Amber Case’s book “Calm Technology” could be required reading for hardware developers one day. It is packed with suggestions for building #IoT gadgets that will be pleasing to use. Her book focuses on how alerts should smoothly capture the users attention without creating excessive disruptions. We have come from a world of a single PC which received all of our attention and now must develop less invasive indicators and alerts that stay in the periphery. Amber suggests coding simple systems in low level languages that are stable with manual override redundancy in case the network connection should go down.

Bringing the next 50 billion devices on-line will be a challenge. The analysts at Gartner group have forecasted that 25 billion devices will be connected by 2020. There is another estimate from GE that by 2020 the convergence of machines, data and analytics will create a market that exceeds $200 billion globally.