Kevin Kelly, speaking at TED on the next 5,000 days of the Web:

Everything will have embedded in it some sense of connecting to the machine, and so we have, basically, an Internet of Things. So you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels, and a car as a chip with wheels. […] A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied, alternative virtual existence, and that we would have the old economy of atoms. But in fact, what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two, where we embed the information, and the digital nature of things into the material world. That’s what we’re looking forward to. That is where we’re going—this union, this convergence of the atomic and the digital.

More on the Internet of Things in this great talk from Matt Jones earlier this year.