The term “internet of things” came to life more by desperate accident than design. When Kevin Ashton was a junior manager at Procter & Gamble Co., he came up with an idea to place radio frequency identification tags into the company’s numerous products and connect them to the internet.

“The challenge I faced as a young executive with a crazy idea was how to explain that to senior management,” said Ashton (pictured), who created the WEMO Home Automation platform and co-founded cleantech startup Zensi, an energy sensing and monitoring company that was acquired by Belkin International Inc. in 2010.

So he retitled his presentation from “Smart Packaging” to “Internet of Things” and the rest is tech history.

“The good news was, about 1998, they’d heard of the internet and they’d heard that the internet was a thing you were supposed to be doing,” Ashton recalled. “I basically took the PowerPoint presentation with me all over the world to convince other people to get on board and somehow the name stuck.”

Ashton spoke with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the LiveWorx 18 event in Boston. They discussed the continued use of RFID tags in industrial environments and how software is becoming a key element in mass production. (* Disclosure below.)

More RFID tags than smartphones

Ashton’s ambitious concept for connected packaging has evolved to a place where IoT is now ubiquitous and invisible. “There’s a billion more RFID tags made in the world than smartphones every year,” Ashton said. “It’s warehouses; it’s factories; it’s behind the scenes.”

With companies such as PTC Inc. navigating change and adapting its technology to meet growing demand for IoT platforms, the stage is set for major changes in manufacturing, according to Ashton. Software as a design tool will become a critical implement for mass production.

“That design on the screen will be plugged right into the production line, and you’ll push a button and make a million [items],” Ashton explained. “There’s this seamless transition happening from imagining things using software to actually manufacturing them using software, which is very much the core of what the IoT is about.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the LiveWorx 18 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the LiveWorx event. Neither PTC Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE