Author: Vlad Trifa

29 Apr, 2009

Awesome news!

All the medias in the world are talking about it, but we didn’t yet. We have an awesome announcement to.. well.. announce. Last week while Dom was busy eating churros and discussing about twittering chimpanzees, he was also preparing to go to a little village in Switzerland because he was told to go there for Energissima. But why? Because his project Energie Visible has won the Jade Nature award (and 10k chf with it), out of 20 other selected projects! The Jade Nature award recompenses an innovating project in the area of sustainability and protection of the environment. And that’s...

3,032

Research / Technology

23 Apr, 2009

Homecamp anyone?

We’ll be going (okay, I’ll be going) to homecamp this saturday in London and hopefully present a quick and dirty demo of what we’re currently doing a with some real devices. Of course, we were supposed to have the LHC with us and a crew of flash programmers to do a kick ass-demo. But we didn’t. So I’ll just bring a “work in progress fast prototype” of what we have currently to show the potentials of WOT (such as some rfid-enabled websites, a physical mashup of energy consumption, and some curl to get data from sensor nets). There were supposed...

6,345

Research / Technology

10 Apr, 2009

Towards the WOT Manifesto

I’m taking a couple of days off in Romania, to chill out and reorganize my brain. We’ve been so busy working with Dom lately that we barely had time for WOT, and even less for getting our work done. Mainly tons of papers, meetings, talks, and barely no time to hack/code, and that kind of sucks. We both agreed that in the coming months, we’ll cut off random unproductive activities, to really focus on our work and building the Web of Things. I’ve notice that all the people I talk to not really understand what WOT is about, and for...

2,577

Random

19 Mar, 2009

World Wide Web@20

We have been last Friday at the 20th anniversary of the Web at CERN. Was a cool, kind of VIPish party with most of the guys who built the WWW in the early 90’s. We even got a demo on the NEXT computer where the first web server has been developed. Very interesting talks, quite geeky and tech-oriented, so not sure everybody really understood what it was all about, but we liked it a lot coz we’re nerds. Nicolas Nova has done a pretty cool all-around summary of the whole event, and I thought to delve a little deeper in...

3,086

Products

12 Mar, 2009

Poken: review quickie

I’ve been meaning to write a quick review of my experience with Poken at LIFT conference. Poken is a small toy/gadet/figurine/whatever that has some near field connectivity (something like an active RFID) in it. The point is that when you meet somebody who also has a Poken you high-five your two figurines together (high-four actually, it missed a limb as it’s not human), and then you’re best friend forever on all your social networks at once. We got a sort of strippeddown Pokens for free as part of our LIFT badges, which I found to be a really awesome idea...

4,756

Random

6 Mar, 2009

On REST for devices

One things that I don’t understand, is that most people in our field do not really like our approach, or maybe they simply don’t get it. Indeed, we’re kind of stuck between several worlds: wireless sensor networks (WSN) people that find our approach too esoteric, and HCI people that find it not enough sexy. It is a bit annoying, as people don’t take us very seriously, especially not WSN researcher. I overheard comments like “What? You want to use the Web to connect devices? hahaha! I can’t stop laughing, haha it hurts me! Come on, be serious dude! Using the...

5,934

Random

5 Mar, 2009

What do you want!

Folks, we realize there’s slowly a cool crowd out there following us, and I’m really curious to know what you guys expect to see here. I mean this site is like so young, we’re just at the beginning, but we don’t know what you look like (are you hairy?). I mean, I’m curious to know if you’d prefer more research? More products? More design? More philosophical debates? More blabla and powerpoints to make your boss happy? More news? More naked girls pictured? Or simply more code? Would you like to see more longer articles, longer? More reviews? More research (I’ll...

687

Random

1 Mar, 2009

LIFT Afternoon

A few running notes I took during the conference, not very elaborate, but thought would share them with you. Ramesh Srinivasan from UCLA What happens when you give technology to other people, who will use it their own way such as fisherman using mobile phones to alert family in case of natural disaster, or people who generate money with mobile phones in Africa. But what does this mean in our world, in our cultures? There are particular ways things are to be used, but people can use them for other purposes, they are locally meaningful. Ontologies for different cultures, different...

3,476

Random

28 Feb, 2009

History of the Web

James Gillies: history of the Web We must write the story before everyone forgets. We can’t just write the story of the Web, as you’d have also to tell the story of hypertext, computers and PC. An early innovator was Vannevar Bush in “As we may think” (1945). Human mind associate things rather randomly. Then Doug Engelbart hypertext, in the 60’s with the first mouse, then at xerox parc people built it. Later paul baran contributed to arpanet, world’s first LAN, based with packet switching (1971). Then Network + Network + Network = Network. The idea was really that several...

3,046

Random

26 Feb, 2009

Lift Day 1: Morning

Nicolas Nova : The recurring failure of holy grail The video phone started in the 60’s, but it was too expensive (27$ per min). Then other attempts of videophones, but still technology sucked, images were lagging. Now you still have new attempts of the video phone (Asus 2008). Another holy grail is the smart fridge. Good idea to have a screen in the fridge to watch movies or have the net, so people can check recipes. Many smart fridges have been launched, but still they are not really used. Another example is LBS, it’s been 20 years that people tried...

Author: Vlad Trifa

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