Category: Technology

1,433

Ondes Visibles: What if the Electrosmog was Visible?

The Web of Things cries for wireless communication! As a consequence, as it is being deployed out there it contributes to a phenomena called electrosmog, understand a cloud of electromagnetic waves that increasingly surrounds us (and the exact effect of that cloud on us is still in the middle of many debates…). The fascinating part about this cloud is that much like our electricity consumption, we can’t really see it or feel it (well except for electro-sensitive people who say they can). Back in 2007, we started working on a project to make electricity visible the Web way (Energie Visible!),...

2,368

The Web of Things explained to your children!

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.

2,373

Tourism and the Web of Things?

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!

1,318

Koubachi Launching Beta

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...

1,325

Oh HTML5 WebSockets, Push Data to my Mobile!

At last a slightly geeky post 😉 ! A few days ago I was at Google Zurich (GTUG) to present a more technical remix of a talk I originally gave at Jazoon 2011. In a nutshell, the talk was about how HTML5 WebSockets would soon be ready for pushing data to mobile phones in a standard way (and possibly soon to/from any embedded device?). In a Web of Things context, we used this at the MIT Auto-ID labs to push data “directly” from RFID readers to Android or iOS mobile phones within a few lines of Javascript code (for the...

1,314

Cookie Time!

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...

1,576

HomeWeb and Android at Home – challenges?

As Google recently announced their plans to move in the home automation world with Android at home (and we are still wondering why they waited so long to do it), I thought I would share my view on that. I do believe there are many opportunities ahead for the “home operating system” domain. The combination of cheap, yet powerful networked digital appliances in the house (NAS, networked media players, WiFi routers, etc) along with an extensible application framework, and a market place for buying new applications (or installing drivers, etc) – will be a killer combo for home automation to...

1,624

IPv6 Day

You all know it (or should) we are soon running out of IPv4 addresses. Since we, the Web of Things community, pushing IP literally everywhere, feel a little bit guilty about it we wanted to show our support to today’s IPv6 world day!