the substance and form of that messaging has not yet to take shape. And some of that messaging may be created to come through Pepper the robot, launching in the U.S. market later this year. Several weeks ago, SoftBank, which makes Pepper, selected an ad agency to launch the humanoid robot. Yesterday I caught up with executives from SoftBank and its agency, Midnight Oil.

The store of the future will track products along with people. Products in the pipeline, like at central distribution centers, have been tracked since pretty much forever, in one way or another. About 10 years ago, Walmart pushed its suppliers to put RFID (radio frequency identification systems) tags on all pallets and cases.

Although they will not drive themselves, connected cars are coming. But it may not turn out the way many think, at least in the short term. The challenge for automakers has been to get the user experience right in connected cars.

Beacons are becoming so yesterday. Not beaconing, for sure, but the actual standalone, battery-operated, radio-transmitting beacon. Beacons aren’t actually going away, they’re becoming embedded into other things, from lighting to Wi-Fi access points in large stores. More importantly, the location data from beaconing is now becoming much more integrated with other location data, such as from Wi-Fi and GPS signals. I spent some time at the headquarters of Swirl the other day to get a read on this new value proposition. I’ve been pretty closely tracking Swirl since when it was a small …