Last June, Kansas City struck up a nearly $16bn partnership with Cisco Systems and Sprint to help make that city a lot smarter. How so? By tapping into digital technologies to improve such vital city services as energy, water and transportation.

Imagine a robot that quietly and discreetly enters your neighborhood, collects your refuse bin and empties it into the refuse truck. It is done without waking the sleeping families and without heavy lifting for the refuse truck's driver. This is the purpose of ROAR, a joint project with the aim to develop tomorrow's smart transport solutions.

If you're not in the communication business now, you soon will be. The Internet of Things (IoT) will see to that.

New market opportunities are available to companies in almost every industry from the data that IoT delivers. These new opportunities could be as simple as getting information from sensors about what is happening on the manufacturing plant floor causing automatic manufacturing updates, potential adjustment to customer order delivery dates or even a maintenance work request to handle a detected equipment malfunction. All of these opportunities cause changes to be made to the supply chain.

An old killer app rides again. Radio frequency identification will become a key component of the Internet of Things because it bridges the physical and digital worlds, enabling the identification of objects and linking them to the internet.