May 29, Report on Business Magazine: By 2020, there will be tens of billions of data-spouting devices connected to the Internet. And they’re already changing how we live and work. Research firm Gartner estimates that by the end of last year, there were 3.8 billion connected things out there—smart cars, smoke detectors, door locks, industrial robots, streetlights, heart monitors, trains, wind turbines, even tennis racquets and toasters. By 2020, Gartner estimates there will be 25 billion of these smart devices, transmitting tiny amounts of data to us, to the cloud and to each other.