Just in case you’ve been hanging out in outer space for the last few years, IoT is the idea that all kinds of devices—from single-purpose temperature or pressure sensors in industrial machines and home automation devices to shipping containers, automobiles, and street lights—will be connected to each other and to the cloud in an ever-expanding network, both wired and wireless, providing data or carrying out useful tasks in isolation or in cooperation with other devices.
Advertising. Almost every business depends on it, in some form, as a major (if not primary) marketing tool. And for some companies—in fact, some entire industries, such as broadcast media and print journalism—advertising is the main source of revenue. Google could hardly fund its wide-ranging initiatives and services without the money it rakes in from online advertising.
Cryptocurrencies, especially bitcoin, are making headlines these days. When speculators run-up cryptocurrency value vs. the dollar, euro, and other government currencies, a speculative bubble results that can eventually burst. The resulting price crash causes significant financial losses to those became players late in the game.
Ask the average person on the street what “blockchain” is, and you probably will get responses ranging from, “Block who?” to “Something to do with Bitcoin.”
In his 1991 song “Better Class of Losers,” Randy Travis sang that his kind of people were not those who “pay their bills on home computers.” At that time—before the World Wide Web—paying bills on home computers was revolutionary, available only on online services such as AOL and CompuServe.
The world has long needed a method of creating secure, unalterable digital records. Developed in 2008 to form the backbone of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, blockchain is a digital ledger technology that fills this gap. It stores data in records called blocks using a decentralized structure, which enables users to make secure online transactions or value exchanges.
