Welcome back to the real world. If you’ve had a leisure holiday full of rest and relaxation, please don’t tell that to those who handled everything while you were getting your toenails buffed and painted.

Here’s a good reason to put off your holiday shopping until next week: the Midwest and Northeast are under severe weather alerts for snow and ice most of this week. That means nearly half of all Americans are impacted. Next week has to be better, right?

The Internet of Everything will be all-inclusive, from huge data centers to single-purpose sensors. While individual power requirements vary across the IoT, the need for energy efficiency will be present everywhere.

How Raleigh, North Carolina, Became an IoT Hotbed

About half of all IoT sensors can’t be plugged into an electrical outlet. That means Plan B for Battery.

Do your leaf peeping quickly, before they all fall down. As we march toward Halloween, the conferences and user group meetings seem to multiply and spread news like those swirling leaves. We caught as many as we could that concerned IoT, and here are some more.

Let’s hope all the education-focused IoT projects worked on during the summer are up and running, because schools are now chock full of children.

IoT projects offer great opportunities, but you need to understand how they’re different from IT as you know it.