So if you like that wild Vulcan mind-meld stuff (that Zachary Quinto now does as well as Leonard Nimoy did—both are stellar in the latest Star Trek), you’ll love this. Yesterday on my new Respect Network blog I did a post called Internet of Things, Meet the Internet of People. It was inspired by a Techcrunch story about how fast the IoT is heating up. My counterpoint was that if you think the IoT is cool, wait until it connects with the IoP.

The thrust of my enthusiasm for this topic was all the energy around personal clouds at the Internet Identity Workshop three weeks ago in Mountain View. It was like a tsunami rolling through the conference: the collective realization that individuals having their own personal, portable, lifetime “piece of the cloud” under their exclusive control is going to be as revolutionary as the personal computer.

One of the most articulate voices in the conversation was T.Rob, who brings his hard-fought wisdom about security, networking, pub/sub messaging (MQTT), and other highly relevant topics squarely to the intersection of IoT and IoP. In fact my last blog post, titled T.Rob Wyatt Explains the Respect Trust Framework (And May Not Even Know It), is about how perfectly one of his blog posts described the purpose of the Respect Trust Framework, the legal basis for the Respect Network as a personal cloud network.

In any case, in the IIW sessions I attended with T.Rob it was patently obvious why he recently made the jump from his longtime position on IBM’s messaging security team to his own full-time consulting  business called IoPT Consulting. But there was so much going on at IIW that I never got the chance to ask him: What does IoPT stand for, anyway?

So imagine my surprise when, after my blot post about why the IoT needs the IoP, T.Rob writes:

Nice post, Drummond! Did we do the Vulcan mind meld at IIW and I didn’t realize it? The “IoPT” in IoPT Consulting stands for “Internet of People & Things.”

Doh! A second Vulcan mind meld and this time I was the one who didn’t even realize it.

Congrats on a cool name, T.Rob, and I look forward more than ever to working with you to help bring the IoP and IoT together in a giant win/win for humanity.