As one of the pioneers of IoT, Rob Tiffany was connecting vending machines to the Internet back in 1994, five years before anyone called it the Internet of Things. He went on to co-design Azure IoT at Microsoft, Lumada IIoT at Hitachi, and the Thunderstruck IoT platform for agriculture at Ericsson. He’s taken his IoT “know-how” and wrote the definitive book for pointing that technology at our planet’s hardest problems: 100 buildable recipes spanning 11 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, each with an affordable shopping list, and 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.
“Rob brings a unique perspective having been part of the IoT from its inception, to the present, and now the
future. I hope we heed his call to action to apply these technologies to the earth’s most pressing
challenges.”RICK BULLOTTA · Co-Founder/CTO, ThingWorx
“Very few books are actionable. This is a rare example of a book that leads you into productive directions. It will set you on the path to building sustainable IoT.”
VINT CERF · Co-Inventor of the Internet
“The Sustainable Development Goals are one of humanity’s clearest shared frameworks for addressing
hunger, health, water, energy, climate, and protecting life on Earth. Rob Tiffany takes a refreshingly
pragmatic approach, showing how commodity IoT technology can be applied immediately, today, to give
communities the evidence they need to spot problems sooner and act faster. Global impact begins locally.”RAY OZZIE · Founder & Executive Chairman, Blues Inc.
Credentials
- “IoT Leader of the Year” – IoT World Conference
- “Top 30 Internet of Things Experts” – Inc. Magazine
- “Endorsed by Vint Cerf and Ray Ozzie”
- Leaders Magic Quadrant for Hitachi Lumada IIoT – Gartner
- “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
- “Top Ten Digital Twin Thought Leader and Influencer” – Thinkers 360
- Host of the IoT Coffee Talk podcast with over 300 episodes
- Led IoT at Real Time Data, Microsoft, Hitachi, and Ericsson
Topics Rob can speak on
Each of these is a segment, not a book summary.
Your town can build its own flood warning system
Rural flooding kills people who had no warning. The sensors, the siting, and the alerting are all off the shelf, all in the book, and all within reach of a volunteer fire department or a single motivated resident.
Precision Agriculture
Decisions and automation based on pest detection, soil moisture + nutrient content help farmers cost-effectively grow more food for a hungry planet with a population growing to almost 10 billion by 2050.
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 512-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 and how to build.
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 the 90s, 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.
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 led IoT at Microsoft, Hitachi, and Ericsson, and is a Navy veteran who served aboard Special Ops and Trident submarines. His new book, Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things, offers 100 buildable recipes for applying inexpensive sensors and analytics to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Long (250 words)
Rob Tiffany has been building the Internet of Things since 1994, connecting vending machines to networks as an early example of the machine-to-machine work that would eventually reshape entire industries. His career 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, designed Azure IoT and Lumada IIoT, and coined the term “edge native” to describe the movement of computation toward devices themselves.
Before technology, there was the Navy. Tiffany served on a Trident submarine and alongside Navy SEALs on a special operations delivery vehicle. Experience that drives 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, talks delivered worldwide, and eventually this book.
Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things is a 512-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. Perfect for high school science projects and university curriculum.Named among Inc. Magazine’s “Top 30 Internet of Things Experts,” he hosts the IoT Coffee Talk podcast and writes at robtiffany.com.
Suggested interview questions
Use any or none. These are here to save you prep time.
- You were connecting devices to the internet in the early 90s. What were you actually doing, and did you have any idea what it would become?
- 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?
- You went from nuclear submarines to Microsoft. How does one lead to the other?
- The book has 100 recipes with shopping lists. Why did you write it that way instead of as a conventional technical book?
- Walk me through one. What does a flood warning system actually cost, and who could build it?
- You insist people don’t need to be an engineer to do this. Is that really true?
- You argue that simple analytics beat sophisticated AI for most of these problems. That’s contrarian right now. Make the case.
- The book covers 11 of the UN’s 17 goals. Why those eleven, and what did you leave out?
- What’s the single most underrated place where a few sensors would make an immediate difference?
- Where does this technology get oversold? What have you watched fail?
- Companies report sustainability numbers they largely can’t verify. How big a problem is that?
- Who’s doing this well right now. A country, a company, a city?
- 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?
- Someone listening wants to help and has no technical background. What’s their first move this week?
- You’ve described this book as a gift to the world. Are you optimistic that these goals can be achieved?
Fact Sheet (The “Why” of this Book)
| Facts | Source |
|---|---|
| Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals | FAO, AQUASTAT / State of the World’s Land and Water Resources |
| 75% of plug-in equipment electricity usage is in private offices and occurs during unoccupied periods | NREL / DOE |
| Federal standards only require bridge integrity inspections to occur every 24 months while invisible water erosion causes 60% of bridge failures | FHWA National Bridge Inspection Standards |
| Fortune Global 500 companies lose roughly $1.4 trillion annually from unplanned downtime equaling 11% of total revenues | Siemens/Senseye True Cost of Downtime 2024 |
| Up to 40% of water used in crop irrigation doesn’t actually reach the crops root zone | FAO |
| Buildings account for about 37% of global energy and process-related CO2 emissions | UNEP Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction |
| 37% of warm-season, heat-related deaths are attributable to human-caused climate change | Vicedo-Cabrera et al., Nature Climate Change 2021 |
| Occupancy-driven HVAC control can cut building energy use by up to 15% | PNNL |
| Transportation accounts for roughly 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions | IEA data via IPCC |
| Wildfires burn over 7 million acres with a firefighting cost of $3 billion annually | National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) |
| The Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, killing 136 people, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic | Associated Press / Texas Tribune coverage, July 2025 |
| As much as 6 billion gallons of freshwater is lost in American cities every day due to leakage | ASCE Report Card for America’s Infrastructure |
| 25% of fruit and vegetables are lost post-harvest before retail | FAO Food Loss Index |
| 2.9 million premature deaths per year are attributed to indoor polluting fuels | WHO |
| 25% of vaccines arrive with degraded efficacy due to cold chain failures | CargoSense, 2019 |
| Schools log over 265,000 medical and behavioral emergency alerts in a single school year | CENTEGIX |
| 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage discharges annually | EPA’s 2004 estimate |
| Lost labor productivity due to extreme heat has reached an estimated $1.09 trillion | Lancet Countdown 2025 |
| The average annual impact of coastal, harmful algal blooms (HAB) in the U.S. is $10 – $100 million with outliers reaching $2.7 billion | NOAA |
| Deforestation represents 10-11% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is the second largest CO2 source after fossil fuels | IPCC/UN |
The Book
Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things
Rob Tiffany
Hardcover · 512 pages · Published August 1, 2026
Publisher: Hood Canal Press
ISBN-13: 979-8996914104 · ASIN: B0H7WFFFJB
Price: $49.95
100 buildable, field-ready IoT recipes with step-by-step instructions and shopping lists, using inexpensive off-the-shelf sensors to address 11 of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Written for non-technical readers, with questions at the end of every chapter for classroom use.
Previous appearances
Unleashing Genius | “The infrastructure that reaches everyone” | 8/6/2026
Beacon Podcast | “Saving the Earth, One IoT Recipe at a Time” | 8/31/2026
IoT & AI Leaders Podcast | “Building the Enterprise Brain with AI, IoT, and Private Data” | 1/21/2026
IoT Coffee Talk | “Agentic Accountability” | 4/7/2021
Media Inquiries
Submit the following form and I’ll get back to you shortly:
