The technology landscape is evolving, with the Internet of Things (IoT) leading the charge. IoT is transforming the way we live and work, with billions of devices generating massive amounts of data. As a software developer, it is essential to stay on top of this trend and understand the opportunities and challenges presented by this new technology.

In this three-part series, we will breakdown IoT,  MQTT, which is the defacto standard protocol powering IoT, and wrap the series up with a practical step-by-step demonstration you can follow to try IoT yourself.

In this week’s news roundup. In this edition, Blackstorm raises $33.5m for a ‘post-app store”, Razer launches a new fund for VR and gaming start-ups and Kony releases a new survey on the challenges of wearable development.

I ‘m part of a hardware research group at Telefónica Digital called “Physical Internet Lab”. Three years ago we started a small group under the Emerging Technologies area of the company focusing on the Internet of Things. The commitment of the group was (and is), in ambitious terms, “to democratize the Internet of Things” opening it to as many makers, developers and users as possible.

We wanted to work at the crossroads of the Internet, the Things and the People. But our development skills were almost 100% software related. In the process we built a team skilled on all three sides. And we figured out how to do agile hardware.