Web of Things

So what are today’s forward-thinking professionals doing with this new technology?

 

They’re finding that work is a whole lot simpler, faster and more enjoyable with data devices that can sort, synthesize and analyze data as well as collect it, and that can work seamlessly with both worksite machinery and advanced office hardware.

Take the public works sector: Government agencies and private companies across the world are using rugged technology for a wide range of tracking, monitoring, reporting and scheduling tasks essential to city maintenance — all while saving time and improving the accuracy of their data.

For example, GPS-enabled devices can tag along worry-free for messy catch-basin cleanup runs and sewer line repairs, and dashboard-mounted tablets with tracking software can simplify data collection on street-sweeping and waste-collection routes, without ill effects from constant road vibrations.

The data these computers collect can be stored, organized, charted, transmitted wirelessly to office locations, and formed into customized reports. Simple manual and sensor-based data input reduces human error and increases accuracy for record-keeping and important reporting, such as for governmental regulations or grant compliance.

Andy Hobsbawm's (one of the founders of the business EVRYTHNG) business gives me a headache quite quickly as I struggle to imagine the implications of the humungous data generated by everything we touch. And then there's the data generated by mixing up the data with other data in order to create more data that predicts the future and reshapes our existence. Got that? Just a little scary, yes?

 

I don't mind my bike or my fridge talking about my habits but the implications of underwear or individual deodorants having their own Facebook page, or the web-of-things equivalent, is mind-boggling. What if - oh dear, how embarrassing - you don't appear to have a deodorant life? Too much information or not enough, either way as we become even more defined by our consumption this could get vicious. I can sense a lobby forming to say our rights are being eroded in ways that go way beyond what Google's done to us so far.

The Weightless SIG claims the new standard will allow for ultra-low-power transmissions at long-range and at a cheap manufacturing cost. If true, that would make the technology ideal for M2M communications.

New electronic tattoos could help monitor health during normal daily activities.

 

Taking advantage of recent advances in flexible electronics, researchers have devised a way to “print” devices directly onto the skin so people can wear them for an extended period while performing normal daily activities. Such systems could be used to track health and monitor healing near the skin’s surface, as in the case of surgical wounds.

So-called “epidermal electronics” were demonstrated previously in research from the lab of John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the devices consist of ultrathin electrodes, electronics, sensors, and wireless power and communication systems. In theory, they could attach to the skin and record and transmit electrophysiological measurements for medical purposes. These early versions of the technology, which were designed to be applied to a thin, soft elastomer backing, were “fine for an office environment,” says Rogers, “but if you wanted to go swimming or take a shower they weren’t able to hold up.” Now, Rogers and his coworkers have figured out how to print the electronics right on the skin, making the device more durable and rugged.

 

The ambition of our proposed IOTA platform was to support a thriving community involved in imagining, building, and testing projects at the intersection of the physical and the digital. It would provide a space for play and experimentation; a central platform where different 'flavours' of hardware, software and data sets could meet, making it simpler for people to combine a range of elements in ways that support their aims and needs. IOTA addresses key issues around technological literacy, education and empowerment, and the interoperability of various competing standards. As it stands, the internet-of-things has a huge potential to empower users – but could easily end up reinforcing the divide between capable users and those intimidated or outpaced by new technology. We are looking to address this issue by building a real community with active moderators, project curation and rolling community challenges, 'augmenting' a relatively neutral core learning platform with human involvement.

Released last fall to the adoration of design blogs, Hue provides enough innovations to the way we light up our homes to make you long for the days when a wall-mounted light switch will be a techological relic.

 

A Hue kit--sold for $199 at the Apple store-- come with four wireless LED bulbs, a wireless hub, and an app that you download for your smartphone or tablet and use to communicate with the bulbs, up to 50 at a time.

 

The LEDs can shine at any color on the spectrum, and, with a click, will absorb the exact color from a photograph on your phone. Or you can rely on Hue’s premixed color "recipes," which are tested to promote relaxation, concentration, energy, or reading.

 

Philips isn’t the only player in the game, of course. About the same time that Hue was announced, the Kickstarter drive for LIFX, another Wi-Fi-enabled LED, knocked it out of the park by raising $1.3 million, more than 10 times its goal. LIFX ups the ante by promising to "visualise your music with animated colors" and integrating with Facebook and Twitter for notifications.

 

A little less sexy than the latest smart TVs perhaps, but drawing significant crowds at CES, were displays of kitchens and kitchen appliances. It is now a very realistic possibility that we will soon (after years of hype) be using fridges that assess when we are running low on certain food items and automatically reorder through our regular online retailer of choice. Given coverage of retail results over the last week and the development of this sort of technology, Morrisons may have even more reason to regret its slow progress in online retail when compared to the likes of Tesco. Another interesting appliance was a dishwasher from LG that liaises with your energy supplier to ensure that it only switches itself on at a time of day when electricity is cheap.

There are a very large number of stands exhibiting smaller scale, wearable computing such as health and fitness monitors and smartwatches (often combined). One of the most interesting of these is the Pebble smartwatch which was the subject of much excitement at CES today. This hotly-anticipated smartwatch was created thanks to $15m of crowdsourced funding (Kickstarter's most successful project to date) and is being made available this month. The Pebble has an e-ink display similar to those found on e-readers and lasts seven days on one battery charge. The screen is able to display a multitude of apps as well as tell the time. Third-party developers will be able to create apps for the watch which can pair up with smartphones running Google's Android software or Apple's iOS. Perhaps of more importance longer term are the devices that will help us monitor our health; not only heartbeat, blood pressure and so on but food intake and amount of exercise.

A huge number of acres of exhibition space was taken by car manufacturers. It feels to me that much of the focus in recent years has been around using technology to improve the quality of the drive as opposed to the in-car experience. But that is clearly about to change. Many manufacturers were displaying technology that can seamlessly link car, smartphone and location data to deliver an enhanced experience. For example, Ford were showing a car that would read your text messages to you as you are driving. Others demonstrated how by synching car and smartphone, the music being played in your car could automatically adapt to driving conditions. One soundtrack for driving faster on an open road, another for city driving.

by Stewart Easterbrook

10 Jan 2013

You’ve got a robot that vacuums your carpet, and it doesn’t even scare the cat too much anymore. That’s progress, right? So where do you turn next in your quest for automated domestic help? How about a robot that does windows?

The Ecovacs Winbot cleans both sides of a window at the same time, with a two-part system. A driver that contains the motor sits on one side of the glass while a follower unit goes on the other side. The two units are held together with a powerful, variable-strength magnet. The robot senses its position on the window and follows a zig-zag path to cover the entire area. A remote is also included to allow manual direction of the robot.

Connecting sensors as well as connected devices to build an Internet of things-style service isn’t easy. But new products from vendors that range from Texas Instruments to ThingsSquared and Mobiplug make it easier for product vendors and consumers to build internets of things.

The connected vehicle is leading the automotive industry to its most significant innovation phase since the creation of the automobile itself.

What if large groups of people could go beyond ridesharing – replacing traditional car ownership altogether through on-demand access to the cars they want: a convertible in the summer, an SUV for winter ski trips?

What if driving skills could be computed as a score that warned us of bad drivers nearby – real time, on the road – also enabling navigation systems to offer safer alternative routes? Imagine if we could get rid of traffic jams and accidents altogether. Or how about if our cars picked up our groceries on their own – and dropped us off at the airport like a self-contained limo service?

What if automakers could subsidize our car purchases by working with telecommunications and other companies that want to capitalize on the lifetime revenue opportunity of a connected driver? Consider also the possibilities for insurance providers to charge higher premiums (for those who drive their cars themselves), or for local governments to monitor personal CO2 usage (in exchange for not taxing or tolling public roads).

BY THILO KOSLOWSKI
04 Jan 2013

"Marketers have been trying to capture that magic moment when a potential consumer is actually looking to interact with your brand."

...

"Current smartphone technology allows for nearly infinitely granular targeting based on behavior, third party data, contextual data like location, and universal sign-in profiles. All of these allow increasingly relevant interactions to follow a consumer across apps and the mobile web, all while waiting for the right moment. While interesting, however, this is not what I am talking about. This is just a refinement of existing approaches to targeting. It’s nothing new."

 

"What I’m talking about is giving consumers control, a tool that allows them to quickly and easily learn something about a specific product or service. I’m talking using our smartphones to create intuitive gateways that bridge the real world with related digital experiences. Whether you call it Web 3.0 or the “internet of things,” this is what mobile is all about and I believe visual recognition technology will play a key role in making it happen."

Cisco’s Lew Tucker stood onstage today at Cloud Connect and pitched the networking giant’s “Internet of Everything,” an app-centric world that will be worth $14.5 trillion over the next couple of years. Whereas the Internet of Things is all the objects in our world, Tucker says the IoE is the smart grids and, really, the entire supply chain and its transformation.

 

Big enterprise companies are good at this kind of thing. They talk about huge market opportunities and great futures with tremendous upside, but it’s a question of how nimble they can be with startups innovating so fast. Tucker, however, gets credit for explaining how an app-centric world ties in with software-defined networking (SDN) and the switch from traditional, heavyweight systems of records (ERP, CRM) to systems of engagement (apps, lightweight services that provide feedback loops).

 

Tucker, citing Cisco’s own study, says there is $4.9 trillion in immediate opportunity through the development of such things as smart grids, smart factories, smart buildings and smart cities.

...

The IoE also provides a context for the ways we interact with this deep fabric of connected things. An ERP system will become less relevant for companies. Instead, systems of engagement will put us right in the center of a feedback loop that allows us to measure our own selves and in the process connect to all the other smart aspects of our life. That might be in the city of San Francisco when trying to find a parking spot or the smart factory where we order our data-generated personal things.

 

We may accept that the internet of things will become commonplace in the next few years, but how do we build out the network and processing required to support it?

 

The network is probably the most important (and is definitely the most expensive) element of the internet of things infrastructure, but another ongoing debate is about where the information collected by the thousands (millions?) of sensors we’ll connect will be turned into action or aggregated to form meaningful insight. Namely, will the processing happen in the cloud, or will it happen locally?

 

Wael Diab, senior technical director at Broadcom’s infrastructure and networking group, noted that the pendulum has swung back and forth between centralized and distributed processing since the mainframe. But what’s worth noting about the internet of things is that there will need to be both — and where the processing takes place will be dynamic depending on several factors.

 

For example, if the promise of a truly universal internet of things ever occurs (as opposed to siloed areas of connectivity in the medical space, the home, the car etc) then devices might send certain types of data to a local hub in a medical or automotive setting because it’s more secure or cheaper, but take advantage of the cloud and wireline broadband in the home or work setting.

With the wave of your hand, MYO will transform how you interact with your digital world.

 

The MYO armband lets you use the electrical activity in your muscles to wirelessly control your computer, phone, and other favorite digital technologies.

 

Preorder at www.getmyo.com. Supports Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Meta, a startup composed primarily of Columbia University, students agrees. In partnership with Epson, the company is releasing a developer’s kit, composed of stereoscopic glasses that offer a super low latency gesture tracking technology which turns your surroundings into your PC and your hands into controllers.

Anna Attkisson

29 Jan 2013

via ces.cnet

LAS VEGAS--This is what Bluetooth was invented for: a tong you stick in the soil of your plant that tells you when to water it.

The Flower Power is a gadget that Parrot will bring to market at some stage this year -- there is no word on price yet while the company works out how much it can get away with charging. The fork has sensors that send the information they pick up from the soil of your plant via Bluetooth to an iPad app.

Once you have told the app what the plant is, it cross-references the information received with the info in its database to tell you which day it needs watering, whether it's getting enough sun, and if it's hot or cold.

You can move the tongs to different plants, and see information on them all on your tablet screen. It also works on lawns.

This is a topic that is important to us at Cisco. We believe the number of internet connected devices reached 8.7 billion in 2012. There are a number of estimates out there by others, but they are generally in the eight to ten billion range. This number would include traditional computer devices, mobile devices, as well as the new industrial and consumer devices that we think of as things.

You can get background and references on that number in a white paper by Cisco’s IBSG group:http://www.cisco.com/web/about/a… Dave Evans on our team works with market researchers to sort these numbers out. IMS Research is traditionally a good source for this sort of data. (...)

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Embedded Systems:

• Why have embedded systems become ubiquitous?
• What’s the best way to get started with firmware/embedded systems programming?
• How do you select the microcontroller brand/part for your low power embedded design?

Rob Soderbery, Cisco Executive

07 Jan 2013

Arkady Zaslavsky and pals at Australia’s national scientific research organisation, CSIRO, reveal how the enabling technologies that Ashton imagined have rapidly matured and that the Internet of Things is finally poised to burst into the mainstream.

Each year in Australia, for example, biologists plant a million or so plots of different types of grain to see which grow best in a wide variety of conditions. These plots are situated all over the country and create a logistical nightmare for the relatively small team who must monitor both the environmental conditions and the rate of growth of the plants.

Their solution is a wireless sensor network that monitors what’s going on and sends the data back to the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre in Canberra which runs the experiments.

 

These sensors are currently deployed at just 40 sites and generate some 2 million data points per week. But the widespread adoption of this kind of technology looks set to revolutionise this kind of testing. What’s more, various cloud-based services are emerging that are designed to help manage these kinds of sensors and the data they produce. 

MIT Technology Review

via The Physics arXiv Blog

04 Jan 2013