Category: Products

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Building the Web of Things Book is Out!

December 1oth, 2014 Vlad and I signed a contract with Manning Publications for a book on the Web of Things, a year and 8 month later, we are thrilled to announce that Building the Web of Things is out! We learned the hard way that writing a book is not as trivial as it seems. “Oh, we’ll just refresh our PhD theses and we’re done in a few weeks” has gradually turned into “OK, well, I guess we’ll have to write these chapters from scratch over the next few months. What about the source code? Which source code? Let’s just...

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Free book: Using the Web to Build the IoT

As we speak, “Building the Web of Things”, the world’s first Web of Things book, is in preparation to be printed. Since Vlad and I just couldn’t wait idling we decided to embark on another book adventure: Manning approached us with a great idea, a free e-book (yes free as in free beer!) about the Internet of Things! The very idea of this book is to be a collection of chapters borrowed from other books that will form a basis of technologies that will have a fundamental influence on what the IoT will become! Indeed, the Internet of Things offers...

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The Web of Things has a Book!

In 2007, Vlad and I were working at SAP Research on a European project called “SOCRADES” (disclaimer: vintage video content inside, remember this was 2007 :)). The goal of that project was to create a service layer for the Internet of Things. In short it was all about integrating real-world Things to applications so that the media gap between, say, real-world sensors and ERP applications would be drastically reduced. The idea was sound, really sound. The approach we used much less… We started looking at WS-* (aka big Web Services, or SOAP WS) services and pushing them down to devices....

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ebay’s IoT Collections: The Mashable Web of Things Home

Welcome to our final blog from the eBay Internet of Things collections series! In our penultimate post in this series, we were showing you how to implement a low-tech version of home automation using NFC and the EVRYTHNG engine. This time we’ll look at the bleeding-edge version of our connected home! A home where appliances can be piped together easily to create a dynamically reconfigurable home. Just like you can use IFTTT or Yahoo Pipes to create smart workflows for your data (e.g. if I tweet this, post this to my LinkedIn profile and update this Google Spreadsheet) you should be able to configure...

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eBay’s IoT Collections: The NFC-Automated Home

In our penultimate eBay Internet of Things Collections blog post we wanted to talk about a cheap way of making your house a little smarter, one NFC or QR tag at a time! A little while ago we were showing you how you could use NFC and the Trigger app to create a ‘cheap smart home’. The app basically lets you create actions that are triggered whenever an NFC tag is seen close to your phone (as in ‘touching your phone’ kind of close). Don’t get me wrong, the app is awesome and I use it on a regular basis...

1,870

Digital Credit Cards

NOTE: This is a guest post by Hillary Jones. You can read more about this topic here and contact her per email. The reason I found this topic relevant for our readers is because I recently heard about the Barclaycard PayTag, which fascinates me as idea because it allows to turn every day objects into a mobile, contactless payment method. This is highly relevant for the Web of Things as detachable tags (and by extension thin electric circuits) offer a “digital skin” to common objects which makes them easily part of the Web. E-wallet technologies may unburden wallets everywhere and...

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The Ard-Vark project

Folks, this is a guest post from Kerwin Lumpkins who is working on a cool project he put on Kickstarter (there’s a video there too), check it out!! He has built a prototype and would like to have it funded to produce more of these. As we’re always happy to share cool projects made by others as well, here you go 🙂 The Ard-Vark is a basic electronics box that has wifi built in to allow easy remote control through a mobile app, and has the following features: Arduino compatible (can use the Arduino IDE as is, based on Leonardo...

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Meetup on Connecting via IoT Cloud Services

For our Zurich-based readers, on April 3rd we’ll be attending and giving a talk at the freshly started IoT Zurich meetup, a meetup packed with IoT / WoT talks around cloud services and their place in a Web of Things landscape. Here is an extract of what we’ll talk about (checkout the other talks as well: Think of a “Facebook for Things” with apps, services and analytics powered by connected objects and their digital profiles. With billions of product and other objects becoming connected, tagged and scannable, there’s a massive opportunity for a company that can provide the trusted engine...

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ARM to lead the IoT?

It’s very exciting for us to see all the noise (& reposts) or the ARM Cortex-M0+ processor (aka. the “flycatcher”) that was unveiled yesterday. Branded as the world’s most energy-efficient microprocessor it is optimized to deliver high performance (with a 32 bits architecture!) for a very low power consumption, which makes it the ideal chip for intelligent sensors and smart control systems in a broad range of applications. In other words, the ideal chip to power the Web of Things.