Why the service layer for the Internet of Things matters more than any single device — first given at Webstock, New Zealand.
By the mid-2010s the cost and availability of components meant that within a decade almost every electrical appliance bought for the home would carry some kind of network connection. The talk's argument was that the interesting design work wasn't any single connected object — it was the invisible service layer that had to sit underneath all of them.
Online services are the connective tissue of the physical world, and physical objects are the avatars of online services.
Most "smart home" demos at the time were really just individually networked gadgets, each shouting into the void. The shape that actually mattered was the connective tissue between them.