Category: Internet of Things

This includes all posts that are about anything to do with IoT.

Categories
Internet of Things Standards

Does IoT Include Virtual Things?

Marco Carugi, one of ZTE's standards "agents," is presiding over the fourth day of the Fourth Meeting of the Global Standards Initiative on the Internet of Things.

In case it has escaped your attention, this is a short description of the activity, from the GSI-IoT Web page:

"The Global Standards Initiative on Internet of Things (IoT-GSI) promotes a unified approach in ITU-T for development of technical standards (Recommendations) enabling the Internet of Things on a global scale. ITU-T Recommendations developed under the IoT-GSI by the various ITU-T Questions – in collaboration with other standards developing organizations (SDOs) – will enable worldwide service providers to offer the wide range of services expected by this technology. IoT-GSI also aims to act as an umbrella for IoT standards development worldwide."

One of the recurring topics on the agenda of past meetings, this week's meeting, and the focus of the first two hours of today, is the definition of the Internet of Things. The definition, and my opinion about the work invested on this topic, have evolved from my post about it last June. It would not be appropriate for me to share/post the current ITU draft definition before it is published by the IoT-GSI group, so I will limit my remarks to my views on the process and one of the core decisions regarding the scope of IoT.

The tenacity and dedication demonstrated by the contributors is impressive. The systematic decomposition of each and every word used in the definition, the possible qualifiers and interpretations of these terms has produced dozens of internal documents and figures, tracing who contributed what. This traceability is fundamental to all standards processes. What impresses me is the way these engineers have systematically attacked so many fuzzy concepts using a language that is, for nearly all those involved, not their mother tongue (English).

One delicate point on which there has been some debate (though far less than I anticipated) is if the IoT definition will include in its scope (in addition to physical things), something called "virtual things." These virtual things are files, such as eBooks, photographs, songs and 3D objects, that can be stored, processed and accessed.

In the past I felt that virtual things should not be in scope but, after listening to contributions, I can see an argument for the IoT to include virtual things. Virtual things will not have attributes such as physical dimensions, communications protocols nor will they be able to measure the physical world. And, physical things will not have a digital dimension (kb of storage). Both virtual and physical things have attributes such as the date and time of creation, an author or manufacturer and an authority to which we will address requests. And, perhaps the most important attribute of all, the physical world might be modified as a result of communication with either virtual and physical things.

The inclusion of virtual things is important in my mind, but it is not the most hotly debated assertion. Other topics such as if there are, and how to describe, the "personalities" attributable to things is even more unclear and sensitive.

Being an observer of these discussions certainly has confirmed my interest in developing, as early as possible, an Augmented Reality glossary of terms on which SDOs will be able to form their own definitions. It has also opened my eyes to the careful editing process defined by the ITU for its work. Results of this process will be published later this year and I hope, for the sake of progress towards standards development, that the definitions will stand the test of time.

Categories
2020 Internet of Things Social and Societal

My Refrigerator

It's convenient to store your white wine and perishables outside when your refrigerator is small. On our balcony, there are no predators to come and take our food. And the temperature outside remains a relatively stable level of cool. In Western Switzerland we are experiencing a cold snap and I brought in items I had been keeping outside so that they wouldn't freeze. I put them in the refrigerator but it was not easy finding room.

[side note: I'll never forget the remark made by an American I once visited shortly after she arrived in country. She asked me "What is it with these Barbie-size appliances?" In many parts of the world, Barbie-size appliances are all you need when you can easily and frequently stop at retail stores. We don't drive a pick-em-up-truck to the grocery store. We walk there, buy what we need and carry it home.]

When I need to stock up, I ask everyone in my family to pick up a few items, or I use the on-line shopping service, LeShop. It's time consuming to go through the catalog but it is convenient to have the products delivered to your door for approximately 4% of the purchase price. (LeShop charges 7.90 CHF to deliver a 200 CHF order).

Taking a break while perusing LeShop's catalog, I read this article in the New York Times about smart appliances of the future. "Is this the next step in the evolution of my Barbie-size appliance?", I asked myself.

I would find it terrifically useful if my next refrigerator not only kept an inventory of its (small but tightly packed cold box) contents, but also connected tightly (or even loosely) with my LeShop order.

What if I could select a recipe the night before, ask my refrigerator (including my balcony shelves) and pantry if there was any ingredient missing, and then have whatever I was missing brought to me? Almost as easy as going to a restaurant and ordering from a menu!

A fridge that synchronizes with my store would be very useful to me but maybe not everyone. Society may not want this time-saving feature. Some may like to shop for food. Before there were roads leading to every door, people questioned the benefit of the automobile. Until everyone had one in their home, office and pocket (or pocketbook) people questioned the utility of the telephone. Why have a camera in a telephone when you have both separately? Many other innovations have become essential components of daily life.

In a recent post RCR Wireless writer Marshall Kirkpatrick took this whole question of machines talking to one another further. He identified a topic that resembled my posts about new technology adoption and use of AR technology among kids and teens. Kirkpatrick points out how quickly technology has evolved since our parents and grandparents were born (television, Internet, etc) and asks:

How do we talk to children about such a radically new relationship with technology that will characterize the world they’ll work and play in as adults? Machine-to-Machine connectivity is not as easy to grasp as the prospect of people communicating with new devices.

And he brought in an illustration from an article co-authored by Dominique Guinard, one of the young Swiss IoT entrepreneurs. Please click on the illustration to enlarge! Under the illustration are Kirkpatrick's translations to English of all the things these connected devices are saying to the teen pictured on the right.

 

 

 

 

 

Freezer: I was thinking about defrosting today.

Clock: Aren’t you supposed to have left the house already by this time?

Faucet: I dripped all night! You should call the plumber.

Toaster: Do not give me too big a toast toast, this time, eh?

Cooking utensils: I remind you that you have not eaten any greens for three days.

Washing machine: And my clothes? who's going to hang them out to dry?

Categories
Innovation Internet of Things Standards

ITU Initiatives Help it Remain Relevant

The International Telecommunications Union is a standards development organization based in Geneva, Switzerland and over the past 30 years has published very important specifications for telephony and networking. Over the past decade, and especially the last 5 years, as the Internet expanded and overtook telephony as the principle vehicle for personal communications, the IETF and other standards bodies seemed to take a leadership role in communications standards.

Membership attrition drove the ITU to search for new agendas and redefine itself in the new world. Periodic examination of goals and missions is necessary in any organization, but particularly important for one whose members or customers must pay fees and seek justification for their expenses. I think that, for the ITU, the results of this process of soul searching are beginning to bear fruit.

I'm currently following the ITU Joint Coordination Activity on Internet of Things standards, which began in May 2011, and have attended two meetings of this group. Its survey of the IoT standards landscape will be very valuable to many groups when published. The motivations and the process are very complementary to the work the AR Standards Community is doing. I'm also highly impressed by and seek to attend and observe future meetings of the Internet of Things Global Standards Initiative (IoT GSI). In this group representatives from these seven ITU Study Groups work together:

  • SG 2 – Operational aspects of service provision and telecommunications management
  • SG 3 – Tariff and accounting principles including related telecommunication economic and policy issues
  • SG 9 – Television and sound transmission and integrated broadband cable networks
  • SG 11 – Signalling requirements, protocols and test specifications
  • SG 13 – Future networks including mobile and NGN
  • SG 16 – Multimedia coding, systems and applications
  • SG 17 – Security

This cross Study Group approach is very effective to address such a fundamental "cross domain" topic as standardization for the Internet of Things.

Recently the ITU TSAG (Telecommunications Standards Advisory Group) made two announcements that caught my eye and demonstrate other results of their efforts to stay relevant in the future as a standards body. The first is the formation of a new group focusing on Bridging the Gap: from Innovation to Standardization. One of the common objections to standards is that they stifle innovation so confronting this head on is an excellent initiative. The focus group's results will be released during an event in November 2012.

Second, the ITU TSAG announced that it is initiating another (parallel to the IoT JCA) "landscape" analysis activity on the topic of Machine-to-Machine communications. This charter for this new activity (pasted below from the announcement page for convenience) is currently open for comment.

"The Focus Group will initially focus on the APIs and protocols to support e-health applications and services, and develop technical reports in these areas. It is suggested that the Focus Group establish three sub-working groups:

  1. “M2M use cases and service models”,
  2. “M2M service layer requirements”, and
  3. “M2M APIs and protocols.”

Strong collaboration with stakeholders such as Continua Health Alliance and World Health Organization (WHO) is foreseen. The Focus Group concept allows for greater operational flexibility and crucially allows non-ITU members and other interested organizations to participate."

Although e-health applications are not all that interesting to me, I believe the concept of developing technical reports focusing on different areas will be very productive. And, as with the IoT-GSI, the M2M focus group will also be complementary to other ITU-T Study Groups, especially Study Groups 13 and 16, and to other relevant UN agencies, SDOs, forums/consortia, regulators, policy makers, industry and academia. I'll be observing this activity when they meet and work closely with the IoT-GSI in Geneva next month.

Categories
Augmented Reality Events Internet of Things Research & Development

Augmented Humans

Augmented humans are at the epicenter of a scenario for the future that Ray Kurzweil has been popularizing for over 20 years. To recap the central thesis of his life's work, including the book The Singularity is Near published in 2005, Kurzweil promotes the notion that technological singularity is the inevitable result of our research on genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (including artificial intelligence). Whether one believes the trends to which he points will go as far as Kurzweil predicts (in which some of those born human and who live among us today will live far longer than any earlier specimens of our race and will, at the same time, benefit or suffer from "superintelligence") or not, research is continuing unabated in these domains.

Some findings of basic and applied research in areas at the core of the Singularity will be reported by those who will present papers during the third annual Augmented Human conference. This conference whose proceedings will later be published by the ACM focuses on augmenting human capabilities through technology for increased well-being and enjoyable human experience. The program committee solicited contributions on the following topics (this list pasted directly from the conference call for papers, which closed earlier this week):

  • Augmented and Mixed Reality
  • Internet of Things
  • Augmented Sport
  • Sensors and Hardware
  • Wearable Computing
  • Augmented Health
  • Augmented Well-being
  • Smart artifacts & Smart Textiles
  • Augmented Tourism and Games
  • Ubiquitous Computing
  • Bionics and Biomechanics
  • Training/Rehabilitation Technology
  • Exoskeletons
  • Brain Computer Interface
  • Augmented Context-Awareness
  • Augmented Fashion
  • Augmented Art
  • Safety, Ethics and Legal Aspects
  • Security and Privacy

I'd like to hear what these folks are doing. However, I'd also (maybe even more) like meet and get acquainted with flesh and blood Augmented Humans. One whom I met a few years ago at a conference is Rob Spence. Rob is a documentary filmmaker who lost an eye and decided, with the help of Steve Mann, one of the original first-person webcamera video streamers, to have a wireless video camera fitted into his prosthetic eye. Rob kept a blog about the experience for several years but moved it three years ago this month to another host and seems to have been closed. Here's a 2010 interview with Rob published on the Singularity University's blog. According to Rob Spence's web site, visited today when researching this post, he's working on a documentary for the Canadian Film Board. So, at least for now, his story is private.

I'm currently reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a work of fiction by Haruki Murakami. The central character (unknowingly) has his brain rewired as part of an experiment and it (his brain) is programmed for him to live the rest of his life "reading" dreams from the skulls of unicorns. It's a gracefully written story. Although stories of people whose bodies and minds have been altered to become "augmented humans" make for excellent works of fiction, of a blog, and probably a documentary, I suspect that the paths humans pursue towards this goal are filled with failed attempts. Interesting to note the last two bullets on the list of topics covered at the AHC. There's confirmation of my concern.

At Laval Virtual, the largest industry event dedicated exclusively to Virtual Reality, Masahiko Inami, a professor in the School of Media Design at the Keio University (KMD), Japan, is giving a talk entitled "Initial Step Towards Augmented Human". Here's the session description:

What are the challenges in creating interfaces that allow a user to intuitively express his/her intentions? Today's HCI systems are limited, and exploit only visual and auditory sensations. However, in daily life, we exploit a variety of input and output modalities, and modalities that involve contact with our bodies can dramatically affect our ability to experience and express ourselves in physical and virtual worlds. Using modern biological understanding of sensation, emerging electronic devices, and agile computational methods, we now have an opportunity to design a new generation of 'intimate interaction' technologies.

This talk will present several approaches that use multi/cross modal interfaces for enhancing human I/O. They include Optical Camouflage, Stop-Motion Goggle, Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation and Chewing Jockey.

Although probably less shocking and hair-raising than the talks at the third AHC, this session should also be very thought-provoking and practical for those working in the field of Virtual Reality. I'll try to make it to both of these events to get fully informed about all aspects of Augmented Humans.

Categories
Events Internet of Things

Makers at IoT ZH

The second meeting of the Internet of Things Zurich meetup group was an enormous success! In the audience, we had an excellent mix of artists, programmers, Do-it-Yourself-ers, students and academics, people from businesses interested in learning about IoT.

Now what?

Growth. To say that this group is large would be an exaggeration because Switzerland is a small country and we only began in earnest a few weeks ago. But by Swiss standards, this group of passionate people, the "makers" of the local IoT industry, is respectable (61 as of this morning). And there were over 50 people gathered in the ETHZ venue to learn from entrepreneurs. 

Experience. Few have it and everyone wants it. The goal of this session was to hear from those with experience in the IoT about lessons learned to date.

We began with great content from Cuno Pfister, Oberon microsystems (slides), Thomas Amberg, Yaler.net (slides) and Simon Mayer, not technically an entrepreneur (he's a PhD candidate at the ETHZ Distributed Systems Group) but a real good guy who shared with us what's happening on the Web of Things side (slides).

During his introduction, Cuno framed the world (loosely speaking) as those who are "corporates" and have a set of characteristics that make them risk averse, although they have (or perhaps as a result of their) resources, and the "tinkerers" those he called "makers." Makers are characterized by:

  • no legacy business models
  • focus on personal growth
  • generating new ideas
  • cost-sensitive (low financial resources) and work on their projects in their spare time
  • attracted to and frequently adopt open systems

After the talks, I took a poll of the people in the room to ascertain the composition of this community. Approximately 30% of us are already "makers" in some fashion. We didn't define this or require people to demonstrate that they have this status through an exam! Presumably even those who are already experimenting want to improve. Of the remainder, many–over half of the room–aspire to become "makers."

With this in mind, there's an excellent opportunity to organize more community meetings and to explore other programs that will permit people to get proficient with IoT tools quickly and with limited resources. I'll be talking to our local experts and more makers in coming weeks to see what we can do about fulfilling this desire and addressing the needs.

Categories
3D Information Augmented Reality Internet of Things Research & Development

Clear Directions Ahead

During the 2011 Geneva Auto Show (almost a year ago), BMW shared with enthusiasts its Vision ConnectedDrive prototype. "Assisted by sensors integrated into the headlights and taillights, a head-up display on the ConnectedDrive Concept can list information on the road ahead in a 3-dimensional format."

Augmented Reality for drivers was also a feature of last week's Consumer Electronics Show. For example, Pioneer Electronics revealed a display that mounts in place of or below the rear view mirror of any model car to project road information for quick consultation without obscuring the driver's view of the road. The photo below is from the CNN article covering Mercedes-Benz's introduction of what it terms "the Future of Driving.

While everyone acknowledges that a date for commercial release of these technologies has not been set, the direction of research and development in the automotive industry is clear: more sensors, more mobile connected services for the user/driver, more in the driver's field of view. More and better sensors are already available for those who can pay the premium price. Also, in an automobile where miniaturization and low power consumption are not as important as in a smartphone, we can anticipate more advanced and more accurate sensors, including cameras, to appear.

Furthermore, the justification of new gadgets on the basis of driver and road safety appeals to many constituents from the individual driver to the regional and national transportation authorities who have (potentially) fewer troubles with traffic congestion. I haven't read anything about the policies or regulations treating the use of AR in cars, but I wouldn't be surprised if some were introduced.

One of the enabling technologies for these applications is the pico projector. MicroVision is one of the early providers of these technologies, while a neighbor, also in the state of Washington, the Human Photonics Laboratory at University of Washington is another. Other enablers are the variable opacity screen materials (aka Smart glass) which can be manufactured today. And to receive information from the cloud, without interfering with the user's mobile phone service, and perhaps using different protocols, we may have machine-to-machine (M2M) mobile communications. In the case of a high end car, the extra radio (its cost, its weight or power requirements) are not obstacles.

Categories
Internet of Things Social and Societal

What makes a community?

There's thousands, perhaps millions of posts about community development best practices, especially since this has become a career track for many. I'm not a trained professional community manager but have accumulated enough experience in the domain to feel that I can start a community.

A few months ago I founded the Internet of Things Barcelona and the Internet of Things Zurich meetup groups in order to contribute to and participate in a global network of folks also interested in IoT projects: Madrid, New York, London, Amsterdam (are there others I've missed?). Both IoT-BCN and IoT-ZH had their first meetings in the first week of December 2011.

I love Barcelona and it is definitely a hot bed of innovation but this group had not had time to ramp up before our meeting. We were only 5 dedicated and curious people who did not know one another and we just had a casual chat about what we think Internet of Things will become, although none of us had any hands on experience.

In Switzerland, the first IoTZH meeting was in Bern. It was co-located with the Mobile Monday Switzerland 28th meeting. The room was full to capacity and many of the attendees were people with whom I've crossed paths in the past 7 years in Switzerland. Although it really wasn't the case, this felt like a room of my closest friends and we shared out pleasure while listening to the well-prepared content delivered by the five invited speakers. The venue is also easy to access and warm. Based on the success of the IoTZH meeting I contacted several folks and we organized our second meeting in Zurich.

Based on these experience, and many others I've had in the past 20 years doing evangelism through community development, I suggest that there are a few key requirements for a community to feel alive and to grow:

  • a variety of people who share an interest but from different levels or points of view. Although it's rare to have this, if everyone is at the same level, there's not a feeling of potential for personal or professional growth. The topic of interest can be broadly or narrowly defined. I really like communities in which there's a balance of academic people (students, faculty or researchers) and people with business backgrounds and interests.
  • critical mass is another key ingredient that really distinguishes a community from just a "group". There's not a magic number for all communities, but for communities sharing a technology interest, regardless of whether they are meeting face-to-face or virtually, the number is close to 100. More is better!
  • novelty is another component that certainly helps a community. What I mean is that the members feel that they are part of something that's not easily repeatable. New topics to be discussed, new problems to tackle, new speakers, even new meeting places which involve a bit of risk. Novelty helps members feel the adventure with each phase and, for many, that's enough reason to return.
  • finally, at least one person or a small group must feel personally responsible for the care and nurture of the larger group. Without a lot of love and devotion, beverages and food for those that meet in person, a community doesn't function well. But there's also logistics: a meeting venue, invitations, a hashtag and a twitter handle. The founder or leader doesn't have to live in close proximity to others but needs to feel passionate and, in this situation, members usually respond.

It's getting easier, with tools on the Web, to form, to nurture and to participate in communities. That said, they don't have to be permanent. If a community lacks one or more of the components above, it's time for it to close, quietly or with a splash!

Categories
Internet of Things Social and Societal

Do you believe (in IoT)?

Larry Smarr’s early December article in the New York Times, An Evolution Toward a Programmable Universe, poetically explains how over the next ten years we and everything around us will be connected. The potential societal, economic and health benefits of the Internet of Things come bursting out of Smarr’s paragraphs like from a pastor on the pulpit. While I’m firmly persuaded that such benefits are possible, I also anticipate that there might be risks.

Another example of the NYT’s campaign to raise public awareness of the IoT was published on December 17. The Internet Get Physical rose to be most popular article of the day (or week, I’m not sure). As the author, Steve Lohr, points out, the Internet of Things is relevant to the general population because it can have an impact on both the health of our planet and business health.

Across many industries, products and practices are being transformed by communicating sensors and computing intelligence. The smart industrial gear includes jet engines, bridges and oil rigs that alert their human minders when they need repairs, before equipment failures occur. Computers track sensor data on operating performance of a jet engine, or slight structural changes in an oil rig, looking for telltale patterns that signal coming trouble.

Sensors on fruit and vegetable cartons can track location and sniff the produce, warning in advance of spoilage, so shipments can be rerouted or rescheduled. Computers pull GPS data from railway locomotives, taking into account the weight and length of trains, the terrain and turns, to reduce unnecessary braking and curb fuel consumption by up to 10 percent.

Thomas Friedman’s thought piece early this week about technology (and network-connected things) in cities (smart cities) is asking readers (especially those in the GOP) to consider how technology innovation produces employment and fuels economic recovery.

When taken individually, each of these is beautifully formulated. Together they read like a hymn book of future (particularly IoT) technology.

I point out the trend because I wonder what is behind it, and what readers who are not following this field closely, but who closely take in every NYT feature and editorial, think of these repeated praises. Is there an element of faith in the goodness of technology resembling the faith some place in God? Have there in the past been similar, concentrated efforts to promote one technology sector as the savior of the planet? Are readers reassured by the thought that technology is going to come to their rescue? Will the general public be disillusioned if (when) such benefits take longer than predicted to materialize?

Categories
Internet of Things Research & Development

Useful IoT Comparisons

Many before us have struggled to develop the "final" definition of the IoT and I've suggested that one day it will be unnecessary to argue over the precise terms because it will be ubiquitous. Between now and then, metaphors are very powerful.

Along this line of thought, I found this post by Dale Calder of Axeda Corp on the Forbes web site comparing the Internet of Things to Facebook insightful.  He points out that "while Facebook is attempting to digitize and “platformize” every Internet user in the world (currently more than 2  billion people), the Machine-to-Machine market is doing exactly the same with all of the world’s machines, devices, and real-time information sources – over 7 trillion potential targets and counting." Every machine or device will have the potential to be at the hub of its graph.

The connection from inanimate objects to social ones is one that has been made before when developing the concept of IoT. For example, WideTag connects objects and/to people. The graph, however, does not need to be social to be valuable. It just needs to portray active (or dormant) connections in logical hierarchy. Or perhaps without any hierarchy.

Comparing the Internet of Things with very large, distributed systems is helpful for architecting suitable infrastructure. Could we compare the sensors deployed in a city with those in a nuclear power plant?

One thing to keep in mind is the potential for information overload. Reminds me of the problems facing physicists and IT experts when building the Large Hadron Collider. According to this article on ReadWriteWeb, "NoSQL solutions are designed to handle large numbers of transactions. CouchDB, for instance, has been used to power the web based IM client Meebo, proving it can handle a rapid influx of data. CouchDB is also specifically designed for distributed environments."

Another thing to consider is bandwidth. Calder points out in the Forbes piece that the traffic from all these sensors could become the single largest user of cellular airtime. Clearly, the network equipment providers and network operators are developing new protocols and procedures in order to offer appropriate products and services.

Categories
Business Strategy Internet of Things Social and Societal

Shaspa-Shared Spaces

Oliver Goh of Shaspa Research said in an interview with Into Tomorrow during CES2010 that "smart technologies" should solve real world problems we experience. That oversimplifies the situation a bit, I think. The types of problems we as individuals want technology to solve will be different based on our circumstances (age, home vs business, country of residence, culture, etc) and the challenges facing businesses also vary widely depending on the domain, currency fluctuations and so forth.

So how could one device detect any circumstance and be ready to respond? Good question! One which I hope to be able to ask about the Shaspa Bridge.

According the Shaspa web site where I found this diagram, their technology connects sensors, gathers data and supports software for decision making and management of resources. Their applications are focusing on shared living and working spaces–hence the name "Sha" for Shared and "Spa" for Spaces.

Sounds remarkably reminiscent of the applications built on the Pachube platform using sensors in the environment or on a smart phone to inform decision making.  But the companies with which Shaspa seeks to do business are quite different and, although there is reference on the site to open and interoperable solutions based on standards, the concepts of Open Source and building communities of users and developers are noticeably absent from their positioning.

Shaspa has some points in common with WideTag in that there is a social media component to the platform. And, similarly to WideTag over the past year, Shaspa does not appear (based on its web site "news" section) to be making much noise. The most recent posting on SlideShare is already over 24 months old. The company could be conserving resources for when there are greater opportunities for businesses serving the developers of solutions based on the Internet of Things, or busy actually doing projects which are too sensitive to make public.

Could Shaspa be one of the companies which will get a positive boost from the recent acquisition of Pachube?
 

Categories
Business Strategy Internet of Things

WideTag too?

With the dust settling around the Pachube acquisition, it's important to consider other companies that might be out there in the same category and impacted by the change in the landscape. One of these companies is WideTag. Although it is technically based in Redwood City, California, the company was founded by three Italians and I believe that the "heart" of the project was in Northern Italy.

WideTag's angle on the sensor data aggregation problem was to provide a software platform that has a social media component. Aside from the emphasis on social media, WideTag and Pachube are very similar. Compare with the Pachube mission, this text:

"The WideSpime framework for massive data collection applications allows for the rapid development of highly scalable, and robust vertical applications in the areas of energy, environment, industrial monitoring, and others.

The OpenSpime development libraries have been put in open-source in order to spur the growth of a healthy community sharing the spime-based vision of the forthcoming Internet Of Things. In addition to this, Roberto Ostinelli, WideTag’s CTO, released in open-source Misultin >-|-|-|<>, a high-performance http server."

The major differences between Pachube and WideTag today are that WideTag is no longer an active business, while Pachube has a major sponsor and deep pockets from which to draw.

It was clear from the declining level of newsworthy activity and developments throughout 2010 that the company was not growing. In March 2011, a post by WideTag CEO, Leandro Agrò, on the site announced that the three co-founders had gone their separate ways but were thankful for the opportunity they had to work in the exciting field of the Internet of Things. What was the difference? Was it a resource limitation?

So now, with the Pachube property valuation in mind, is there an opportunity to pour a little cash in and revive WideTag? Is there a WideTag Phase 2? Or is there a fresh, new company, like Open Sen.se, coming in to fill the void?

Categories
Internet of Things News

Pachube Acquired by LogMeIn

The news broke earlier today that Wobrun, Mass-based LogMeIn, a provider of software to remotely access computers and mobile devices, acquired Connected Environments, the provider of Pachube for approximately $15M cash. In its press release, and the investor relations conference call that followed, LogMeIn said that it intends to leverage the acquisition to expand its Gravity platform while leaving the existing team in place. Usman Hague, the founder of Connected Environments and the individual most closely identified with the company's vision, wrote a sincere post about his hope for the future on his blog.

Pachube (pronounced Patch Bay) has been around for nearly 4 years (the service was launched in 2008) and has had a tremendous impact on the development of concrete Internet of Things projects.  I hope that this continues and, with the resources of the parent company, expands in the future.

A few words from the LogMeIn press release:

"The Pachube Service and User Community

Pachube is an Internet of Things pioneer.  Their service offers real-time monitoring and management of any type of connected device. Pachube makes it easy for people to connect their devices and sensors to its service, to publish data, and to receive data and instructions from other devices. The Pachube service also collects and stores the published datastreams for further analysis and visualization. Using the Pachube service, individuals, developers and businesses can create applications, services and products that leverage the data created by these connected devices. In doing so, Pachube empowers people to share, collaborate and make use of the information generated by the world around them.  Currently, Pachube users send more than seven million datapoints to the service each day."

The Pachube community is, in my mind, the most valuable asset of the company which cannot quickly be rebuilt. I wonder if LogMeIn will be able to nurture and to grow the community which is composed largely of people who are very firmly devoted to open source.

What do you think?