Tag: IoT-Zurich

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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
Events Internet of Things

Where EVRYTHNG Connects

Over the past 10 days I've been traveling and participating in important workshops and events in the US so writing and posting to this blog has been infrequent. My recent face-to-face meetings involved those attending the AR-in-Texas workshops, followed by the participants of the Fifth AR Standards Community Meeting that I chaired in Austin. Then, I participated in the Open Geospatial Consortium's quarterly Technical Committee meetings. I'm currently in San Francisco to attend the New Digital Economics Brainstorm.

I haven't counted but I estimate that within a week's time, during and between these events, I've met with over 100 people individually or in small groups. During the trip just prior to this one, the five days of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I met and spoke with at least that many and probably closer to 200 people.

A significant slice of these (the majority, I am guessing), are people with whom I have a history–simply meaning that we may have spoken by Skype, phone or in person, or exchanged some e-mail. Our meetings in the physical space, however, differ from those we conduct virtually. We all know that the Internet has formed far more links between people than physical contacts could ever hope to make, however, meeting in person still brings us value. How much? Well, that's difficult to measure in time and in terms of revenue. Certainly they provide me sufficient value to warrant my leaving my office to attend meetings! I could probably ramble on and reflect further about this interpersonal on-line/in-person communication dichotomy but one tangent I want to explore with you is slightly different.

When I'm traveling I also come into contact with many many objects. Products, places, things. I wonder how many objects (new ones, old ones, ones I've seen/encountered before) I come into contact in a day. What value do these bring to me? How would I discover this?

Think of a ‘Facebook for Things’ with apps, services and analytics powered by connected objects and their digital profiles. With billions of product and other objects becoming connected, tagged and scannable, there’s a massive opportunity for a company that can provide the trusted engine for exchanging this active object information.

One of the companies that is responding to the opportunity is EVRYTHNG. I hope to see many new and familiar people in the room on April 3 in Zurich when I'll be chairing the next Internet of Things face-to-face meeting featuring the start up EVRYTHNG. Why should you be there?

One reason is that co-founder Dominique Guinard will be talking from his company's perspective about:

– What is the Web of Things?
– Web of Things: How and Why?
– Problem Statement: Hardware and Cloud Infrastructures for Web-augmented Things
– Web-enabling Devices and Gateways
– Active Digital Identities (ADIs)
– EVRYTHNG as a storage engine
– Problem Solved: Connecting People & Products
– Vision: Every Thing Connected
– Projects and Concrete Example of How and Why ADIs are Useful.
– Using our cloud services and APIs to build your next internet of things / web of things applications.

Let's connect in Zurich!

Categories
Internet of Things Research & Development Social and Societal

City WalkShop

Adam Greenfield is one of the thought leaders I follow closely on urban technology topics. Adam and his network (including but going beyond the Urbanscale consulting practice) are far ahead of most people when it comes to understanding and exploring the future of technology in cities.

In this post I'm capturing information about this small event conducted in November 2010 in collaboration with Do Projects (in the context of the Drumbeat Festival) because it inspires me. I've also found documentation about two more of these done in spring of 2011 (Bristol and London). On March 11, there will be another one taking place in Cologne, Germany in collaboration with Bottled City.

City WalkShop experiences are "Collective, on-the-field discovery around city spots intensive in data or information, analyzing openness and sharing the process online."

I discovered the concept of WalkShops when I was exploring Marc Pous' web page. Marc just founded the Internet of Things Munich meetup group a few weeks ago and, in addition to being eager to meet other IoT group founders (disclosure: I founded IoT Zurich meetup in October 2011), I learned that he is a native of Barcelona (where the IoT-Barcelona group meets).

I got acquainted with Marc's activities and came across the Barcelona WalkShop done with Adam.

The WalkShop Barcelona is documented in several places. There's the wiki page on UrbanLabs site that describes the why and the what, and I visited the Posterous page. Here's the stated goal:

What we’re looking for are appearances of the networked digital in the physical, and vice versa: apertures through which the things that happen in the real world drive the “network weather”, and contexts in which that weather affects what people see, confront and are able to do.

Here's a summary of Systems/Layers process:

Systems/Layers is a half-day “walkshop” organized by Citilab and Do projects held in two parts. The first portion of the activity is dedicated to a slow and considered walk through a reasonably dense and built-up section of the city at hand. This portion of the day will take around 90 minutes, after which we gather in a convenient “command post” to map, review and discuss the things we’ve encountered.

I'd love to participate or organize another of these WalkShops in Barcelona in 2012, going to the same places and, as one of the outcomes of the process, to compare how the city has evolved. Could we do it as a special IoT-Barcelona meeting or in the framework of Mobile World Capital?

I also envisage getting WalkShops going in other cities. Maybe, as spring is nearing and people are outside more, this could be a side project for members of other IoT Meetup Groups?

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.