Michelle Barbee-Vargas, Global Client Reference Manager for IBM Watson Internet of Things, gives us her impressions of the Genius of Things event in Boston earlier this month. I arrived in Boston fresh off the train from my small town early Wednesday morning excited to hear about what IBM and our clients are doing in the IoT space. As a Client Reference Manager my day consists of hearing about how our clients are transforming the world using Watson IoT solutions, and I was eager to see some of our work in action. After getting my badge and finding a seat, I made small talk with the person sitting next to me about how IoT is impacting every aspect of our lives. We talked about how amazing it is that companies are intelligently filtering and leveraging massive amounts of data in that pursuit. This ended up being a nice segue into the opening remarks, given by Deon Newman, Vice President of Marketing for Watson IoT.

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Harriet Green is currently general manager of Watson customer engagement, Watson Internet of Things (IoT) and education at International Business Machines Corp. (IBM). Prior to that, she held numerous leadership positions including that of chief executive officer (CEO) of Thomas Cook Group, CEO of Premier Farnell Plc, and senior vice-president of Arrow Electronics Inc. A recipient of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to electronics in 2010, Green was in Mumbai last week to announce IBM's partnership with Unlimit--a business venture of the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Group--to jointly develop IoT solutions. In an interview on the sidelines of that event, she explained why she is excited about IoT, the role that Watson has to play in this space and her thoughts on gender diversity. What made you join IBM after Thomas Cook? IBM was so much of an obvious choice.

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Harriet Green tells us she is very excited about the prospect of the cognitive era. And so she should be. The former Thomas Cook CEO, switched holidays for robots, when she joined IBM in 2015 to head up its Watson, Internet of Things, commerce and education department. "IoT is just an amazing force of the digitisation movement – connecting things to people," she tells Essential Retail. "It's really all about Watson's ability to take vast amounts of structured and unstructured data and process that data, whether its smell, sound, video or text."

If you think Tickle Me Elmo is freaky already, wait until those talking monsters can beat you at Jeopardy!. Sesame Workshop, the educational nonprofit behind Sesame Street and its iconic characters, this week announced a partnership with IBM Watson to develop edtech for pre-school children. Sesame Workshop is no newcomer to tech. The organization previously set up a venture fund in partnership with Collaborative Fund. And they currently offer mobile games, story apps, e-books and digital Family Toolkits to help parents and caregivers navigate challenging topics like autism, incarceration, and more.