When something is connected to the internet, that means that it can send information or receive information, or both. This ability to send and/or receive information makes things smart, and smarter is better.
Let’s use smartphones again as an example. You can listen to any song in the world, but not because your phone has every song stored on it. It’s because every song in the world is stored somewhere else (that place is known as “the cloud”), and your phone can request a song, and receive information to stream it.
To be smart, a thing doesn’t need to have super storage or a supercomputer inside of it. All a thing has to do is connect to super storage or to a supercomputer. Being connected is awesome.
In the Internet of Things, all the things can be put into three categories: