Our world is getting more connected and this infographic from Cisco neatly describes some of the benefits. How about your alarm clock resetting itself to wake you up 5 minutes later when a meeting gets delayed and signaling your car to start de-icing itself at the right moment.
Microsoft’s Embedded team is busy working with partners to build systems that do precisely these kinds of things – seamlessly connecting our world and help smooth out the seams of our lives. See my earlier post and video on this.
There math on the Alarm clock scenario is wrong.
If you train is twenty minutes delayed then you need to leave twenty minutes earlier. With the gas fill up and traffic totaling 20 minutes, there are no time gains/losses.
The fact the meeting was pushed back is irrelevant. The train is the limiting factor.
You needed to get gas anyway, so that isn't a loss against the baseline. And the meeting being pushed back is important, because otherwise you would have needed to catch an earlier train rather than the delayed one.