It’s the year 2014, and we’ve yet to have our flying cars and commuter jet packs. But we do have a glimpse of the future with the advent of the “internet of things.” It’s essentially the idea of connecting everyday objects — be it thermostats or kitchen appliances — to the web, in an effort to make our lives easier. As wonderful as that sounds though, development of new IoT technologies can be slow, due in part to the multiple different protocols in existence today and how tiresome it is to create an ecosystem from scratch. That could soon come to an end, however, thanks to ARM. The chipmaker has just announced a brand new IoT-specific device platform that includes both a free operating system (tailor-made for ARM’s Cortex-M processor based devices, of course) plus a server-side software product that ties it all together.