Albert Einstein once said: "Information is not knowledge". While it is true that we have more information at our fingertips than he could ever have imagined, Einstein was right; separating the wheat from the chaff has become an ever more difficult task. Only 5% of the information created is "structured", i.e., is in a standard format of words or numbers that can be interpreted by computers. The rest comes in the form of photos and phone calls, making it more difficult to recover and use, in theory at least. This situation is changing with the tagging of photos and face- and voice-recognition, which allow people and words to be identified online. The question is, how much information is there out there?

Last year the digital universe came to 800,000 petabytes (remember that one petabyte equals one million gigabytes). This year it will hit 1.2 million petabytes or 1.2 zettabytes. At this rate by 2020 the digital universe will be forty-four times bigger than in 2009.

This disproportionate amount of information is beginning to transform the way we do business, the running of the public sector and the day-to-day life of millions of people. For example, the American company Walmart handles over a million transactions... every hour! The Internet of Things means that any object can be a source of data, and that its "behavior" can be monitored in time and space. As a result, the world is going to be full of new and available information. Faced with this growing quantity of information, it is hardly surprising that companies and entrepreneurs are in a race to innovate data storage, speed, access and analysis methods. Just as in an agricultural economy, the factors of production were land and labor, and in an industrial economy they were capital and labor, information has become the production factor of the twenty-first century.

The challenge of meeting this growing need to manage information is palpable in many business initiatives. One of them involves responding to the miniaturization of technology, i.e., the trend towards developing smaller and smaller systems and devices because the physical space is running out. Defying Moore's Law, Hewlett Packard has announced the creation of a device called a memristor (memory resistor) which takes the size of a chip down to atomic scale without requiring any electric current

Storing any information flow on the Internet is also big business. The Future Trends Forum experts agree that the business of datacenters as "hotels" for computers on the Internet is growing exponentially. It is "high season" for information. Google is said to have more than 30 datacenters, the equivalent of over a million servers. In order to catch up with Google's global roll-out, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and putting up to 20,000 new servers online a month16. A range of factors, such as the immense heat given off and the energy consumption the processing requires, have made it necessary to situate these datacenters in some of the world’s more remote locations. By 2020, the combined power consumption of these centers is expected to exceed that of Germany, Canada and Brazil put together

Many companies have benefited from Google’s storage service. Virtualization or cloud computing18 allows these companies to make use of the greater space and processing capacity the datacenters can offer. In this way, they do not have to invest in the fixed costs of implementing and maintaining their own technical infrastructures, but instead pay a monthly fee—just as they would for any other supply. Later on, we shall see how the availability of bandwidth and IP addresses in a network that is beginning to be saturated is starting to become a major priority.

Another very fashionable trend at the moment is metadata—literally "data on data" or "information about information". Think of a can of food: you don't have to open it to know what it contains; you just have to read the label on the outside. This is a good way of explaining how search engines index websites. In general, any service that can filter or sort a very large quantity of information is of interest in the current climate, where decisions are made in a question of seconds, and companies are prepared to pay high prices for this possibility. IBM has invested billions in software of this type. For example, it spent $1.7 billion on Netezza, a vendor of data warehouses (a system that can analyze and cross-reference huge amounts of data). The market for data analysis programs is expected to grow by over 30% in under four years, to $3.4 billion.

Experts are also working hard on the algorithms to cope with a ubiquitous world. Programming objects in such a way as to allow them to "communicate" is a complicated task, especially since they will have to interact with increasingly diverse and autonomous systems. Much of the economic value will centre on algorithms that allow machine-to-machine communication and the development of software services. UbiComp Grand Challenge is an initiative created by the universities of Nottingham, Oxford and Cambridge, among others, to encourage collaboration and to respond to the challenge of ubiquitous computing. If a central gearbox can be built that allows a heterogeneous federation of "Internet of Things" technologies, it will aid interoperability and avoid the barriers to large-scale acceptance.

Given the importance of processing all the information, storage and search speed are not the only challenges. The capacity to analyze a large amount of information in real time is essential for organizations, and represents a major market opportunity for companies capable of offering such a service. Companies such as ThinkAnalytics, Praxis Softek as well as household names like IBM have seen the importance of decision-making in sectors such as the retail trade. Ultimately, speed and efficiency in information are competitive advantages for customers. So data can mean wisdom. In technical circles, people speak of the DIKW hierarchy (data, information, knowledge, wisdom). The most basic tier is "data". By contextualizing a data set, you get "information". This information will only be "knowledge" if you know how to use it. And finally, "wisdom" explains why you are using it.

Business is clearly starting to invest in "smart" services as well as the more common items of information technology. Increasingly, companies are turning to external providers who can offer powerful solutions based on shared service centers that allow their clients to get on with their core business, leaving them to act as "aggregators" of applications and infrastructures.

Having set out the bases of the Internet of Things and explained the workings of a ubiquitous world in which people, objects and machines can interact by transcending the barriers of time and space, we will now go on to explore the current state of the technology.