Author: Vlad Trifa

4,491

Research

31 Jan, 2011

Big data and smart cities

I didn’t blog much in the last months as I was fortunate enough to spend the second half of 2010 as a researcher at the MIT SENSEable City Lab. I spent most of my time working on the LIVE Singapore! project (and living between Boston and Singapore), in particular exploring the “so what?” aspect of WoT – that is how to actually build something useful on top of all these sensors. This project is very timely and matches wonderfully with what’s happening right now in the data.gov and smart cities spheres.

4,803

Random

11 Jan, 2011

lift@hackerspace – UrbanIOT

A little while ago took place the lift@hackerspace workshop, which was the second part of the Urban-IoT 2010 workshop that took place on November 29, in Tokyo, Japan. The Urban-IoT workshop aimed to bring together experts from various areas related to smart cities to present and discuss their research in a formal, academic context. As a follow-up, the lift@hackerspace event served to deepen the conversations in a more relaxed environment context, where the various participants could explore some of the main topics and challenges that emerged during the formal session, in an open discussion format among a couple of focus...

Urban-IOT soon (and program ready) – join us in Tokyo! 4,137

Random

19 Nov, 2010

Urban-IOT soon (and program ready) – join us in Tokyo!

We have been working hard to finalize the program of the Urban-IOT workshop that will take place very soon in Tokyo. In addition to a classic workshop with paper presentations and demos, we have prepared a second part, that will change your perception of what an academic workshop would look like. As we didn’t receive any industrial funding, we are sorry to say that we couldn’t afford to invite the people we had planned for a keynote (yeah, seems like industries aren’t interested in this topic… yet…). But no worries, we’ll use this time to hack and work! From 3...

Prepare your submissions: Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things, Tokyo 571

Products / Research / Technology

19 Aug, 2010

Prepare your submissions: Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things, Tokyo

We are organizing the First International Workshop on the Urban Internet of Things at the IOT 2010 conference, at the end of this month, and we would love to invite you all to submitting a demo or a paper. Unlike the WoT2010 which brought together WoT researchers, we emphasize here concrete applications practical solutions that can be built on top of WoT. We particularly welcome real-world deployments that can highlight the plus/minuses of using WoT as infrastructure for a scalable urban-scale data collection and processing. We would like to bring closer practitioners in the area of smart cities (industries that...

OpenPicus Community & FlyPort 5,306

Products / Technology

26 Jul, 2010

OpenPicus Community & FlyPort

The OpenPicus community released a wi-fi module called FlyPort. It is a small device that uses the Microchip PIC24F (256K Flash+16K Ram, 16Mips@32Mhz) and MRF24WB0MA/RM WI-FI certified module. FlyPort runs a wireless Stack (TCP/IP version 5.25 from Microchip) and has a 26 Pin connector for easy prototyping. Applications and libraries are open source and can be freely downloaded from the openpicus website. Programmers have full control of the wi-fi module, thus the Flyport can act as tiny Web server and client that can directly interact with other Web resources directly, without requiring a gateway. Besides, this project has a social...

CouchDB 1.0 released 4,759

Products / Technology

14 Jul, 2010

CouchDB 1.0 released

As in our project we needed a (quickly setup, reliable, and flexible) backend system to store sensor data, I played around with CouchDB as I wanted to explore a RESTful data store. As a matter of fact, the version 1.0 was released just a few minutes before I installed it. First impression, wow. Sleek, pretty fast, damn easy to use, flexible as any software should be (not the conventional click and run install, but damn well documented installation). I have to admit I’m impressed by the quality of this release, just as much as by the documentation. I think this...

COAP-01 draft out! 3,367

Technology

12 Jul, 2010

COAP-01 draft out!

After the last draft released in december, the COAP folks just released a few days ago a more refined version of the COAP draft, with additional thoughts on coap-http mapping, RESTful verbs for constrained environments, and pub/sub notifications, and more. Abstract This document specifies the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), a specialized RESTful transfer protocol for use with constrained networks and nodes for machine-to-machine applications such as smart energy and building automation. These constrained nodes often have 8-bit microcontrollers with small amounts of ROM and RAM, while networks such as 6LoWPAN often have high packet error rates and a typical throughput...

Fast Prototyping WoT Apps with NIWEA 7,999

Products / Technology

29 Jun, 2010

Fast Prototyping WoT Apps with NIWEA

I gave a few thoughts recently about what the iPad (& iPhone) represent for the WoT. NIWEA As our friend Hannes Gassert awesomely summarized it recently, NIWEA (Native Interoperable Web Applications) is the sweetest method to build interactive applications for all things mobile, plus NIWEA feels like it was made for the Web of Things. In a nutshell, NIWEA are simple Web applications (developed only with HMTL/CSS/Javascript) designed to look & feel like a “real” (native) mobile application. This not only provides a great environment to develop easily apps for the iPhone/Pad, Android, Blackberry & co, but in particular it...

Yaler 1.0 released 3,276

Technology

10 May, 2010

Yaler 1.0 released

We’re happy to announce that our friends at Oberon Microsystems have released the first open version of yaler (reverse of relay). The have made an excellent impression at our WoT2010 workshop by showing a demo of an essential building block for building an infrastructure for the Web of Things. In two words it’s a server to which embedded devices can initiate an HTTP connection, which will be kept open. Using the reversehttp protocol, notifications can be send anytime from the server to any device connected to yaler, even when behind a firewall or NAT. From to the official website: A...

Internet developers day – part 2 3,080

Random

7 Apr, 2010

Internet developers day – part 2

Here is part 2, part one is here. One Web, Yoan Blanc, doSimple. We thought of a single uniform web. Banana phone, with WAP. Now we have tons of devices that try to surf the Web and they all want the same level of experience (mobile browser market share version 1.0 image). Discusses the <meta viewport>, that allows it to fit on many mobile devices (he talks about ppk, peter paul koch who does testing of mobile browsers). Testing: MicroEmulator runs opera mini. You don’t need an iPhone app! Html is enough. You can also use manifest.cache to specify what...

Established in 2007, the Web of Things is a community of developers, researchers, and designers exploring the future of the physical Web. We want to leverage Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices and tagged products to make them easier to use and integrate in classic Web applications. WoT aims to build a future Web of devices that is truly open, flexible, and scalable, and we believe Web standards are the best way to do it.
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