At last! We eventually have a document that vulgarizes the Internet and the Web of Things, oh JOY! I’ll be able to illustrate to mom/sister/grand children (I’ll have to wait a while for that though ) what I’ve been doing for the last 7 years of my life without having them go like: “hmmm oooookayyyyyy”! The one and only problem: the article is in … French. Désolé!

(Source: SVJ)

When Olivier Lascar, from Science et Vie Junior asked if I would be interested in participating to an article about the Internet of Things targeted towards teens I just couldn’t resist, especially since, as a kid, I never missed an issue of the magazine! A couple of interviews hours later and here we go: si vous parlez Français, je suis sûr que vous allez comme moi aimer cet article. It is a savory mix between vulgarization and facts, something that anyone (I believe) can more or less relate to, with plenty of well picked examples. The magazine is still on sale (SVJ 268), so get a printed copy. If you can’t, SVJ provided us with a free PDF version for our readers: L’Internet des Objets, SVJ 268

Remarks and commentaires are very welcome, as comme toujours!

When Massimiliano Ventimiglia (aka. Max, from H-art), first asked me to give a keynote at the BTO (Buy Tourism Online) 2011 conference, I was rather puzzled: what can the Web of Things bring to tourism? What innovation can we fuel in this rather distant field?

Well, after several brainstorming sessions with the crew at Evrythng, we had so many application ideas that I had to filter most of them in order not to overload the talk!

Not convinced? Well then make sure you watch the video below (I’m starting, in English, at 5:58:00 but if you understand Italian make sure to listen to the other talks in the session!):

or at least have a look at the slides:

Any other ideas of how we could contribute to Tourism 3.0? Let us know below

A while ago, in an interview for Postscapes I was talking about a start-up, good friend of ours and spin-off of our research group at ETH which was building plant monitoring sensors. I had the chance to test them and was rather amazed by this practical, truly Web of Things type of project. They are just about to ramp-up production of their first hardware product – a WiFi Plant Sensor. Internal sources told me it’ll be launched in Spring 2012 but we’ll keep you updated on this one.

Meanwhile, the guys are currently launching a Web version of their plant monitoring iPhone App. It’s currently in private beta, but we have invites for 50 Web of Things readers. Just visit my.koubachi.com and enter the code WOT2011. So WoTters and plant lovers, make sure to check it out!

To get a taste of it, check the video of the neat iPhone app below (@Koubachi: How about an Android version? Pleazzze!)

A side effect of running the Web of Things blog is to get a daily number of “request for articles” (i.e., requests for free advertisement on your blog of my product). Most of them are totally completely and entirely unrelated to the Web of Things (and Vlad has a pretty interesting standard reply-mail for these ;-P) but once in a while you get a little pearl that is definitely worth talking about. We got two of those lately: one being rather serious, the other being awesomely delicious! Let me share the latter with you today and keep the other for later on.

When Johannes Schoening (a good research friend of mine) first mailed me about the project, I had to laugh for half an hour (before starting to wonder what kind of drugs he was on). But then he sent me a package, containing a sample of his invention: the first, Web-connected (ok, through a proxy but still) …. cookies! The idea is so simple, but just so nice: a box, full of ingredients for cooking cookies and containing some eatable QRCodes. These standard codes are resolved to a URL than can then be redirected to any online content through the QKies Website (German only, sorry about that!). Can you think of any better way to invite your friends to your next party or of announcing some happy event to your best (geeky) friends?

QKies – sag’s mit Keksen from r3 media on Vimeo.

Besides being a neat little product there is also one important thing we can learn from it: simplicity is the way to go forward to slowly but steadily bring the Web of Things to the masses! Big up Johannes

Part 1: Cloud & REST | Part 2: HTML5 WebSockets | Part 3: Physical Mashups

A few weeks ago, I started posting a series about the project we were working on while at MIT: applying the Web of Things patterns and blueprints to the RFID global network (EPC Network). Better late than never, here is the last part of the posts series: Physical Mashups.

Physical Mashups are applications unifying the Web of today and tomorrow’s Web of Things. Tech-savvies, i.e., end-users at ease with new technologies, can create Physical Mashups by composing virtual and physical services. Following the trend of Web 2.0 participatory services and in particular Web mashups, users can create applications mixing real-world devices such as home appliances or sensors with virtual services on the Web.

Thanks to the deployment of the EPC software stack in the cloud and the implementation of a RESTful architecture for RFID, we can now implement Physical Mashup editors for enabling users to flexibly model use-cases of RFID infrastructures. Let us think for instance of an Electronic Article Surveillance system (aka EAS). For this use-case, we design new mashup building-blocks:

These modules were implemented as building-blocks a modified version of the nice Clickscript mashup editor. Reducing interfaces of the EPC Network to Web interfaces enables each building block to be implemented with a small amount of JavaScript code. Using these building-blocks and other basic blocks, we can implement several EAS use-cases within a few clicks. As shown in the figure below, the building-blocks of the RFID mashup editor communicate with several components of the EPC Cloud Infrastructure. First, the RFID-reader block subscribes to the t-pusher HTML5 WebSockets push service using a particular reader ID (e.g., exit-gate). As a consequence, it gets pushed all the RFID events for this reader. The EPCIS block is then used to check whether the pushed RFID number (i.e., EPCs) represent goods that were already sold. To check this, the block uses a RESTful HTTP request on our open-source EPCIS Webadapter.

If it is the case, nothing happens. If it isn’t the case (i.e., the goods were stolen), the Video Camera block is triggered. This components represents a Webcam that can be used to take snapshots through a RESTful API. The URI of the snapshot is then sent to all subscribers of a particular topic (i.e., URI) through t-Pusher. As an example we developed a small mobile Web application with Sencha Touch which subscribes to the topic and loads the corresponding image alongside with the EPC number of the stolen good (see mobile phone in the figure below). Such an application can be used to push information about the theft to all staff members in a store.

Once a mashup has been successfully created and tested locally with Clickscript, it can be exported to our Physical Mashup Engine where is it going to be deployed remotely executed. This illustrates well the benefits of transforming every standard in the EPC Network to offer RESTful Web APIs: development is streamlined to Web development and cross-integration with existing services on the Web (e.g., social networks, visualization tools, could infrastructures, mashups) becomes very straightforward.

The full use-case was tested in a lab deployment at the MIT Auto-ID Labs featuring a standard gate (LLRP) RFID reader and an off-the-shelf Webcam as shown in the figure below. The average observed RTT (round trip time: from the reader, to the Amazon Cloud instance, through the mashup engine and finally to the mobile Web application) was around 1 second. However, it is worth noting that this RTT stronlgy depends on factors such as the available connection bandwidth, the type of instances used on Amazon EC2, the current load of the cloud appliance, etc. Since these factors cannot all be controlled this is a real challenge for IoT / WoT applications in the cloud and we are eager to hear about your real-world experiences in the comments!

For more details about the project, have a look at the published paper or the slides below:

Dear all,
In the middle of our thesis-writing, we gave an interview on the Web of Things to the american Discover magazine for a special issue on the invisible earth. The interview just got published and I wanted to share some thoughts about it with you.

Actually it was a really fun interview and came out as a really fun article. No rocket science but a funny, critical and futuristic look at the Internet of Things and the evolution towards the Web of Things. Beyond the fact that David H. Freedman (the author) definitely masters the art of vulgarization, he was asking me a tricky question about half-way in the interview:

What are the killer apps of the Internet/Web of Things?

A simple and not exactly rare question, so I came up with a number of traditional answers taken from our previous work and prototypes such as: drastically simplifying home automation and expending the cross-devices possibilities, making end-user things programming a reality, allowing (real-time) and tracking of every goods on the planet, making cities/transportation/agriculture smarter, linking objects and people through social networks, finding your keys anywhere in the world, etc, etc.

I also gave him a number of links to great startups in the field and briefly described some of their products: Evrythng, IoBridge, ThingWorx, Sen.se, Koubachi, Mirasense, OpenPicus, the Sun Spot crew, etc, etc, etc!

No way! He was still not finding a true killer app in those. My take is that although the world is almost ready for the Web of Things, we (as a community) still have to get a bit more down to earth, thinking beyond platforms about very simple use-cases that we can implement today already and that people can relate to.
Suggestions anyone? Let’s kick off the discussion!

Enjoy the article online as well:

	Read the article online >
The Internet and the Web of Things

In a little more than a week (12.06.2011) we will kick-start the second international workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2011).

2011 is the year of many WoT realizations and this is reflected in the, we believe, rather thrilling program of WoT 2011. Here is a brief preview of WoT is to expect

Morning: after a short welcome introduction we will deep into real world architectures with three papers discussing how smart things can actually be Web-enabled and what are the architectures and technologies that make it possible.

We will then discuss the Social Web of Things as well as the Semantic Web of Things with three papers illustrating how things are blending with the social graph and leveraging the semantic Web.

Afternoon: after a nice lunch, full of HTTP requests here and there, we will be discussing actual deployments of the WoT as well as its concrete applications. Four papers will be presented, ranging from how business processes can leverage the WoT, cloud computing and REST to how users can be put at the very center of the Web of Things.

Finally, we will have a great and open demo session where the participants will be invited to demonstrate concrete and working (well half-working is ok as well) WoT prototypes.

The fact that this year is the year of WoT realizations is also reflected by the fact that a number of companies, developing, deploying and selling WoT technologies will be present.
Hans Scharler from ioBridge will present their rather impressive Thingspeak platform. ThingWorx will present their professional platform for connecting the real-world devices to business applications.

This teaser would not be complete without showcasing the hackaton that we organize before the workshop (11.06.2011) where we expect lots of creative participants to build innovative apps on top of Web of Things prototypes and products like the Sun Spots (thanks to Oracle for providing them!) and the disruptive Sen.se platform.

Can’t wait to be there!

Full program of the Web of Things Workshop (WoT 2011) available here! and description of the hackaton here!

Our friends from Oberon microsystems (who designed yaler), just released a tech book (just like we love) about they experience with hacking around the Internet of Things. The book called “Getting Started with the Internet of Things” which is publish by our favorite nerditors O’Reilly Media is available in PDF and paper, and is written by Cuno Pfister.

Learn to program embedded devices using the .NET Micro Framework and the Netduino Plus board. Then connect your devices to the Internet with Pachube, a cloud platform for sharing real-time sensor data. All you need is a Netduino Plus, a USB cable, a couple of sensors, an Ethernet connection to the Internet—and your imagination.

This looks lovely (other than the reference to the thing that starts with dot and ends with net and we’re looking forward to check it out. Especially as they just announced a hosted Yaler instance (try.yaler.net, register here to get an account), I guess to try the examples in the book, so that makes this book even crunchier.

Dear readers,

First of all let us apologize for the infrequent posts. We are both in “final PhD writing mode” which is a rather time-consuming activity right in a time where the Web of Things is getting a real hot topic!

Hence, only a small post to point you to a book. In an earlier post, we presented the Web of Things cookbook, which is in fact part of a book that just got published called: “Architecting the Internet of Things”.

The book is a nice surprise. It is not focused, like our chapter, on technical problems but rather gives an overview of where the Internet of Things comes from and where it might go in the (very?) near future. While we do not agree on everything in this book (but hey, mixes of perspectives usually lead to the right one! ) you should definitely browse it if you are an IoT / WoT researcher and especially if you need an easy to read overview of what researchers do in this field.

You can find it on Amazon or directly on Springer.

Part 1: Cloud & REST | Part 2: HTML5 WebSockets | Part 3: Physical Mashups

Since last summer, I had the chance to work at the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity (LMP) in the Auto-ID Labs sub-group, working with the lab associate director Christian Floerkemeier and Prof. Sanjay Sarma. Six month after the beginning of the project we reached a fist milestone and thought it would be good to wrap up what we did there.

The idea of the project is to study how Web and Web of Things blueprints (i.e., architectural patterns) can help to foster the adoption of the EPC Network by making it simpler to deploy and develop upon.

The EPC (Electronic Product Code) Network is probably one of the most comprehensively standardized IoT (Internet of Things) infrastructures: it offers standards that address every steps from encoding unique number on RFID tags, to reading them with standardized readers (LLRP), aggregating events (ALE) to persiting events in their business context and make them available for applications (EPCIS).

Recently, RFID is getting a second youth, its hype phase passed, it is now slowly coming to maturity in a number of applications. A lot of which combine RFID with other sensors and actuators. Not to forget the recent announcements of Google to boost the adoption of NFC (Near Field Communication, another type of RFID tags) by adding native Android OS support for NFC readers embedded in mobile phones (e.g., in the Nexus S).

However, while the adoption the hardware (EPC tags and LLRP readers) is progressing significantly, the adoption of the software standards is yet to take off especially for SMEs.

We believe that part of the reasons for this lack of adoption is the complexity of EPC Network infrastructures. As an example, the leading open-source implementation of the EPC software standards, Fosstrak, requires a total of 12 software components to be installed, configured and maintained. This was our starting point: what if Web and Web of Things architectural blueprints would make the EPC Network simpler to deploy, maintain and develop upon.

After looking a little more a the pain-points of EPC Network deployments we discovered that we could help on at least three of them with Web (of Things) remedies. We came up with 4 different remedies. In this post we look at two of them and will look at the others in a next post.

Cloud Computing and Virtualization to Reduce Installation, Configuration and Maintenance Costs/Hassle

We used virtualization (sometimes called Private Cloud) to create a development virtual machine, instead of hours of installation, the EPC dev virtual machine lets you test and develop with the EPC software stack within a few minutes.

We then used Cloud Computing (Utility Computing in a Public Cloud) to create an Amazon EC2 instance of a whole EPC back-end called EPC Cloud Appliance. Instead of weeks of installation by domain-experts, you now

1. buy an (LLRP) standard reader,
2. log onto Amazon EC2, select the EPC Cloud virtual machine fire it up on any number of appliances and off you go, you are ready to create your RFID applications, backed by a scalable, standard, EPC software infrastructure.

RESTful Interfaces to Simplify Application Development

Next, we wanted to simplify the currently rather complex interfaces to enable new types of apps using the EPC Network such as mobile apps, apps on sensor nodes or Web applications. The pattern we used for this is REST. Like in most Web of Things projects, we developed a RESTful architecture for the EPC Network in order to provide interfaces to RFID data and devices that are lightweight, easy to use, and easy to integrate with existing services on the Web.

Our first step in this space was to RESTify the information service of the EPC Network (the EPCIS) in a component called: EPCIS Webadapter as described here open-source software framework here. Using the Webadapter, every tagged product, reader, location, etc. gets a unique and resolvable URL.
Try it for yourself on live data by clicking the link below:
restepc.webofthings.com/location/urn:ch:sap:regensdorf:frc/reader/urn:ch:sap:regensdorf:frc:shopfloor/time/2010-12-28T12:23:28.000Z/event

With this interface, RFID data can be consumed by any Web client such as browsers, mobile phones, sensor nodes, etc.

In part 2 of this post we talk about how we used the Real-Time Web and Physical Mashups blueprints to further help easy Web development on top of the EPC Network.

You can also sneak into the presentation of the full project below.

Over the last few years we had the chance (and increasingly have) to meet plenty of WoT researchers but also people who work for companies developing Web of Things software and products. This is the first in a series of posts where want to share with you a few companies and their people that we had the chance to visit and liked a lot.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to visit the Oracle Labs (Ex-Sun Labs) in Menlo Park, California. There I had the chance to meet, live, some of the actors of the Sun Spot project such as Vipul Gupta, Ron Goldman, Pete St pierre, Randy Smith. Sun Spots are wireless sensor nodes that have the particularity to be:

1. Very powerful (for sensor nodes)!
2. Java programmable (end to end, they run the Squawk JVM!)
3. Rather Web of Things “compliant” and friendly

Getting better insights on the fact that the project was more alive than ever (it seems like Oracle, who inherited from the labs, is keen on investigating the Internet/Web of Things) was very nice. They also gave me the chance to have a first look at the latest generation of Sun Spots, that they are shipping since last week (I was even shooting a nice un-boxing video there but in the process of not properly unmounting my SD card I entirely lost it ).

We definitely liked some of the new features such as:

1. A faster CPU (now at 133 MHz)
2. The 8 Mb of Flash and 1 Mb of RAM
3. The tri-colors light sensor
4. The onboard speaker…

This new hardware release goes alongside with a new software release named Yellow, find more info about both here.

Finally, we also were happy to be able to count on the labs support with devices for our Web of Things workshop and hackathon, more about this to come but until then, long live the Spots

Besides the fact that we are big Sun SPOTs fans, we also got increasingly more interested in the OpenPicus platform, not only because the constant motivation of the project founder Claudio Carnevali is impressive but mostly because the FlyPort (the OpenPicus wireless sensor node) is featuring a WiFi module and a Webserver (according to them our WoT community influenced them on that point) which makes it a nice, compliant, Web of Things device.

Yesterday, the OpenPicus project released their free, open-source, IDE which supposedly makes it really easy to develop Web of Things applications backed by Wireless Sensor Nodes.

The team asked us to post some news about the IDE, instead of that, I decided to test it and report here:

1. Got the IDE here. First small decrease of my tremendous motivation: the IDE is .NET/Windows-based, hem, slightly strange choice provided the WoT community is probably 50% mac, 50% Linux (or it least I’d like to believe so), but let’s not be so futile, and simply remove the dust off my XP VMWare virtual machine.
2. The IDE requires the .NET 4 framework which installed smoothly on my VM.
3. Unzip, sorry un-rar (Duh! Ok, let’s download 7 Zip) the IDE.
4. No install required, neat, the IDE starts smoothly. It has a familiar Office 2007 / 2010 look and feel. It’s actually not bad, simple and quite efficient. The code-completion works fine which really helps discovering the OpenPicus and FlyPort API.
5. I plug my FlyPort for the first time in my VM, again it is smoothly discovered as a USB/Serial port, which means the install does not need any additional driver.
6. This video, guides you through your first FlyPort project. The whole process ran smoothly on my VM as well (for people using Linux like me and wanting to use the OpenPicus IDE in a VM, make sure you get a WiFi dongle, as VMWare maps any native WiFi interface of your computer to a wired network in the guest operating system.
7. The video also shows how to deploy the native Webserver to the FlyPort, which takes, in essence, 3 clicks and is entirely customizable so that you can make your services truly RESTful, very neat!

To sum up, I need more experience with the device to really judge it (coming soon!) but it seems like a very good platform for easly prototyping Web of Things applications, very good job! On the drawbacks I would have liked a Java, cross-platform, version of the IDE and Flyport stack rather than a .Net one but I must admit that the IDE’s simplicity and integration is impressive and after all what only really matters to us is the out-of-the-box ability to hide the FlyPort’s internal language behind a Web API (more to come on that part as well, I’ll test the FlyPort against the Web of Things cookbook!).

A few weeks ago we described our framework for making the standard RFID network (EPC Network) part of the Web of Things.

We are happy to announce that the framework was accepted to be part of the leading Open Source RFID infrastructure (Fosstrak) and is available on the Fosstrak forge.

In order to foster adoption we created two useful resources, in the user and developer guide you’ll find a detailed description of the API and install procedure (basically 4 clicks if you already have a running Tomcat instance).
Additionally, an introduction video details the features of the framework and showcases an application (an RFID Business Intelligence Dashboard that you can test live on our Google App Engine Instance).

Beyond the software, the fact that the EPCIS Webadapter offers a RESTful API for a service that is currently offered through a WS-* (WSDL + SOAP) interface makes it an interesting case-study. Indeed, we lack (we as a community, since this was one of the conclusions of WoT 2010) a better understanding (and proving?) what the benefits of RESTful architectures are when compared, from a developer point of view, to other systems such as WS-* or Big Web Services.

Thus, if you do use the EPCIS Webadapter, please let us know what your experience was in this online form, your feedback is very valuable!. We already got some early insights from another study, but that is going to be the matter of a next post and paper

In our second talk at IoT 2010 we presented a project we kept warm (and working on) for a little while now: bringing RFID to the Web. Not RFID in the sense of small RFID readers like the nice phidget reader meant for prototyping, but the world of standardized RFID networks and in particular the EPC (Electronic Product Code) Network and its EPCIS (Information Service).

The Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS) is a standard which defines interfaces enabling RFID events to be captured and queried. The query interface, implemented with WS-* Web services, enables business applications to consume and share data within and across companies, to form a global network of independent EPCIS instances. However, the interface limits the application space to the rather powerful platforms which understand WS-* Web services.

In the EPCIS-Webadapter (aka. REST-Adapter) project, we propose seamlessly integrating this network into the Web by designing a RESTful (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture for the EPCIS. Using this approach, each query, tagged object, location or RFID reader gets a unique URL that can be linked to, exchanged in emails, browsed for, bookmarked, etc. Additionally, this paradigm shift allows Web languages like HTML and JavaScript to directly use RFID data to fast-prototype light-weight applications such as mobile applications or Web mashups. We illustrate these benefits with a JavaScript mashup platform that integrates several services on the Web (e.g., Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.) with RFID data to allow managers along the supply chain and customers to get comprehensive data about their products.

You’ll find the paper (btw, IoT 2010 best paper award nominee) here the slides below as well as the project description, source code, and live demo on our new “projects” page. As I moved to the MIT Auto-ID labs to work on this project for about 6 month, there will be more coming, stay tuned!

(btw, thanks to Vipul from Oracle Labs, for coming up with the nice title of this post )

It’s a known fact that we (or at least) love Sun SPOTs. Not the ones on the sun but the Sensor nodes developed by Sun Labs (now/soon Oracle Labs?) a couple of years ago.

Speaking Java better than any language out there (including French ), when the first fully-natively-java Wireless Sensor Nodes came out you can imagine my joy. Since then I can’t remember a paper we wrote that does not use Spots in its prototype! We worked quite a lot with them, created several stacks to make them “Web-enabled” and RESTful, to make them part of the Web of Things!

When we had the chance to meet part of the Sun SPOTs crew at WoT 2010, they told us they were about to release some software to be able to apply and experiment with the Web of Things concepts.

Well, here we go! The Sun SPOTs now have their own WoT stack. Probably the most important innovation when compared to the already available WoT stacks for the SPOTs (such as ours), is a Nano App Server. Inspired from the Java App Servers, which are basically Web Servers on steroids, it lets you register Web Apps which run on the nodes or on the gateway (i.e., host PC). The Web Apps are then responsible for handling part of the URL subspace (e.g., /…/blink which would be an app for making the SPOTs LEDs blink) and serving the Spots functionality in a RESTful manner.

The Nano App Server also offers support for great functionalities that definitely make sense for such small nodes such as HTTP compression or built-in support for caching!

All of this is best summarized on Vipul Gupta’s blog. Tutorial files and coding exercises are also available on this blog. Last but not least, a presentation guides your through the most important parts and steps, enjoy!

Ok, so we talked a lot about integrating sensor nodes to the Web, then about integrating home appliances to the Web or about integrating industrial machines to the Web.

How about simple, dumb, traditional objects? Well the community is working on it! As an example, one of our latest projects is to Web-enable the global RFID networks (EPC) so that every RFID-tagged object becomes a true citizen of the World Wide Web (see our paper at IoT 2010). I’ll tell you more about this project soon but meanwhile I want to talk about even more dumb objects: those tagged with barcodes only!

We are big fans of barcode scanning. Most of our projects (like the home mashups project) use them as a “bootstrap” for obtaining the entry address of smart things (i.e., the root URL). We are even bigger fans of mobile barcode scanning because, actually, the mobile phone is probably the best interface to smart things out there.
But until today, barcode scanning (and especially 1-D barcode scanning) was a rather painful/frustrating/oh-my-gosh-I-wont-do-it-again process!

Say hello to Mirasense! Knowing the guys behind it, we actually knew about their superior scanning technology a while ago (and could really test it!). Now, they are going live on the iPhone platform with the Scandit free iTunes US Appstore app.

Scandit shows that barcode scanning is about to become a real input modality, a commodity. The app manages to scan almost any barcode in any situation, check it out:

Yeah I know the video looks suspicious and you can show whatever you want on a video. But hey your devoted blogger had the chance to test it live. Still not believing me? Well this is backed by a scientific paper at the IoT 2010 conference. Still dubious? Well just install it then!

While this does not yet address the pure “Web” aspect of barcode tagged object (i.e., how do you create RESTful Web APIs to access authoritative data, traces, etc. about these objects), in their Scandit app, they further integrate the scanner with a lot of different services and information on the Web (BestBuy, social networks, twitter, etc.) turning the shopping experience into a giant and automated data mashup:

Having recently moved from iPhone to Android and feeling sooooo good about it, I just can’t wait for the Android version to come out (apparently it’s planned).

We are organizing the First International Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things at the IOT 2010 conference, at the end of this month, and we would love to invite you all to submitting a demo or a paper.

Unlike the WoT2010 which brought together WoT researchers, we emphasize here concrete applications practical solutions that can be built on top of WoT. We particularly welcome real-world deployments that can highlight the plus/minuses of using WoT as infrastructure for a scalable urban-scale data collection and processing.

We would like to bring closer practitioners in the area of smart cities (industries that build the various components of smart cities such as infrastructure, sensor, software, middleware, hardware, etc), along with researchers in various fields related to networked objects (that’s why we do this workshop in the context of IOT conference), and with architects/designers/urban planners that are in charge of designing the points of contact between citizens and this invisible (& growing) digital infrastructure.

The outcome would be for participants to get to know the latest trends in research/technology (& each other) and at the same time get practical insights about the challenges in building such scalable (city-wide+) infrastructures to collect, process, share and store huge quantities of real-time data from various urban sources. Pretty much like a combination between twitter and data.gov, but for sensor data which emphasizes open access to real-time data streams from cities (public APIs that anyone can access and code with).

As we wanted to avoid a “classic” mini-conf like workshop to enable active participation, we have been preparing a few surprises that will allow you to get your hands dirty and join the conversations and hands-on sessions with world-class experts in this area. More to follow soon.

Also, we are still looking for sponsors that could cover the travel costs of our keynote speaker, so if you know someone or are interested to sponsor us in exchange of some promotion/visibility, please get in touch with us (info@{guesswhat}.com would do).

Read more on the official call for papers/demos.

The OpenPicus community released a wi-fi module called FlyPort. It is a small device that uses the Microchip PIC24F (256K Flash+16K Ram, 16Mips@32Mhz) and MRF24WB0MA/RM WI-FI certified module. FlyPort runs a wireless Stack (TCP/IP version 5.25 from Microchip) and has a 26 Pin connector for easy prototyping. Applications and libraries are open source and can be freely downloaded from the openpicus website. Programmers have full control of the wi-fi module, thus the Flyport can act as tiny Web server and client that can directly interact with other Web resources directly, without requiring a gateway. Besides, this project has a social aim too, they give away free development kits for students and universities that want to develop their applications on this platform, as long as they want to share the code and results with the community (mail us if you are interested by such a kit, or just write in the comments and we’ll get back to you). According to the project’s founder, Claudio Carnevali, the Flyport will be available soon to a wider public for less than 30 Euros each.

We have seen more and more projects around embedded wi-fi modules, and we believe this direction will have a strong impact in making the Web of Things happen. For a few bucks more, every electric appliance out there could host one such wifi module on-board, and coupled with a Web server on it this. For example, companies such as RedPine, GainSpan, ZeroG Wireless (that has been recently acquired by microchip), or G2 Microsystems are among the key players to watch in this area, and I’m sure that we’ll see a proliferation of Web-enabled appliances in the next years [ thou, smart fridge, will u finally become real?? ]

Now that wi-fi chips are virtually easy to integrate in appliances, the next important step to make WoT happen is to also offer a free, easy to use high-level programming environment that would allow people to fast prototype Web of Things applications on top of the wi-fi substrate – just like the Arduino did, but on a even higher level. Instead of learning how to read and write signal to digital & analog pins, developers could interact with these devices simply through a RESTful Web API. After a great discussion I had last october with Massimo Banzi (co-inventor of the arduino), the next stage is clearly a wifi version of the Arduino (nothing disclosed about that yet), which would make it straightforward to also run a Web server on it. I can’t wait for the day this will happen.

[Thanks to Claudio Carnevali for providing us this information and we're looking forward to the evolution of the OpenPicus project]

As in our project we needed a (quickly setup, reliable, and flexible) backend system to store sensor data, I played around with CouchDB as I wanted to explore a RESTful data store. As a matter of fact, the version 1.0 was released just a few minutes before I installed it. First impression, wow. Sleek, pretty fast, damn easy to use, flexible as any software should be (not the conventional click and run install, but damn well documented installation). I have to admit I’m impressed by the quality of this release, just as much as by the documentation.

I think this is the best option out there to store relatively low-frequency changing data, such as device metadata, information about locations, etc, but I really wonder how it performs for high-frequency data, such as sensor samples. Considering that it is a document store (for JSON data for example), I wondering how it handles the storage of thousands of incoming “documents” per second. This question is certainly worth exploring and I will hopefully be able to share some insights on this question soon.

In the meanwhile, we are looking forward to hear about your experiences with Web-oriented datastores.

I gave a few thoughts recently about what the iPad (& iPhone) represent for the WoT.

NIWEA

As our friend Hannes Gassert awesomely summarized it recently, NIWEA (Native Interoperable Web Applications) is the sweetest method to build interactive applications for all things mobile, plus NIWEA feels like it was made for the Web of Things. In a nutshell, NIWEA are simple Web applications (developed only with HMTL/CSS/Javascript) designed to look & feel like a “real” (native) mobile application. This not only provides a great environment to develop easily apps for the iPhone/Pad, Android, Blackberry & co, but in particular it is the perfect platform to fast prototype various interactive applications for the WoT.

What it means for developers is that one doesn’t need to learn cocoa & co. and similar weird & proprietary languages for each target platform anymore. It takes time & money to develop an iPhone app (thus the designers’ nightmare when the client says “me too want iPhone app”). As our colleague Erik Wilde mentioned, many apps in the Apple Store could be implemented as Web apps directly (games are a different story and might need to be native for performance reasons). Besides, HTML5 seems to be a pretty versatile, lightweight, and powerful alternative to Flash, and full HTML5 support on future mobile browsers would be the perfect trick against the lack of support for flash in the iPhone (not everyone seemed to agree with the end of flash though, maybe now things have changed 2 years later…).

There’s been a significant move towards more and more simple Web apps directly for mobiles (especially as mobile internet has pretty much become a commodity), and what we see is only the beginning. Simply look at the tremendous progress in Javascript recently: more and more server-side javascript engines, tons of libraries for animations, pretty plotting & vector graphics, etc. Additionally, with all the noise around Real-time Web, highly responsive event-driven Web applications can be developed, especially with the Web Sockets in HTML5, which is much cleaner than Comet, therefore paving the way for a new generation of versatile and mashable-by-design Web content distribution platforms.

Beautiful Interfaces

There is a lot going especially around sleek framework for building interactive and visually appealing UI for mobile devices, among which jQtouch, iui, or Sencha (pretty much everything about this was said by Jonathan Stark at our favourite sxsw’s presentation).

Sencha Touch Introduction. “Sencha Touch allows your web apps to look and feel like native apps. Beautiful user interface components and rich data management, all powered by the latest HTML5 and CSS3 web standards and ready for Android and Apple iOS devices. Keep them web-based or wrap them for distribution on mobile app stores.“

Caching & the N of NIWEA (native)

Using Web apps for mobile device might give the impression that the mobile *must* have Web connectivity at all times, which obviously wouldn’t be that practical. The simplest solution to have stand-alone (offline) Web apps is to use PhoneGap (PG) or Titanium which are the first steps towards NIWEA.

PhoneGap is described on the original site as:

An open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iTouch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs.

An interesting alternative is to leverage the caching features of HTML/HTTP, so you can explicitly specify what data can be cached locally on a devices and for how long. But there’s a long road ahead towards a common definition (& rigorous/uniform implementation on all browsers). This is definitely an area that deserves through exploration, in particular for how to optimize Web apps rendering and sensor integration for various classes of devices.

iPad is more than just a big iPod

An essential virtue of the iPad was to open our eyes towards what it means beyond just an iPhone with a bigger screen, especially in terms of HCI. As explained by Matt Jones, the novel types of multi-users/-touch interactions enabled by such a larger display offers a fresh perspective for devices, an interactive surface you can share and use with others. Another excellent example is the great iPad radios (sorry, in german), an intriguing Web radio that augments the listening experience with pictures of the singer, and has been developed by our friends at liip (check this awesome “behind-the-curtains” overview of radios).

If you think of the Chumby as a great platform for interactive information display, then NIWEA is Chumby on steroids. Not only because it runs on many more platforms, but especially because the development life-cycle of NIWEA apps is so much shorter. And trust me, there are many Web developers out there waiting eagerly [for NIWEA frameworks] to put their talent and build great Web apps for pervasive screens.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Looking at the Mag+ concept video above offers a great glimpse into the future of media. In this gorgeous example, a digital surface such as the iPad offers countless new ways to distribute and interact with information, while gaining back the clean and aesthetically pleasing features of print media – the tangible experience. In our world overloaded with information, subtle, appealing, and efficient interfaces are required to interact with all types of media, and a flexible solution accessible to most is needed to maximize its utility.

An iPhone is useful only when you use it, else it’s just there, doing nothing. Because of its form factor, an iPad can be useful even when not used: while you leave it on a desk to charge, it can show stuff to you. The idea of ambient information display is certainly not new, but the iPad just reminds us how we (as designers) barely scratched the surface of all the interaction possibilities hidden behind such a simple (& falsely considered non-disruptive) gadget. What is needed now, is an elaborate, ease-to-use, and efficient framework for building flexible UI with support for smooth tangible interactions of all sorts (multi-touch, sensors, GPS, etc) that can run on a various classes of devices. Such a framework would offer a uniform, high-level, and transparent API that can be used directly from Javascript by people without deep technical expertise, thus enable them to explore the realm of possibilities offered by such displays. This would allow to easily (& cross-platform”ily”) leverage a common set of interactions seamlessly in various NIWEA apps, yet could be still optimized and suited for the hardware platform under consideration.

More to follow soon!

Coming back from Jazoon, a conference that some people see as the European version of Java One. Since this conference is for me a nice concentrate of what’s coming in the Java/OO/Business software world, I wanted to report a little on what I’ve seen there and what this implies/offers in a Web of Things context.

Let’s be modular

As last year, modularity was a BIG keyword. The Java community has acknowledged the success of OSGi and is looking for a somewhat closer integration of these concepts. The Language Support for Modular Programming (JSR 294) will be part of Java 7 and will pave the way towards truly re-usable software components. In the WoT community and in our personal projects here at ETH and SAP research, we started using OSGi a little while ago. The physical world is definitely not homogeneous in terms of protocols, thus the need to create device adapters or drivers, understanding a particular device and providing its functionality as a Web API. OSGi helps there as it enables us to package these drivers and inject them, at run-time, on different platforms such as “smart gateways”.
But using OSGi also complexifies the whole developement cyle and thus a seamless integration to Java of the modularity concepts might help simplifying it! Wait and see…

REST rules
REST ohhhh REST core of the Web of Things! REST was already pretty strongly represented at Jazoon last year but it now seems to have gone beyond the hype and is in the process of being “tool-supported” in lots of ways in the serious world of Java Enterprise. The most prevalent example of this is the number of Java frameworks offering to help you implementing your RESTful API both on the server and client sides.
When we began our exploration of REST we basically had the choice between RESTlet and …. RESTlet (in the Java world). To me RESTlet has always been a great tool with a great community however, as a developer with Java Enterprise background I always felt not totally at ease with the level of abstraction used by RESTlet (which are really close toFielding’s thesis) and with the relative lack of tight integration with the enterprise tool-box such as JAXB.
The JAX-RS standard changed the deal. It offers abstraction levels which are more familiary to the Java developer and its implementations a tight integration with the Java enterprise tools (JAXB) and techniques (annotations, etc.).

Two implementations of JAX-RS were dominating at Jazoon, Jersey and RESTeasy. Jersey is the reference implementation from Sun (ohhhh sorry Oracle). We’ve been using it in two of our latest projects (that I shall present here soon) and I must say and really really like it. It was presented in several talks but I especially liked this one.
I can only advise you to have a look at Jersey and especially it’s integration to Grizzly, a embedded Web server to follow being only because of its very fast integration of bleeding edge technologies (e.g. Comet) and scalability!

The second framework I had the chance to discover was RESTeasy, a full implementation of JAX-RS as well. I did not have the chance to test RESTeasy yet but I was impressed by the presentation. I especially liked its out of the box support for lots of representations (e.g. RSS, XML, ATOM, JSON, YAML, etc.) and its out of the box support for caching, which is extremely valuable in a WoT.

One of the big problems Java WoT developers will now face is choosing the right framework because these are just three amongst the many poping up every month, the graph below is a hype-meter of the four major REST frameworks for Java:

It was created by a colleague at SAP who also made a great benchmarking of these frameworks (and others). I should soon be able to publish it here…

[to be continued]…

Like it or not, the “Web of Things” first appeared last month on Google Trends.

As a recap, Google Trends only shows trends for search terms (or combinations of terms) when the volume of single queries becomes interesting enough (i.e. big enough).

Note that, of course, the trend for the “Web of Things” is not as big yet as the one from his mother “Internet of Thing”, but it is growing (IoT is in blue, WoT in red)

This means that the popularity around WoT is growing and so is the hype. Let’s just makes sure it’s not only a hype and that it also roots on some solid ground that will, one day, make the world of “real things” truly part of the beautiful World Wide Web.

For that we need to do that thing Dilbert calls: “work” (thanks to Vlad for that one):

After being asked by several members of WoT the community and beyond to release the Energie Visible prototype, we finally managed to find the time to package it and now give it for free on the Web! To recap: the Energie Visible project aims at making the your energy consumption … visible!

We created a page to host the application, you’ll find the latest version and additional info there.

Note that it currently only works with the Bluetooth Ploggs and on Windows (XP or later).

The bundle you download there basically contains two applications. First is contains a Web of Things Gateway for the Ploggs (written in C++) which is discovering the Ploggs and making them available through a RESTful interface. Then, it contains a Web UI and datastore based on the great Google Web Toolkit and on the wonderful RESTlet.

The bundle contains the binaries but not the source code. If you are interested in getting the source code please contact us.

We hope you’ll enjoy the software! Note that it is provided “as is” without support. However, you are very welcome to use this blog entry to post your comments, bugs reports or feature requests.

SUN is about to release the newer java card 3! Quoting the wikipedia article:

Java Card refers to a technology that allows small Java-based applications (applets) to be run securely on smart cards and similar small memory footprint devices. Java Card is the tiniest of Java targeted for embedded devices. Java Card gives the user ability to program the device and make them application specific. It is widely used in SIM cards (used in GSM mobile phones) and ATM cards. The first Java Card was introduced in 1996 by Schlumberger‘s card division which later merged with Gemplus to form Gemalto. Java Card products are based on the Java Card Platform specifications developed by Sun Microsystems. Many Java card products also rely on the GlobalPlatform specifications for the secure management of applications on the card (download, installation, personalization, deletion).

Here are some features of it (text stolen from here):

• JDK6 Compatible VM: Except for floats, it support class file version 50.
• Full Java Language support: Java Card 2 has restrictions on the language itself. But JC3 has no limits. You can use all language features like annotations, enhanced for-loops etc… (except floating point)
• Rich API: This is mixture of CLDC, GCF, Servlet, JavaCard2 API, Sockets, Threads, Transactions …
• Three application models and two library models, which makes it possible to have virtually any kind of secure application on JC3: o Servlets, extended-Applets, Classic-Applets o Extension-Library and Classic-Library
• Servlet Container with Servlet 2.5 support.
• HTTP and HTTPS interface: No need for special client programming. Use any web client to reach JC3.
• Still tiny(!!):24K RAM, 128K EEPROM, 512K ROM with a 32 bit processor
• It is not just “Card” any more: With the newly added USB interface this technology can go beyond Smart Cards into devices like secure USB tokens, Secure Personal Databases, Embedded Servers, WebDAV compliant thumb drives and more.

The hot part is that smart cards support directly HTTP/HTTPS. This means it can be part of WoT and support natively Web-based communication (HTML/SOAP/REST), so it could be very nice to see new applications that could be built with it. Any experience on your side with that?

In an attempt to “standardize” REST a little more, Red Hat is launching an open alliance and community towards creating standards for RESTful Web Services (hem aren’t RESTful Web Services already implemented using some standards like… HTTP ) Of course this is of interest to our Web of Things community since we definitely foster the use of REST towards a architecture to integrate things to the Web (see paper and that whitepaper for instance).

However it seems like the REST-* initiative is also generating a lot of unhappy people amongst the RESTians. One of the reason is that they fear the REST-* initiative being a generated WS-* initiative (which is pretty much the case, JBOSS is an Enterprise Server after all, not a Web Server…) will end up with lessons like: “look guys, we did great stuff in the WS-* world now let’s apply what we know to the REST world”.
Fundamentally this would of course be wrong. If the initiative really takes off (which I quite doubt looking at the virulent feedbacks) then it is a great opportunity to rethink the WS-* integration patterns and not re-do what was done for WS-* in REST.

Essentially the first goal of such an organization should be (and is probably going to be, let’s hope) to educate people on the RESTful philosophy. Because it is definitely not trivial to entirely master (while trivial to use) and takes a while to fully understand. It probably took me over a year to go from “REST is just about URLs and Verbs (PUT, POST, etc.)” to “REST is really an architecture with constraints and great great benefits when you are interested in making you application PART of the Web”
REST is simple to use for the RESTful “API” (as word that RESTians don’t always love…) user but hard to grasp in a correct way for the RESTful “API” architect or developer.

So please REST-* guys and gals, do not do standards for the sake of it. The WS-* galaxy has so many standards that no one on earth can tell me how many (watch you eyes if you click on that). REST-* is a great idea which could turn so wrong, don’t waste it!

Indeed, there is a need to clarify what RESTful Web Services (which go beyond REST only) are about and this organization may help towards this particular goal. As a starting point what really helped ME towards this goal already exists. It is a book (a thing with a lot of pages that you can read without Internet connectivity) by people who understood most points of a RESTful architecture. A book that I read over and over again, understanding each time a little more while putting it in practice.

Btw, we are currently writing a more techie and scientific article for a conference which we will publish as a more detailed white paper once it is ready. It should also give its share of advices on building RESTful architectures for… things!

Robert Siebeck, Till Janner, Christoph Schroth, Volker Hoyer, Wolfgang Woerndl and Florian Urmetzer on Cloud-based Enterprise Mashup Integration Services for B2B Scenarios.

In this first talk of the 2nd International Workshop on Mashups, Enterprise Mashups and Lightweight Composition on the Web at the WWW conference (WWW 2009), Volker Hoyer (a colleague from SAP Research in St-Gallen) talks about patterns to integrate information resources (e.g. an ERP) and generic cloud services (e.g. storage) in the context of enterprise computing.

Enterprise mashups are web resources that combine other web resources that have a business relevance, but unlike traditional compositions mashups can be created by end-users using simple editors. For Volker Enterprise Mashups can be represented in a 3-layers architecture, we first have Resources (e.g. APIs to ERPs, information systems, etc.) these APIs are consumed by Gadgets which are basically visual representations (screens, graphs, maps) and building blocks (piping, flow, aggregates, etc.) consuming the resources’ API. Finally we have the actual mashups which often occur in an online editor
where the gadgets are combined together to create a new ad-hoc application.

Volker explains how resources should also go beyond APIs to enterprise information systems to also include services from the cloud such as storage, asynchronous queues, hosting, etc. In particular in their prototype they use the Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS, etc.)

As an example they demonstrate a promotion request system where a company A creates requests for promotions that other companies can accept to fulfill. When say company B wants to read the requests from A it can do it by extracting an Atom feed built from a storage cloud service at Amazon fed by company A.

Finally, Volker talks introduces the FAST project which deals with mashups in the enterprise context. Note that FAST is an open project, meaning the sources are available on the web.

You can find the slides here.

I’m pretty sure that by now you got the fact that the Energie Visible project is one of our favorite use-cases for the Web of Things. In this project we apply the concept of smart things with webservers and RESTful APIs to create a plug-and-play energy monitoring system for your home or company.

In order to better illustrate the application and for us not to have to carry a printer, a kettle and a… fridge around for each demo, we shot a video of the prototype.

The end of the video also contains some more technical insights on the structure of this project and of the web of things in general.

Enjoy! (PS: choose the HQ version, because it is rather hard to read the screen-casts on the other one, PS 2: Thanks to Iulia Ion for the great “fridge opening” acting!)

Not that we did not know it, but when somebody as important for the Web community as Tim O’Reilly says it, it becomes even more true!

Apparently according to Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo the next evolution of the Web is going to be physical or to be more precise, driven by sensors.

In his O’Reilly Radar post, Dylan Field talks about a few concrete applications of this Web of sensors. We also listed some and are about to list the other ones we are working on. Understanding the use of the sensor Web and having examples of killers apps is really key in building the sensor Web and making it convincing. But instead of having us only describing our prototypes, it would be a several orders of magnitude more interesting to get YOUR input!

What application of the sensor Web to you envision/work on? Post your ideas and links here as comments and let’s blog about it!

I’ve been meaning to write a quick review of my experience with Poken at LIFT conference. Poken is a small toy/gadet/figurine/whatever that has some near field connectivity (something like an active RFID) in it. The point is that when you meet somebody who also has a Poken you high-five your two figurines together (high-four actually, it missed a limb as it’s not human), and then you’re best friend forever on all your social networks at once. We got a sort of strippeddown Pokens for free as part of our LIFT badges, which I found to be a really awesome idea (a PCB in your badge has this nerdy appeal). Not sure I’d try if I had a pacemaker.. The idea is lovely and the thing is cute.

But…

For a 5 year old kid. I found it very nice to test it, and it’s an awesome idea to give it for free at a conference. Great marketing guys. But, after discussing with their awesome product manager – who managed to sell me two of those – I kind of felt “shit, why the hell did I buy that thing?”.

MAJOR TURN OFF NO. 1: Pokens would be awesome and would really work only if everybody in the world would have one – which I doubt. As he told me, they sold 50k units but hey, who the hell would really would buy that (it’s 10 chf =~ 6 euros)?

MINOR TURN OFF NO 2: It just doesn’t look serious. I mean what would I think of a formally dressed VC that pops out a three eyed alien with a blinking led instead of his usual business card? I would be like “Dude, no. I don’t really feel like going to your place and see your electric trains collection and your lego city, but thanks for asking though”. The idea is great for conferences (at least much better than shockfish’s spotme), where you could leverage the social net of the conference and befriend all the people you meet automatically (@lift crew: why didn’t you leverage lift’s social net, and use the pokens to befriend people directly?? That would have been so cool!! the kind of things that we did at picnic rfid hacker’s camp).

MAJOR TURN OFF NO. 3: This was the worse for me: when I gave him my biz card, he back offed just as a vampire that was presented some garlic, and said “no no get away with that, our goal is to eliminate business cards from this world for every”. I realized that this idea is plainly horrible conspiracy. I am a business card design fetish and I think I’d be so sad if natural human interactions (business or not) were to be replaced with a generic digital high-5. I don’t want paper business cards to ever disappear. First because it’s something physical, tangible that conveys someone’s personality. Just like someone’s clothing, it gives you essential details about someone, how much do they care for details. But it’s also a gift, it’s something you cherish, you deserved his card. By seeing a business card, I remember much better about the person who gave it me, what we discussed about, eventually what I wrote about that person on it. A clean, well-designed business card, is just like an elegant suit, it shows that people have spend time to chose it. See, I’m really a fetish for business card, so maybe this turnoff is quite personal.

MAJOR TURN OFF NO. 4: The website, just, simply, plainly sucks. I mean the toy works great and seems reliable, but their website is of a much lower quality than I’d expect from a Web 2.0 startup, and that’s a total turn off for me. It’s sad that they did such an excellent hardware, but neglected to do a really flashy, great, nice, appealing web site! It looks like a modified version of my first website in 1995, just with less animated GIFs. In terms of usability it’s really bad. Guys, please hire a decent designer, because I really don’t feel like using this website, and most people who see it won’t use it again.

Then it’s kind of befriending any people you speak to more than 5 seconds (hey let’s pokenize dude, see u soon, k thx bye). When connecting with someone on a social net becomes so easy, then I think it will just bring a bigger mess in your social net, where half of the people you just met drunk at a party and asked them for a fire to light your cig.

Oh, 1 mil $ question: you still have to friend the people on each network manually, as it doesn’t seem to automatically friend me when I met the peopl, or am I just plain stupid? If you still need to invite all of them to friend them on each network manually, then well it’s just a shortcut to search for people’s profile on each site, which makes me doubt the value proposition of poken.

For the good things, it’s a Swiss startup, which is awesome. Second you got a 1 GB memo stick with it… (so the business model of poken is to sell memory sticks, right?). For the rest, well, I wouldn’t buy that for me (okay, I did already, but I’m selling it, so mail me if you want a 3-eyed alien or a panda…)

I have absolutely nothing personal against the poken crew, I really wish them all good, and I encourage more people to do the same, dream big and build companies in this hot field. I just hope they’ll think about these point and adapt their product to something more useful and valuable, not just a cheap toy that you get bored after playing with it for more than 5 minutes.

Great pleasure to be able to attend another talk from David Rose from Ambient Devices and Vitality Inc.

Instead of a pure transcription I’ll try to sum up some aspects of the talk. Note that does not entirely reflect what Dave meant but rather my interpretation
of the talk. Dave began by talking about clairvoyance and magics. He explained how they materialized these chimers into the well-known Orb which changes its color according to a trend. Dave then explained how ambient devices where between push and pull technologies, how they should be peripherial and seamless with the environment(s).

He explained how facinated he was by the idea of dashboards a information concentrators. He especially focused on how to design them in an ambient manner so that they do not turn into pizza-style-portals with too much information to be really integrated to the environment. In the field of weather forcast he presented a prototype he designed recently. This small black screen provides very general information and is very ambient when people are far away. As people come closer it displays more accurate information and increases the info bandwidth and concentration on the screen.

The next part of the talk was about life-cycles of nature and the way to map it as an output interface for ambient devices. As an example gardening and the growing of fruits and vegetables could be mapped to something like the Orb. As apples grow they change their colors (green to yellow to reddish…) the same pattern can be applied to ambient devices.

He then talked about monitoring the energy consumption, an especially interesting topic to us our Energie Visible project develops. He pointed at the fact that energy metering is already in place just not at the right place and not using the right human-computer interface. It is in our cellars when it should be informing us in our living room. In this field he introduced the off-the-shelves products of Ambient Devices Inc.

He went on talking about one of the products of Vitality Inc. The Glowcap is the world’s first Internet connected pill cap! It may sound silly but it actually has a number of uses. It can be used to coordinate re-fills for instance or to check whether you really take your medications. It reminds me of a paper we wrote a while ago about RFDiyin the hospital. But Glowcaps go far beyond and I think they encapsulate the evolution of the Internet of Things. From being able to identify things to being able to enhance and literally connect things..

The last project he talked about was the Ambient umbrella, that knows when it’s gonna rain. While it has not real use it makes a point: take the information away from your browser, embed the Internet into every-day objects.