Tag: IoT-Standards

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Events Internet of Things Standards

Sensors, Their Observations and Uses

There was a splash when my suitcase fell into the puddle next to the taxi outside the Exeter St. David's rail station last night. Although it was sunny under blue skies for both the days in London, while I was indoors attending the Open IoT Assembly, I was expecting rain in England and came prepared, I thought; it was the force of gravity that I had underestimated and caught me (and my suitcase) by surprise.

"More rain" announced the lonely receptionist at the White Hart hotel when I inquired about today's forecast. Instead the sky could not be bluer or clearer of clouds. Is the unpredictability of the weather an omen for the day? At least I won't be traveling with wet belongings on my way to the UK Met Office for the open session of the OGC meeting and back to the rail station this afternoon. 

I'm attending the meeting only for a few hours so that I can conduct in person meetings with the chairs and conveners of the IndoorGML Standards Working Group, the Sensors 4 IoT Standards Working group and other luminaries in the geospatial realm. I find it highly appropriate that the sensors I've used for weather have been so highly inaccurate today! I trust that my internal confidence about my meetings will serve me better today than they did last night.

Categories
Events Internet of Things

IoT via Cloud Meetup in Zurich

The other day I traveled 2 hours and 45 minutes from Montreux to Zurich and 2 hours and 50 minutes home following a 2-hour meetup group meeting at the ETHZ. It was a classic case of my desire to meet and speak with interesting people being sufficiently strong to outweigh my feeling that I have too much to do in too little time. See Time Under Pressure. Fortunately, I could work while on the train and, in keeping with my thinking about Air Quality, I (probably) didn't contribute to the total Swiss CO2 emissions for the day. And what is really amazing is that the meetup was worth my investment. I previously mentioned that I was looking forward to catching up with Dominique Guinard, co-founder and CTO of EVRYTHNG, a young Zurich start up, and co-founder of Web-of-Things portal.

Dom did not disappoint me or the 20 people who joined the meetup. In addition to great content, he is an excellent presenter. He started out at a very high level and yet was quickly able to get into the details of implementations. He included a few demonstrations during the talk and a couple of interesting anecdotes. We learned that his sister doesn't really see the point to him sharing (via Facebook) the temperature readings from his sunspot gadget. And how he was inspired when WalMart IT management came to MIT for a visit and mentioned that they were considering a $200,000 project to connect security cameras to tags in objects in order to reduce theft. In 2 days, Dom (and others, I presume) had a prototype showing that the Web of Things could address the issue with open interfaces. My favorite story during the talk brought up the problems that can arise when you don't have sufficient security. Dom was giving a demonstration of Web of Things once when a hacker in the audience saw the IP address. He was able to go into Dom's server and within minutes (during Dom's talk) the power on his laptop shut off!

In addition to Dom's stage-setting talk, we had the pleasure of having Matthias Kovatsch, researcher in the Institute for Pervasive Computing at ETHZ, and the architect of Copper, a generic browser for the IoT based on Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). Matthias presented the status of the projects on which he is working and the results of an ETSI/IETF plugfest to which he went in Paris. The consolidated slides of the IETF-83 CoRE meeting include the Plugtests wrap-up slides (slightly edited). It's really exciting to see how this project is directly contributing to part of the standards proving process!

In addition to these talks, Benjamin Wiederkehr, co-founder of Interactive Things, an experience design and architecture services firm based in Zurich, gave us great insights into the process and the tools they used to achieve the new interactive visualization of cell phone use in Geneva. Learn all about this project by visiting Ville Vivante web site, in collaboration with the City of Geneva.

Valuable evening, folks! Thank you for making another trip to Zurich worth the effort!

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
Internet of Things Standards

Can We Define IoT?

The Internet of Things can be understood, at its simplest, as the phenomenon whereby more things or objects are inter-connected to the Internet than people. I feel this statement is useful for a lay person but insufficient for business or technical purposes.

How do we define the Internet of Things in a way that is concise, yet clear, general, yet specific enough to be meaningful?

The question of the precise definition of the Internet of Things has commanded considerable intellectual debate in recent years. Getting the definition perfect is important for regulatory, legal, legislative and, lets not forget, funding purposes.

Several presentations explored this question at the European Commission-backed IoT day in Budapest in May 2011. Exchanges on a mailing list continue a debate among members of the IoT Joint Coordination Activity.

The definition proposed by Monique Morrow of Cisco, suggests:

"The Internet of Things consists of networks of sensors attached to
objects and communications devices, providing data that can be analyzed
and used to initiate automated actions. The data also generates vital
intelligence for planning, management, policy and decision-making."

Olivier Dubuisson of Orange FT Group defines Internet of Things as:

"A global ICT infrastructure linking physical objects and virtual objects
(as the informational counterparts of physical objects) through the
exploitation of sensor & actuator data capture, processing and transmission
capabilities. As such, the IoT is an overlay above the 'generic' Internet,
offering federated physical-object-related services (including, if relevant,
identification, monitoring and control of these objects) to all kinds of applications."

In my opinion, the IoT definition should not specify the purpose. It must describe only what the IoT IS and it probably will need to be a living definition, frequently updated to reflect the evolution of the state of the art.

As with the definition of Augmented Reality, however, there should and will be a day when the definition of the Internet of Things or AR no longer matter because the "thing itself" is so ubiquitous and easily understood that a definition is unnecessary. Between now and that day, expect these debates to continue. At least outside the events which I am responsible for organizing!