Kevin Ashton

Kevin Ashton (born 1968) is a British technology pioneer who cofounded the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which created a global standard system for RFID and other sensors. He is known for coining the term "the Internet of Things" to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors.

Biography Ashton was born in Birmingham, UK. He read Scandinavian Studies at University College London from 1990 to 1994. He was working as an assistant brand manager at Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 1997 when he became interested in using RFID to help manage P&G's supply chain. cleantech company EnerNOC (NASDAQ:ENOC) and Zensi, an energy-sensing company he founded with Shwetak Patel among others. Zensi was acquired by Belkin International in April 2010. Ashton then developed and launched the Belkin Wemo (originally stylized as WeMo) home automation system. He writes for RFID Journal, Medium and Quartz, and published a book, How to Fly a Horse with Random House in 2015. In January 2016, How to Fly a Horse won "Best Business Book" from 1-800-CEO-READ.

For an April 2013 Quartz article Ashton created Santiago Swallow, a fictional Mexican social media guru who specializes in the "imagined self", the fictional expert was furnished with 90,000 paid-for Twitter followers and a Wikipedia biography. The creation of Swallow is an attempt to show that credibility is unrelated to the quantity of Twitter followers.

Scientific publications Kevin Ashton's scientific publications can be found in leading science and media journals:

The Atlantic; New York Times; RFID Journal; Medium; Quartz.