How big will the IoT market become?

So macro things first–how big is the IoT market expected to become, at least in the eyes of the academia and industry?  Here’s a couple of figures I found from MIT Tech Review and Cisco’s website.

The first one shows the total connected objects to reach around 28 billion units by 2020, and “Things” will consist a little under half of that at about 12-13 billion units. This means in that in the next 6 years, connected “Things” will be equivalent in unit size to PCs, mobile phones, and tablets which have been around for many decades.

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In the second one, Cisco even has a real-time counter that shows how many objects are connected to the Internet (12.485 billion units at the time of writing this), and they expect this to reach an even more bullish 50 billion units by 2020.

In reality, IoT is still an emerging market that is FAR from proving its potential to reach those numbers. One thing we know is that the number of hardware startups is at a historical high that it’s almost chaotic, so we’re in no shortage of experiments through trial-and-error.  Let’s see what kinds of Nests and Fitbits or even bigger world changers emerge from the chaos we see today.