It's a very smart move (pardon the pun), because in 2009 we're only at the very start of connecting almost any object in the world to the Internet.

Pachube and MQTT are enabling technologies for the Internet of Things, and are expected to be serious players in the interconnected, instrumented world envisioned by the IBM Smarter Planet initiative.

A few mentioned the "Internet of things" - or a world in which everyday objects have their own IP addresses and can be tied together in the same way that people are now tied together by the Internet.