Who Coined the Term Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things is now a phrase you see on product boxes, in boardroom slide decks, and across thesis titles in engineering departments everywhere. But it has a surprisingly precise origin. The term was coined in 1999 by a British technologist named Kevin Ashton, and it was not born in a research lab or an academic paper. It started its life as the title of a corporate sales presentation. A slide deck, not a laboratory In the late 1990s Ashton was a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods giant behind products you would find on any supermarket shelf. He was wrestling with a mundane but expensive problem: store shelves kept running out of a particular shade of lipstick, even though the warehouse had plenty in stock. The supply chain simply had no reliable way to know, in real time, what was where. Ashton's proposed fix was radio-frequency identification, or RFID: tiny tags that could be attached to products and read automatically by sensors, with no human scanning each item by hand. The vision was that physical objects could report their own location and status, feeding that data up into computer systems without anyone typing it in. To sell this idea to executives, he needed a title that would make supply-chain tagging sound as exciting as the technology dominating headlines at the time. So he linked his RFID proposal to the hottest topic of 1999 and called the presentation "Internet of Things." By his own account, years later in RFID Journal, the choice was deliberate. Tying tags and sensors to the red-hot word "internet" was the surest way to get senior people in the room to pay attention. The pitch worked well enough that the phrase stuck, and Ashton went on to help found the Auto-ID Center at MIT, a research group that did much of the early standards work that made networked RFID practical. Why the name was actually a good description It would be easy to dismiss the term as a marketing flourish, but it captured something real. Ashton's point