When a light bulb goes on over the mall

New York

AMONG the many promises of the Internet of Things - a network of Wi-Fi- connected devices and equipment managed with smartphones - is the automation of everyday life, whether finding a parking space or a discounted blouse at the mall or lighting the streets when day shifts to dusk.

But public lighting, it turns out, offers more than illumination. Using a combination of LEDs and big data technology, public lighting is the potential backbone of a system that could use billions of fixtures to collect data about traffic congestion at an intersection or a consumer walking down the cereal aisle, to name just a couple of applications.