The vision of connecting a large amount of objects on this planet to improve well-being and safety is slowly taking shape. Preceded by a decade-long era of research on low-power low-rate short-range wireless sensor networks, first proprietary and later standards-compliant embedded technologies have successfully been put forward. Cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) is taking this technology to a next step where communication ranges are significantly extended by relying on cellular infrastructure. This position paper discusses these emerging paradigms and highlights how cooperative as well as security requirements are core to their designs