Atmel’s Tom Vu on wireless standards:

“Companies like Atmel play an important role in creating the building blocks for embedded control and connectivity by means of progressing the ARM / AVR / Wireless / Touch portfolio of products, all of which are the necessary thinking and connecting glue of the Internet of Things. Internet of Things has a large appetite for ultra low power connectivity using wireless standards.  Wireless Sensor Networks are key technology for the IoT, so much that WSN was probably the number one issue in the early deployment. There are many competing standards: Zigbee, SA100.11, WirelessHART, IrDA, Wireless USB, Bluetooth, Body Area Network, MiWi, Wi-Fi Direct, NFC, Z-Wave, EnOcean, KNX, XRF, Bluetooth, WiFi, RFID, RFM12B, IEEE 802.15.4 (supporting WPAN such as ZigBee, ISA100.11a, WirelessHART, IrDA, Wireless USB, Bluetooth, Z-wave, Body Area Network, and MiWi).”

you can find the whole article here:

http://blog.makezine.com/2013/04/22/the-internet-of-things-why-does-it-matter/