Recently everybody is talking about the Internet of Things, the countless connected sensors and intelligent devices that are springing up everywhere and re-shaping our living and working environment. The IoT will possibly be the next technological revolution that we will all participate in, one way or another. The IoT is expected to make our world more intelligent and responsive, capable of anticipating our needs. The digital and physical worlds will come much closer to one another forming a web of “enchanted objects” as David Rose, MIT Media Lab visiting scientists, calls them in his new book.

These billions of devices that can sense the world and communicate with one another, our computers and our smartphones are driving innovation in areas like individualized environmental monitoring, energy management, medical, transport systems and agriculture. When the IoT fully emerges hospitals will monitor and regulate heart implants long distance, factories will automatically address production line issues and report to the manager, hotel-rooms will adjust temperature and lighting according to guests’ preferences directly provided by their self phones, while households will be equipped with smart heating systems and washer/dryers, automatically adjusting to our everyday schedule. Body worn computers will become second nature—sensing, recording, and transmitting data to and from our bodies, to networks around us.

The IoT will open up tremendous opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship as market research estimates that the universe of connected devices will total 30 billion by 2020. The question is what new businesses will arise as things get connected and which different sort of economics will come into play when those widgets start to communicate?

The MIT Enterprise Forum Greece and the MIT Club of Greece invite you to join the upcoming Technologies That Matter series event “Internet of Things: Opportunities and Risks” on Tuesday 17th of February, at 19:00 at the Eugenides Foundation. Our panel of experts will share experiences from their work and discuss cutting edge research in the realm of the Internet of Things, giving the audience an overview of the opportunities and the risks it creates.