This Cloud-Based Data Service Makes the IoT Less WTF Relaying real-time data is getting real results.

For a peek at the future of the Internet of Things, check out the label on a bottle of Scotch whisky. Diageo, the global beer and spirits maker behind Guinness, Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff, is experimenting with liquor bottles featuring a proprietary smart label from Thinfilm embedded with a sensor. These sensors can tell Diageo whether a bottle has been opened. By pairing the bottle with a smartphone app, Diageo gets a flood of useful data about how frequently the customer is pouring a drink and on what days and times.

It's a heady amount of data to capture and crunch -- tracking millions of bottles at a time -- but a hell of an opportunity. That's where the new Evrythng platform comes in. Rather than invest in servers, software and developers to organize and parse those billions of bits of data flooding in from their bottle sensors, Diageo sends all its info to Evrythng's cloud-based service, which spits out a real-time dashboard that Diageo's marketing team can act on.

"You do this, and you're turning the nonelectronic into the electronic," says Evrythng co-founder and CMO Andy Hobsbawm. This move to digitizing everyday products is well underway -- research firm Gartner estimates that there are nearly 5 billion IoT devices in consumer and industry hands today, and that figure should jump to 25 billion by 2020.