A smart home gate capable of opening at the owner’s arrival or transforming your garage into a giant letterbox for online shopping deliveries, a real-time analysis and 3D printing solution to design and produce in-store custom made shoes within a couple of hours, a fully connected and sensorized fire truck capable of measuring resources, a smart platform to control water quality in fish farms, and a powerful platform capable of provisioning any device to any platform in just seconds. These are the first five projects announced to take part in the 2018 Internet of Things (IoT) Solutions World Congress Testbed Area. Held at Fira de Barcelona from 16 to 18 October, the event will display 10 testbeds showing how the IoT will reshape the global economy.

A truck driver for the Schwebel Baking Co. rolled out of Cleveland toward Rochester, N.Y., on a recent day with a trailer full of freshly-made sandwich rolls and buns. Less than an hour into the run, sensors tied to his tractor-trailer started sending a stream of urgent data messages that led the big rig to turn around and head back to the bakery.

There has been more talk in recent years about how blockchain technology can change the world than actual projects showing what it can do.