The Internet of Things is now a phrase you see on product boxes, in boardroom slide decks, and across thesis titles in engineering departments everywhere. But it has a surprisingly precise origin. The term was coined in 1999 by a British technologist named Kevin Ashton, and it was not born in a research lab or an academic paper. It started its life as the title of a corporate sales presentation.
A slide deck, not a laboratory
In the late 1990s Ashton was a brand manager at Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods giant behind products you would find on any supermarket shelf. He was wrestling with a mundane but expensive problem: store shelves kept running out of a particular shade of lipstick, even though the warehouse had plenty in stock. The supply chain simply had no reliable way to know, in real time, what was where.
Ashton's proposed fix was radio-frequency identification, or RFID: tiny tags that could be attached to products and read automatically by sensors, with no human scanning each item by hand. The vision was that physical objects could report their own location and status, feeding that data up into computer systems without anyone typing it in. To sell this idea to executives, he needed a title that would make supply-chain tagging sound as exciting as the technology dominating headlines at the time. So he linked his RFID proposal to the hottest topic of 1999 and called the presentation "Internet of Things."
By his own account, years later in RFID Journal, the choice was deliberate. Tying tags and sensors to the red-hot word "internet" was the surest way to get senior people in the room to pay attention. The pitch worked well enough that the phrase stuck, and Ashton went on to help found the Auto-ID Center at MIT, a research group that did much of the early standards work that made networked RFID practical.
Why the name was actually a good description
It would be easy to dismiss the term as a marketing flourish, but it captured something real. Ashton's point was that the internet of the 1990s was almost entirely built from information that humans had typed, photographed, or recorded by hand. Computers, he argued, were starved of data about the physical world because they depended on people to gather it, and people are slow, inattentive, and easily bored.
If everyday objects could sense and report on themselves, computers could understand the world directly. That is still the founding idea of IoT today, whether the device is a soil-moisture sensor on a farm, a water meter on a city pipeline, or a temperature logger inside a cold-chain truck. The technology has moved far beyond RFID to include microcontrollers, low-power wireless protocols, and cloud platforms, but the core ambition is unchanged: give physical things a digital voice.
From 1999 to the devices we build now
The leap from a single warehouse-tracking pitch to billions of connected devices took two decades of progress in embedded systems and wireless networking. Cheap, capable microcontrollers like the ESP32 put internet connectivity inside objects that cost a few dollars. Sensor prices collapsed. Cloud services made it trivial to collect and act on streams of device data. What was once a clever way to track lipstick became the backbone of smart agriculture, industrial monitoring, and connected consumer products.
For developers and students here in the Philippines, that history is more than trivia. It is a reminder that the most valuable IoT projects usually start with a concrete, unglamorous problem, such as a shelf that keeps running empty or a generator whose fuel level no one can check remotely. The technology is the means; the data about the physical world is the point. A capstone project that connects a real sensor to a real dashboard is following exactly the path Ashton sketched in 1999.
Building on a 25-year-old idea
At Fluidwire we work across that whole stack, from the silicon and firmware on the device to the web services that turn raw readings into something a person can use. Whether you are prototyping a thesis project, validating an industrial sensor, or planning a connected product, the questions are the same ones Ashton was really asking: what do you need the physical world to tell you, and how do you get that signal cleanly from device to cloud?
If you are building something that needs to sense, connect, and report, get in touch. The Internet of Things started as a way to let things speak for themselves, and that is still the most useful thing it does.
