There are many platforms, like ThingSpeak, that allow uploading and analyzing sensor data. There are numerous APIs available from hundreds of web services. It is not possible for a developer to remember all these APIs and how to use them. A web service called Temboo addresses this problem. It allows access to thousands of APIs from popular web services in a uniform way. These services include Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, etc. You need to select API web services from the list and it gives you the setup instructions so that Temboo gets secure access to that web service. Then it can generate code in many languages that you can use directly inside a thing to call that API. Temboo supports code generation in Python and JavaScript. On BeagleBone, you need to download the Temboo Python and JavaScript SDK and then you can execute generated code inside BeagleBone. This generated code is very small code calling up Temboo with API details and authentication credentials. All the complex API calling logic remains on the Temboo cloud. You get direct results of an API call. So, it saves lots of space and computational power of a thing. Using Temboo, a basic loT app can be developed without writing code. For more information, visit: https://temboo.com. There are similar but high level services available called IFTTT and Zapier. They allow you to create a relationship between various web platforms using GUI. You can automate a task in such a way that in particular conditions, your task gets triggered. For example, create a new note in Evernote when you star any message in Gmail, pause irrigation system automatically if rainfall is predicted by a weather website, and so on. Visit https://ifttt.com/ and https://zapier.com/ for more details.

We worked a lot on BeagleBone connecting to us and online services. We did not cover connectivity with other things. This is also called Machine to Machine (M2M) connectivity. A sensor network can be formed using M2M standards. For very lightweight embedded systems, even the HTTP protocol becomes heavy. There are many lightweight messaging protocols that exist that give security, Quality of Service (QoS), reliability and other benefits to lightweight embedded things. Examples of such protocols are MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), and so on. These protocols are suitable for IoT/M2M applications.