Press & Media

As one of the co-inventors of IoT, Rob Tiffany was connecting vending machines to the Internet back in 1994. A full five years before anyone called it the Internet of Things. Decades later, he’s written the definitive handbook for pointing that technology at the planet’s hardest problems: 100 buildable recipes, each with an affordable shopping list, written so that you don’t have to be an engineer to use them.

Rob is available for interviews, panels, and keynotes. Press and media inquiries can be submitted at the bottom of this page.

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Credentials

• “IoT Leader of the Year” – IoT World Conference
• “Top 30 Internet of Things Experts” – Inc. Magazine
• “Top 50 Thought Leader on the Internet of Things” – Thinkers 360
• “The Internet of Things Landscape: Top 100 Individuals and Brands” – Onalytica
• “The Top 50 IoT People to Follow” – IoT Central
• Author of nine books ranging from Mobile to IoT to Business Strategy
• Host of the IoT Coffee Talk podcast with over 300 episodes
• Led IoT at Real Time Data, Microsoft, Hitachi, and Ericsson

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Topics Rob can speak on

Each of these is a segment, not a book summary.

Your town can build its own flood warning system for a few hundred dollars

Rural flooding kills people who had no warning. The sensors, the siting, the alerting — all off the shelf, all in the book, all within reach of a volunteer fire department or a single motivated resident.

Wildfire detection that doesn’t require a satellite budget

Early detection is the whole game. The technology to do it at community scale already exists, costs very little, and almost nobody has deployed it.

“I couldn’t put IoT and sustainability in the same sentence”

2019: a panel of the world’s foremost sustainability leaders, and Rob scrambling in the days beforehand to work out why he belonged in the room. Seven years later, that discomfort became a 500-page book.

A recipe book for saving the planet

Why the barrier to environmental technology was never engineering talent — it was that nobody ever told the people closest to the problem what to buy.

Give a high school class a $200 kit and watch what happens

What changes when students build something that measures the actual world instead of completing an exercise about it.

The man who was doing IoT before it had a name

Connected vending machines in 1994, five years before the term was coined. What three decades of watching a technology mature teaches you about which promises get kept.

From Trident submarines to sensors in the wilderness

Systems that fail silently, at depth, with lives depending on them — and what that taught him about building infrastructure nobody is watching.

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Biography

Three lengths, ready to copy.

Short (25 words)

Rob Tiffany connected machines to the internet in 1994, five years before “Internet of Things” existed. He’s led IoT at Microsoft, Hitachi, and Ericsson.

Medium (75 words)

Rob Tiffany has spent three decades building the Internet of Things — starting with connected vending machines in 1994, five years before the technology had a name. He has led IoT work at Real Time Data, Microsoft, Hitachi, and Ericsson, and is a Navy veteran who served aboard nuclear-armed Trident submarines. His new book, Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things, offers 100 buildable recipes for applying inexpensive sensors to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Long (250 words)

Rob Tiffany has been building the Internet of Things since before it was called that. In 1994 — five years before the term was coined — he was connecting vending machines to networks, an early example of the machine-to-machine work that would eventually reshape entire industries.

His career since has traced the technology’s arc, through Real Time Data, Microsoft, Hitachi, and Ericsson, where he led the company’s IoT efforts. Along the way he shipped smartphones, worked on Azure IoT, and coined the term “edge native” to describe the movement of computation toward devices themselves. ###VERIFY: confirm or cut the Azure IoT and “edge native” details###

Before technology, there was the Navy. Tiffany served aboard nuclear-armed Trident submarines and alongside Navy SEALs on a special operations delivery vehicle — experience that surfaces in both his fiction and his instinct for systems that must work when no one is watching.

The book began with a panel discussion in 2019. Then leading IoT at Ericsson, he found himself onstage with some of the world’s foremost sustainability leaders, scrambling to articulate how connected devices could address the planet’s largest problems. The years since produced keynotes, articles, and talks delivered worldwide — and eventually a book.

Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things is a 500-page manual containing 100 field-ready recipes, each with step-by-step instructions and a shopping list, using inexpensive off-the-shelf sensors to address problems from rural flooding to wildfires to global hunger. Written for non-technical readers, it doubles as a textbook, with questions at the end of every chapter.

Named among Inc. Magazine’s “Top 30 Internet of Things Experts,” he hosts the IoT Coffee Talk podcast and writes at robtiffany.com.

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Suggested interview questions

Use any or none — these are here to save you prep time.

1. You were connecting devices to the internet in 1994. What were you actually doing, and did you have any idea what it would become?
2. You’ve said that before a 2019 panel you were scrambling to figure out how to put IoT and sustainability in the same sentence. What happened in that room?
3. You went from nuclear submarines to Microsoft. How does one lead to the other?
4. The book has 100 recipes with shopping lists. Why did you write it that way instead of as a conventional technical book?
5. Walk me through one. What does a flood warning system actually cost, and who could build it?
6. You insist people don’t need to be technical to do this. Is that really true?
7. You argue that simple analytics beat sophisticated AI for most of these problems. That’s contrarian right now. Make the case.
8. The book covers 11 of the UN’s 17 goals. Why those eleven, and what did you leave out?
9. What’s the single most underrated place where a few sensors would make an immediate difference?
10. Where does this technology get oversold? What have you watched fail?
11. Companies report sustainability numbers they largely can’t verify. How big a problem is that?
12. Who’s doing this well right now — a country, a company, a city?
13. You want this in high school classrooms. What does a student get from building one of these that they don’t get from a textbook?
14. Someone listening wants to help and has no technical background. What’s their first move this week?
15. You’ve described this book as a gift. Thirty years in, are you optimistic?

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Fact sheet

###VERIFY: confirm every figure below against the book and add a source line, or delete the ones you can’t source. Delete this instruction line before publishing.###

• Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater consumption ###VERIFY###
• Up to 50% of water used in crop irrigation is wasted ###VERIFY###
• Buildings are responsible for approximately 27% of operational carbon emissions ###VERIFY###
• Occupancy-driven HVAC control can cut building energy use by up to 30% ###VERIFY###
• Transportation accounts for more than 30% of carbon emissions, roughly a third of it from fleet vehicles ###VERIFY###
• ###ADD: your strongest wildfire statistic###
• ###ADD: your strongest flooding statistic###
• ###ADD: typical per-site hardware cost range across the 100 recipes###

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The Book

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Previous appearances

###FILL: hand-pick your six strongest interviews, keynotes, and podcast appearances. For each one, add the outlet name, the title, the date, and an embedded player or a link. Lead with IoT Coffee Talk. Do NOT use an auto-updating post list here — a booker judges you on your best clip, not your most recent one.###

More at Interviews and Events.

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Media inquiries

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