IoT groups are like an orchestra tuning up: The music starts in 2016

If the Internet of Things didn't quite proliferate in 2014, at least IoT industry groups and standards bodies did.

At least five efforts at bringing order to IoT began in 2014, and another that launched in late 2013 found its legs this year. That caused some confusion in an industry that was vast and multifaceted already. Unfortunately, all those groups will probably be here a year from now, too -- maybe even more of them.

IoT involves linking devices that in many cases have never been connected before, or at least not on anything but a closed, specialized network. It also involves managing those objects and developing applications to make them do things together that they could never do alone. So products from different vendors eventually will have to speak the same language, at some level.

If they can't, then products for connected homes, cities and factories won't ship in the largest possible numbers, which they will need to do if prices are to plummet like they have for PCs, smartphones and other products over the years. That's especially important for consumer IoT, where cost is paramount.

So vendors are eager to build some momentum behind technologies that are already starting to roll out. They don't want to wait for formal standards bodies to build the equivalent of the IEEE 802.11 family of specifications that powers the vast Wi-Fi industry, said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy. Until formal IoT standards are finished, probably in 2017, companies are banding together to form de facto standards, he said.

Not all the organizations that have formed in the past year are actually writing specifications of their own. Some want to foster harmony among the ones that are already taking shape. But despite pledges all around of working for the good of the industry, there are some groups whose efforts overlap.

Here, in no particular order, are some of the big names at play:

AllSeen Alliance

Open Interconnect Consortium

Thread Group

Industrial Internet Consortium

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C11/C++11: Building blocks for the future

C11 (formerly C1X) is an informal name for ISO/IEC 9899:2011, the current standard for the C programming language. It replaces the previous C standard, informally known as C99. This new version mainly standardizes features that have already been supported by common contemporary compilers, and includes a detailed memory model to better support multiple threads of execution. Due to delayed availability of conforming C99 implementations, C11 makes certain features optional, to make it easier to comply with the core language standard.

Interesting things about C++11 are “making C++ easier to teach and learn” and “make C++ a better language for systems programming and library building.”.

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Standard Units of Measure for IaaS

The worldwide market for cloud services—encompassing both dedicated services available via private clouds and shared services via public clouds—could top $148.8 billion in 2014, up from $68.3 billion in 2010 . The sheer, and growing, volume of available services make it challenging for any organization to assess their options, measure what services are being delivered and what attributes exist for each service.

Organizations need a way to compare services from competing providers of cloud services, as well as with their own internal capabilities. Such comparisons need to be “quantitative” on a like-for-like or “apples-to-apples” basis (e.g., quantity of consumption, period of usage, etc.) and “qualitative” on a set of service assurance attributes (e.g., degree of elasticity, degree of service level, etc.). However, there is no standard, vendor-independent unit of measure equivalent to million instructions per second (MIPS) and other measures used for mainframes that allow such comparison. This is partly because there are no common measurements for the technical units of capacity being sold, and no common way to describe the qualitative attributes of cloud services. Consequently, organizations either try to fit individual Cloud-Provider’s models to their business problems, or embark on costly and lengthy request for proposal (RFP) processes in an attempt to conform the providers to a set of parameters that can be compared.

The Open Data Center Alliance recognizes the need for development of Standard Units of Measure (SUoM) to describe the quantitative and qualitative attributes of services to enable easier, more precise comparison and discovery of the marketplace. This Usage Model is designed to provide subscribers of cloud services with a framework and associated attributes used to describe and measure the capacity, performance and quality of a cloud service.

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HTML5 Deep Dive

The draft HTML5 Web specification has already found its way into most desktop and mobile browsers, even the standard remains under development. That fact creates opportunity for Web and mobile developers to get a leg up on the more powerful version of HTML today, but it also means more complexity for managing Web apps that IT offers. This Deep Dive shows what you can do today with HTML5 without having version overload, for both desktop and mobile Web apps.