Samsung recently announced that it will allow more of its products to interact with its competitors’. Starting with this year’s Gear S2, a smart watch, all future devices will be able to connect with any smartphone running Google Inc’s Android operating system 4.4 and higher. Prior to this, Samsung’s smart watches required a Samsung smartphone.

This business decision is part of the larger trend of the growing importance of the Internet of Things (IoT). Internet of Things is a catch-all term to describe

the network of physical objects or “things” embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity, which enable these objects to collect and exchange data.

This includes devices such as smart watches, smart appliances that send information to your phone or computer and smart cars with sensors that process information for you.

Samsung plans to make all of its devices able to connect to each other by 2020 and to have 90% of devices connectable within two years.

To read more about Samsung’s announcement read the article on the Wall Street Journal. To learn more about the Internet of Things check out the recently released white paper by the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Computing in the Physical World Task Force about some of the challenges in the IoT sphere that need to be addressed going forward.