Dear readers, today we have an important announcement to make: we both finished our PhDs, so are now officially ‘doctors’ .

But the important part is that we’ve teamed up with entrepreneurs Niall Murphy (founder of WiFi network The Cloud, acquired by BSkyB last year) and Andy Hobsbawm (founder of Online Magic, which later became Agency.com) to form a very cool venture called EVRYTHNG, that is working in the area of… Web of Things! You bet!! Dom has taken upon the role of Chief Technology Officer, while mine is Chief Product Officer. EVRYTHNG is funded by the awesome Atomico (Skype’s Niklas Zennströms’ investment fund), so Dom and I are super excited to be part of a commercial start-up in the WoT space.

EVRYTHNG wants to organize the world’s objects with an Active Digital Identity (ADI) for every thing. We have a vision of dynamic digital services and experiences connecting people and things — where every product and other physical objects are part of the Web. EVRYTHNG’s engine for Active Digital Identities provides technology, tools and services to create ADI profiles for products and other types of objects. We help manufacturers and developers create brilliant new services, apps and experiences that connect things with people.

Feel free to sign-up for our BETA program and browse through our developer resources to learn about our API. Of course, please let us know what you think.

As you might have noticed, our official domain name is now webofthings.org – we wanted to keep this place separate from a commercial .com space. If you like, it’s our promise to you that we’ll keep the Web of Things site separate and keep posting quality, independent material to keep enriching this community more than ever.

We see WoT evolving into a curated source of useful news about what we (and you!) think are the hottest innovations in WoT/IoT technologies for techies and thinkers, and with the support of EVRYTHNG we’ll be able to setup more hackathons and workshops all around the world. In the longer term, we want to foster a strong global community of researchers, practitioners, and designers, and support open-source projects in that area.

We realize WoT has been online for around three years and we take this opportunity to thank you all for your trust, participation, help, suggestions, or simply readership. The day has come to rethink what it has been and where it should go. Therefore we’d really REALLY like your input on what comes next and what you’d love us to do. Send us an email or post a comment below. If you’re lazy, we added a little poll on the right column on our page – we’d love to hear from you!!

Folks, we’re both sorry for having been totally silent for the last few weeks (ok, months…) but this was for a very good reason: we finally both finished writing our PhD theses a few days ago (yaay)!!! This means we have officially sent the final draft of our thesis to our committee, and are now preparing for our final defense (Dom’s on the 15th August, mine 2 weeks later, on the 26.8). Then (if all works according to the plan) we’ll be both become doctors of science (how cool is that!). Then we’ll be both doing our civil service (something like the meat-less version of the swiss army) and we’ll both start working on a new butt-kicking webofthingy project we can’t share with you yet (I can only tell that we’re finalizing the legal paperwork at this time).

Why do we write this, as in why would you care and what it means for the WoT community? First, we’ll finally have the time & focus to bring this community to a whole new level. Second, so that you know we do care a lot about wot.com and plan to reshuffle things here quite a bit over the next few weeks – it’s just that writing and finishing our research took all our time. Third, it will be time to introduce more and more code and material that people could use, and get a more concrete platform out here. Fourth, even if it looks like we’re copy pasting each other’s life with Dom, I just needed to reassure you that we’re still two different persons and didn’t merge into a single semi-gingery entity (yet..), and especially we’ll join forces to build and hack some damn fine projects soon.

More importantly, that means we’ll be able to come back to blog a little more often (once our defense is over – that is) and share our thoughts as we evolve from academia into real-world, industrial, and entrepreneurial projects and and… (oops, maybe I’m saying already too much, so I stop here).

Stay tuned – more to follow soon!

Because we don’t like just talking but also doing, we’ve decided to set up an exciting warm-up for our upcoming WoT2011 workshop. I named: a hackathon on social device that will take place on the 11 June 2011 somewhere in San Francisco. In 3 words (okay more than 3):

We propose to create, play, hack, build real “stuff”. Social devices. We will start with a bunch of embedded devices and other electronic things (sensors, robots, urban screens, toasters, etc.) provided by our partners and we’ll ask participants to put them on social networks, to explore how to share them, make them talk to each other, secure them, and see what happens and what can be done. We intend to put in the same room developers/coders, hardware hackers, and interactive designers that will brainstorm on simple projects that can be done in 1 day (and night…) that combine programmable electronics, Web APIs, and social networks along with funny technologies and standards (activity streams, HTML5, OAuth, Facebook connect) and we’ll explore what it means to “publicize objects”. The actual topics that each project will emphasize (from “how to share devices with friends”, to how to “secure access to private electronic appliances”, to “social networks for objects”, how “to fast prototype social networks on mobile phones” etc.) is of course free for each team to decide.

SOOO, we are also looking for partners that would like to: bring some hackable devices, pizza and beers, give us access to some nice APIs or experimental sexy tech we *have* to try (mark zuckerberg, wanna come with some source code?) or platforms, or simply bring some tech expertise. Interested in bringing something to the table (or literally a table… as we don’t know where it’s gonna take place yet, so if you have some big office space with wifi to host a bunch of nerds)? Mail us!!

Register NOW!

Dear readers,

A few days ago we missed being listed here because our feed was ill (a weird, non ASCII char appeared in one of the posts)!

I gave it some steroids and while at it moved it to an Atom feed. For a RESTifarian community as such as ours, it was somewhat weird to actually support RSS and not Atom and its great, RESTful, AtomPub protocol.

Now, since I moved the default Atom, subscribed members might have some problems, many (only?) in the case they use a bad feed client.
Thus if you suddenly are not able to see the webofthings.com feed anymore (then you probably won’t read this message, hem) you might want to register to this, old-fashioned, RSS 2 feed, or get a proper reader.

Plus, you shall also comment this post to tell us how unhappy you are with this move to Atom as a default.
Yes, let’s make it political

Let’s mash things up: a Twitter widget showing you the live comments regarding our SXSW 2010 presentation.

J.P. Vasseur from Cisco (IETF ROLL co-chair, IPSO tab chair) and Adam Dunkels have written a book on IP-based sensor networks called Interconnecting Smart Objects with IP – The Next Internet. The book covers IP-based sensor networks from the link layer and up, and covers network architecture (IPv6, transport, web services, …), technology (RPL routing, 6lowpan IPv6 802.15.4 adaptation, hardware, software, uIP,…), and applications (smart grid, industrial automation, home automation, smart cities, …).

The foreword is written by Vint Cerf. The book will be available in June 2010, but is already available for preorder from amazon. This is great news and very likely a solid reference for future research direction for the Web of Things, and more generally to extending the internet to smart devices (& written by – could I say – the inventor of IP-enabled sensor nets). In my wish list (& my birthday is soon, so you know what to offer me).

I’ve been following a few different activities related to life-streaming and and social nets all around (such as: diso/activity streams). A few days back MySpace posted on their blog a summary of their activities towards providing a more open platform for social data. This is definitely excellent news and is very relevant here, because first it’s more open, shareable, and distributed social network are in my opinion the direction the future Web will be taking, and second because we’ll soon be seeing more and more devices feeding information to these networks as well (e.g. a high-level, human-understandable stream of activities as inferred from tons of data streams from devices).

Looking forward to see how this will develop in the future, and feel free to share in the comments related projects you know about!

Just a short post to say sorry about the 25 template changes today We are currently completely lifting webofthings.com.
Starting with an upgrade to the latest wordpress, a cleaning of the theme (less pink but still a little ), adding new contributors (Like Erik Wilde) and most importantly turning webofthings.com/net/org into a portal rather than only a blog! The goal being to incrementally include new services such as internal websites for the workshops we are organizing.

So please do apologize the probable bugs and template changes during the coming few weeks!

We have been last Friday at the 20th anniversary of the Web at CERN. Was a cool, kind of VIPish party with most of the guys who built the WWW in the early 90′s. We even got a demo on the NEXT computer where the first web server has been developed. Very interesting talks, quite geeky and tech-oriented, so not sure everybody really understood what it was all about, but we liked it a lot coz we’re nerds. Nicolas Nova has done a pretty cool all-around summary of the whole event, and I thought to delve a little deeper in some of the talks that are somewhat relevant to the WOT community.

“The Web is just about having people agree on a few simple things.” Tim Berners-Lee

I particularly liked the last panel about the future of the Web. The first speaker was Chris Bizer who is the initiator of DBpedia, a database-like interface for wikipedia. The strong focus of the future Web was mainly about Linked Data (LOD) and the semantic Web. The idea of LOD is inter-linking tons of data from different sources using RDF and other semantic annotations. It’s cool because you can browse things and concepts, just like files, and this correlates very much with the initial version of the Web. I particularly liked the move from a Web of documents towards a Web of data. From a global file-system to a global database, it’s great because it’s very much what CSS did for HTML, separation of the content and presentation. And thinking much more about the data itself (and their structured representation), is great because data can be produced both by devices or humans. Also, you can imagine having a very different approach to search engines, which would become “answer engines”. You don’t look for documents, you look for answers.

Tom Scott from BBC gave a very nice talk about how they’re moving from a collection of independent micro-sites, towards a microcosm of data. Moving from web pages to URIs, data, and things. Every important concept from BBC (actors, TV shows, etc) get its own URI, and this sounded very REST to me. In other words they do LOD without knowing it. Also, the page becomes its own API, and it’s much more scalable. Dan Brickley from FOAF, discussed about building a web that shares aspect with the real world. He mentioned some funny things people built around with FOAF, they started building tons of extensions for their needs (blood types in Japan or language skills). In a hyperlinked Web, you will be able to answer questions that a single page can’t, and this is essential. Stéphane Boyera from the W3C consortium discussed a little more about the mobile Web. Can the web be useful for people in developing countries? How to do that? They lack infrastructures. 4 billions people have a limited computing power in their hand, how to leverage that?

He mentioned standard examples of using phones in a different way, e.g. SMS banking in Africa, fisherman in India (better prices and regulation of demand/offer). In Bangladesh, you can even register kids through your mobile phone. There are millions of social entrepreneurs with the potential to create incredibly useful and simple services, even if mobile phones are not the closed world they’re thought to be anymore, we still need to raise the awareness. There are technical gaps that limits the accessibility of mobile, such as localization/internationalization (no character sets). In particular we need to teach people how to access the tools to develop their own applications and how to use these tools. For this purpose, they are building the Web Foundation

Of course semantic technologies will play an increasingly role in the future internet, but I’m not sure the future Web is *only* about semantic technologies. Personally, I am not that sure that storing hardwired relations between concepts is the best approach because of the complexity of the real world. Having studied years of neuroscience and AI, you don’t dumbly store all the connection between nodes, but rather reason over a much smaller subset of connected nodes. Also, I think that the idea of RDF and semantic Web which is very much focused on machine (they say it, first for machines, then humans), is not that appealing, because that requires a translation mechanism in place. That’s what we have tried to do for too long, make humans understand machines! I like microformats because they were thought first for humans, but allowing them to be easily parsable by computers, at the same time. Lightweight semantic info just like microformats or RDFa, and especially tags/machine tags, are to me the future of semantic Web. Simple to understand, human-oriented, loosely constrained, extensible formats are much more useful to me (and work better) than defining huge ontologies that try to capture the whole world.

The day was packed with great things (maybe Dom will post some pix on flickr – when this guy will open an account there). However, I was quite disappointed that no one barely mentioned the Web of Things, which was a huge surprise to me. Instead of thinking how to connect devices to the Web, it seems to me that the W3C has not much interest for connecting anything physical/devices on the Web. Other than how to access the Web from your mobile phone, that’s pretty much all they do. I asked the panel what were the activities of the W3C in this area, which is connect other things than humans and their documents to the Web, and their answer was quite vague – not so sure that they really understood what IOT/WOT is really about. Other than the semantic sensor networks incubator, there is still much the W3C could do to build a future WWW. We’re doing it anyway, so stay tuned and I’m looking forward to see them more looking more to devices and things.

One things that I don’t understand, is that most people in our field do not really like our approach, or maybe they simply don’t get it. Indeed, we’re kind of stuck between several worlds: wireless sensor networks (WSN) people that find our approach too esoteric, and HCI people that find it not enough sexy. It is a bit annoying, as people don’t take us very seriously, especially not WSN researcher. I overheard comments like “What? You want to use the Web to connect devices? hahaha! I can’t stop laughing, haha it hurts me! Come on, be serious dude! Using the Web for that!! Man, you’re great, I gotta call my colleagues to tell them your idea, they’re gonna *love* it“.

Jeez!

The Web technologies are still so under-exploited, so few projects out there have really used them even though they are good enough for what non-geeks (i.e. over 99% of population) will do with networked devices. But no. We keep being laughed at when we submit papers, and comments are like “Sorry guys, but connecting devices to the web is nothing new. Next.” Sure, we keep pushing our work, so that people can see it working in live. We are at a point where we can finally show researchers that our stuff is working well and can certainly compare in terms of performance with what’s out there, but more importantly it is much more sexy than anything out there in the academia, especially it’s much easier to use and program, and unarguably more flexible. It’s just very small yet and we’re just down the mountain, but we can see the road clearly. We can even see tons of gold shining up there on the top, and we keep finding huge nuggets on our trip, so it’s totally worth it!

WSN people got certainly a point because of course fundamental research is important, but I also think that too many people in WSN are only focused on “let’s get this protocol 2% faster” or “how about a 3% cheaper computational costs of this algorithm”, or “how to locate eastern eggs in burning bushes with WSN” which of course is interesting, but the people out there on the streets (as opposed to the coke-drinking geeks) don’t really care about that. They want to see stuff that works well and they can buy (and if it’s sexy even better). As a consequence, embedded systems remain some NASA-lab/US-Army kind of research, feared by the public who doesn’t want to deal with it (but they do so daily anyway).

Let’s do something concrete with WSN, that works, and that’s usable, and that people will really need.

There’s a huge lack of the “let’s do something concrete with WSN, that works, and that’s usable, and that people will really need” kind of mentality in this area. I find it’s about time people start building toys and real products with WSN, that are easy to use, and do live up to peoples’ requirements. The technology is young and not perfect, for sure. But come on, it’s sufficient for most needs. We just need to empower people to build their own applications and to innovate, and that’s exactly our target at Web of Things. Just like the Arduino enabled tons of designers and other people to access and use digital circuits within their work, we want to push this idea further. I’ve had a huge debate recently on linkedin, where a guy was like “hey, why the hell do you want to connect things? My customers don’t care about that, and I don’t see why you’d do that anyway.” Maybe his customers don’t need it yet (which I doubt), but they will soon. The point the guy was making is that he doesn’t see the reason behind connecting a dog to a fridge. I don’t see why either, but I’m sure that there’s somebody out there who does. And that’s what matters to me! If somebody has an idea a business model behind, then great let’s give him the tools to do it. I think this point is essential, and that’s why

Networked devices have an amazing implicit value for so many disciplines, and I’ve seen fantastic ideas out there (like everything on Yanko design, my daily fix of inspiration), many of which are realistic and feasible today. Still, I don’t see any products like that on the market, and the ones I see simply suck, or are just made for extravagant billionaires. Why is that so? Maybe, because simply don’t know how to (re)use it. More importantly I see the problem being that if you buy two objects that are not from the same company, they just won’t work together. Companies don’t really care. Of course they want to push their own standards, but if a product is based on a closed standard which makes people not wanting to buy it, is that attitude worth it? Even worse, most researchers in WSN don’t care at all about reusing what’s there and they just come up with yet another soon-to-be-dead solution on their own that fails to reach a broader acceptance. Indeed, I’ve seen so many standards that only a few people use drying in the desert of general indifference. So why not just help us reusing the most of what’s there on the Web, instead of reinventing the wheel (and a square one, moreover)? Let’s just stop inventing new standards, and just exploit and explore the ones we have before doing so! Join us today! I guess, I’ve pissed off most WSN researchers – which is really exciting – and I invite you to join the discussion, please send criticism in the comments!

Folks, we realize there’s slowly a cool crowd out there following us, and I’m really curious to know what you guys expect to see here. I mean this site is like so young, we’re just at the beginning, but we don’t know what you look like (are you hairy?). I mean, I’m curious to know if you’d prefer more research? More products? More design? More philosophical debates? More blabla and powerpoints to make your boss happy? More news? More naked girls pictured? Or simply more code? Would you like to see more longer articles, longer? More reviews? More research (I’ll soon put summaries of the pile of papers I’m gonna read), would you like that?

We’re thinking of having maybe a couple of RSS feeds for each category, because I’m not sure business people want to see code, and not sure geeks want to see naked girls, err.. I mean power-points of course. Would that be good? Please use the comments or a mail to let us know what you guys (girls too we hope) think (naked pics of you girls to be send at info@webofthings.com).

We’re just at the beginning of a huge adventure and we thank you all for your interest! And we’re really hope you’ll enjoy the ride with us towards the future of the Web! Stay tuned, more and more goodies will be released sooooon!

We just finished our LIFT workshop, and it WAS GREAT! Tons of interesting people from all around joined us (too many of them, so sorry for those we had to throw out). We started with a short introduction by Alexandra, Dominique, and Me about the past and the future of the internet of things.

[Alex's presentation coming soon] UPDATE: it’s here

Dom’s presentation: From the Internet of Things to a Web of Things

Vlad’s presentation

Then we gave tons of post-its to the people and asked them to write down keywords in there categories the “what” (objects, cats, bath soap, mobile, etc), the “where” (at work, in the office), the “who” (elderly, young people, travellers, etc).

After that we separated people into groups, each picked one post-it in each category and then go! Just go wild and propose a scenarios in the 50′s (2050). That was good fun!

Finally, tons of cool ideas were presented (to come in the next posts)! I think the workshop got out really well, and we hope some cool conversations to emerge from in the next months. For all who attended, please send us all your notes, drawings, etc about your project.

See all the pics of the workshop here.

Dear all,

Ok, Vlad and I have interesting (almost ) things to say to the world but we are certainly not the only ones thinking about the Web of Things. Thus, the need to make this platform a … platform and not a two-man-show.

A first step towards this goal is to start building a community of interested people. For that matter we added two widgets to the blog: WOTA COMMUNITY which is a Google Friends Connect community widget and WOTA CHAT! a chat box accessible to those who registered on the WOT COMMUNITY widget.

We evaluated a number of alternative but the Google Friends Connect one seemed to be the best (does somebody not agree? Then comment please!) as it is not too intrusive and supports Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID accounts so that you don’t have to register-yet-another-time.

These tools are really meant for building a community of Web of Things enthusiasts. We suggest you add a link to a page that describes you the best when signing it, so that other community members can find out who you are. Hopefully that way you’ll find the designer, coder (buddy?) you’ll work with on building the Web of Things!

Thanks to all the marvelous folks who signed up for our workshop @ LIFT. It’s been sold out for many days, yet people keep asking to join in desperately. We wish of course to have all of them join in, but as we want to make them all attendees work and think hard, we have decided to limit how many people join in to 25. That way we can ensure that people can work in small groups and be all productive. We have printed special badges for a special purpose (you’ll know why at the workshop), a couple more than the 25 (hint: 40 is MUCH more than 25), so even if you’re not registered you might join in. BUT, this will be only on a first come first served basis, so if you’re not there before 9:30 sharp, a sleazy fellow might very well take your seat!

We’re totally ready to have a major blast at our workshop and LIFT! See you there! If you’re around just ping us for chat/drinks.

See also our own LIFT workshop page, where we’ll keep track of all what concerns the workshop. Including the final report when it’s ready!

See the Workshop Program (PDF).

Comrades, I have the feeling (okay it’s actually a fact) that the web of things is actually too much of a spiritual feeling, an aetherical concept with a lacking connection with the real world. In short, tons of people asking me “what the hell is all this fuss about Web of Things? Is it not the same as Internet of things? I don’t get it dude? Why not just use CORBA?”. Well, let me disappoint you. For many, it will be the same shock as learning that Santa Claus doesn’t exist (sorry for those who didn’t know that either).

The Web is NOT the same thing as the Internet. And that’s central in our visions. Internet refers just to the physical network formed by bilions of computers connected together and is not what you see in your browser. Internet is the lower layer which connects your browser (or mail client, or chat client, or game, etc) with a server. The Web is the layer above, and how the data that gets transferred (usually over HTTP) between your browser and your server. It’s about the HTML pages you see for example. It’s the RSS feeds you read. Many people claimed (and still do) that HTTP is cool for simple things, but it is not good enough for building solid, robust, scalable, and bla bla bla types of enterprise, business, industrial, whatever applications. It is simply not serious enough. Well, I think it’s just scalable, simple and open, and that matters (2 bilions people might not be that wrong when using it daily). Indeed, HTTP is certainly not the *best* protocol ever for any application, but it’s certainly one of the best for *most* applications. That’s what the WEB of things is about, to reuse protocols that made the WWW so sucessful(URI, XML, RSS, and alike), and extend them for physical devices, as they were initially designed for hypermedia documents.

Maybe (certainly), our vision is ambitious, it is about building the Web of tomorrow. A web where objects in the real world are plug and playable on the Web, they have their own Web pages, but more importantly, they are active beings on the Web. They can blog, they can vote, they can chat, they can be friends. Your house can send you emails, your cat can ring your bell to get back in the house. Unlike the smart fridge vision it’s not just about connecting things to the internet, it’s about allowing people to build easily whatever application they want on top of web-enabled devices. It’s going a step further and thinking why most smart bridges and web-connected things have failed? Well, because each product came with it’s own protocol and tons of competing protocols are used, which makes it difficult for a single one to stand out. And that’s why we propose to build a simple and open infrastructure to bind them all, and this one should be based on existing statndards already widely used: the Web. I’m currently writing a white paper to describe our vision, will put it online in a couple of days, so stay tuned.

We should really put some pictures to go with our posts, coz just plain text feels like geeky, no?

People, please do not worry! Dom & are still alive and well. The lack of activity is not due to us becoming reasonable and getting a real job to feed our 75 children. No, we just have been working like wild animals on the 17 paper deadlines we have daily, but it’s okay. Life is beautiful. At the end of this month we’ll be alive again and less multitasking deadlines. I’ll just post some quick news for now, and more deep (read philosphignical).

I’ve stumbled upon yesterday on the website of the Sensor Web alliance, and this seems quite cool. In particular I like the fact that these people would really benefit from having global standards for sensor deployments. I have been briefly checking out their work, and I love the fact that most of them are working with real problems, in particular in the field of GIS, agriculture and so on. I think these real problems and concrete implementation are an essential element for building the Web of Things, because I feel most work in the are of networked devices is really about tightly coupled system for very specific application. They are organizing a cool workshop on this topic and will try to go there (it’s in may in Tokyo, but there are chances I’ll be there around that time,so please cross your fingers for me, thx). I think our work on building the Web of Things is definitely important for the Sensor Web community.

ok good, that’s not really a news, my papers are waiting. stay tuned until we become normal beings that sleep at night again.

My turn to Welcome you (Vlad’s always first, gosh that guy is just too quick for me!) to the Web of Things (or WOT for the insiders).

We’ve been talking about that blog for almost a year now but a number and we’ve been working for an even longer while on topics around the Web of Things. I started in 2006 by exploring the wide world of RFID there already, rather than looking at connecting one reader to a computer we explored ways of considering a global world of tagged objects being observed at a million places a day. Back in 2004 I worked on the RFIDLocator project together with Sun Microsystems and their RFIDMiddleware. There, as many, we were exploring ways to infer interesting patterns from loads of RFID data, like: “where did our 30’000 Euros defibrillator go?” Integration of this data with other apps there was provided by means of Java messaging queues (JMS). I sticked with what people now call the Internet of Things for a while. During this time, Vlad was going into sensor networks and swarm intelligence. He was working patterns of real-world data as well but using sensor to recognize bird songs at UCLA. Integration with other apps there meant: “get Vlad and he’ll show you how!”. A while later, 2006 I started experiencing with sensor networks at Lancaster University (UK), trying to use them to enable more spontaneous interactions between our mobile companions and the real world of everyday devices. Integration there sounded like: “RelateGateways would be a great stuff if we get everyone to program everything in Java and plug ultra sound sensors to his mobile phone.” (dixit a consultant who actually believed in selling the system as is, um…)

2007 we were both back in Switzerland working at SAP Research. Integration there was (and is) actually our focus. Integration of real-world devices (mainly sensor networks and machines) with Enterprise Application (i.e. BIG and rather complicated stuff) by means of web services (SOAP, WSDL and the WS-* like using DPWS to be accurate). A really nice idea but there integration (still) means: “get a lot of ram for your washing machine, it’s gonna need it to offer web services, and oh, btw, get an IT specialist to couple it with you coffee maker”.

And then, I remember Vlad saying, what would be cool would actually be able to have a prototyping platform for normal (i.e. non-geeks) people to be able to consume the physical world from the virtual space from the web. I remember bouncing on that, having in mind a talk at Jazoon where a guy (today rather a super-star) called Roy Fielding presented the idea of REST. From then on we never stopped talking about applying such approaches to things rather than websites. Pushing the web to the physical world or the physical world to the web, with this vision that one day combining services on devices is going to be as nice as mashing up websites is today, the day of physical mashups!

Of course after that rather ego-centric post I should say we are not the only ones with that vision, neither were we the first! And that’s actually what the Web of Things blog (or platform) should be about bringing physical-to-digital geeks and researchers together, blogging, experiencing, explaining and debating!

Enjoy!

This is the first post on the Web of Things. Yeah, our vision is finally alive. We will be talking about new products, technologies, devices, and everything related to physical computing. The About page will give you more info of what we’re talking here. We really hope this web site will strive and provide a solid platform where geeks, tinkerers, practitioners, interaction designers, business people, and anyone else interested in the Web of Things can exchange ideas and build the next generation of the Web. We plan to be more than just a blog, a real place where new technologies can be experimented with in the World Wide Web.

The Web of Things is small but growing community that was born by noticing a need to share real sensors.

We’re a bunch of geeks that work in the field of Web of Things. But first, what is the Web of Things?

1. A global ecosystem of Web-enabled devices. We’re referring to anything that has a microprocessor and a means to communicate data. This includes obviously all kinds of Wireless Sensor Networks, mobile phones, physical computing platforms (arduino, gumstix, etc…), and anything else that mets the criterion above.
2. It is not the Internet of Things. Simple. We do not just talk about using the Internet to exchange data between devices, but really about making any kind of devices as citizen of the Web. This is about analyzing what made the Web so popular and successful as a distributed system.
3. Not some Web service to read data from a weather station in Zurich. Our target is to experiment and reuse as many existing standards from the Web as possible.

Unless you want to get a bunch of input, you should select feeds that are really concerning you. Be ready, because tons of goodies are in preparation.