Coming to a technology conference near you this summer are serious amounts of gushing about how the Internet of Things, the web of billions of connected devices coming on stream over the next few years, will change your life forever. Who would have thought that the simple toothbrush, once wired up to the internet, would instead become a personal health device capable of seriously moving the needle on your quality of life. The Internet of Things is the vector whereby the day-to-day becomes game-changing. Or so the marketers would have you believe anyway. But along with the serious amounts of marketing cycles being given over to the Internet of Things, connected devices do actually offer some pretty amazing benefits to the world. Think water monitoring in the third world, intensive remote healthcare or better prediction of environmental disasters.