In the flurry of news surrounding Google’s acquisition of Nest on Monday, I was particularly intrigued by the following graph from Business Insider   Specifically, the combination of 8 billion Internet of Things devices and 6 billion mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) projected for 2018 gave me pause.

I believe the real value of these expanding markets comes from the combination of the IoT and Mobile segments.  IoT technology progressively enables us to instrument and automate many areas in our daily lives; Tablets and Smartphones provide our primary windows into that instrumented and automated world.  The possibilities are limitless.