David Oban talks about OpenSpime, an open Internet of Things.
The Trend
Cisco is forming the Internet Smart Object alliance, which promotes the used of IP in Networks of Smart Objects not long after this announcement they also acquired Jabber to extend their knowledge in messaging.
The EU is organizing a number of Internet of Things workshops, thus it seems like the IoT is becoming a reality not sci-fi anymore.
Spime Application Space
Spime is the contraction of SPace and tIME. It’s about a new category of objects aware of their surroundings. As an example CO2 Spime collects the CO2 level from a number of sensors sending it to the Web where the concentration of CO2 can then be visualize.
Social Energy meter is another example of Spime powered application. Its aim is mainly at visualizing your own energy consumption as well as on comparing it with others. WideNoise is an iPhone app that takes noise samples on a regular basis and mashes up the observations with a Google Map, enabling people to check the noise level at various places. The Spime design workshops are interactive sessions where 20 to 30 folks meet to think about how they could invent Spime based apps.
From OpenSpime to WideSpime, from Prototypes to Living in a World Full of Smart Objects
From 10 to the power 8 PCs, 10 to the power nine humans and mobiles David expects more than 10 to the power 10 of Spimes. As a consequence it is of prime importance for the Spimes to be autonomous, you can not expect humans to manage such a big number of devices. Manage their data, functionalities and instinsic properties such as battery state.
OpenSpime provides a free and opensource toolbox for building based on these fast growing objects aware of their surroundings and environment. OpenSpime is a python framework that uses the XMPP messaging prototcol. The new evolution of OpenSime is named WideSpime. The goal here is to accept the challenge of massively distributed computing environments based on wide network of things. In WideSpime they want to re-think the way we design computing systems in order to take into account the >1000 smart objects per people we will soon have to deal with.
