Adam Greenfield vs El Mundo

It's not very common that a personality in the field of Ubiquitous Computing such as Adam Greenfield, that became widely popular with his book "Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing", appears in a Spanish mass media newspaper such as El Mundo. He was interviewed last Sunday as he took part in the Urban Labs meetings, organized by the citilab of Cornellà (Barcelona, Spain).
The interview from El Mundo quotes Adam saying:
what users ask has nothing to do with what they need
It seems that Adam is not very happy with how the interview got its final form, and has created...

Immaterials: the RFID aura

This video and experiment called Immaterials from Timo Arnall has become very popular between the Internet of Things and proximity interaction communities in the last weeks. It tries to decribe the interactive properties of RFID by visualizing the activation area of RFID readers and antennas with long-exposure photographs.
The results are not only aesthetically impressive, but a very good learning material in order to understand how RFID fields work.

First International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2010)

A successful approach to the Internet of Things is the so called Web of Things, a concept promoted by Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard that focus on the use of Web technologies, particularly RESTful services and mashups, to build the IoT.
The news is that they are organizing the First International Workshop on the Web of Things that will be held in conjunction with PerCom 2010 in Mannheim (Germany) from March 29th to April 2nd 2010. I guess some nice stuff and an enthusiastic community will come out from this event!

My presentation on the Internet of Things at Tweakfest

Last month I was invited to Tweakfest to share my vision of the Internet of Things. It was a very exciting event with a nice mix of digital artists and technologists. Among the other invited speakers, I liked the presentations by Ian Pearson (futurologist!?) and Nam Do (co-founder of Emotiv Systems), who made a presentation of the EPOC.
For those of you interested, this was my presentation titled "Ambient Intelligence and the Internet of Things":

The Real-Time Web: a new candidate for Web 3.0?

The news website ReadWriteWeb.com is (too) strongly promoting a concept called Real-Time Web as the new "promised land" for all those who still think that there is a Web 3.0 after Web 2.0.
It is funny because I have seen how they have been generating a lot of buzz with this term, and how those news have been consistently linked from other websites. You may want a take a look at these two articles:
Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web! (16/01/2009) Introduction to the Real-Time Web (12/05/2009) Now, let's look at this chart:
This is the evolution in terms of Google search of the...

One of the best presentations on the Internet of Things/Spimes

Singularity University Spime Design WorkshopView more documents from David Orban.

Energy Secretary! Evolve!

The Real Theorem Generator: a Context Free Grammar

I should probably document the real origin of the Theorem of the Day and Philosophy of the Day. Coffee and Henry David Thoreau are perhaps less involved than originally indicated.

The theorem generator was written by a good friend of mine, Matt Gline, as a project for CS51: Abstraction and Design in Computer Programming, which we took together as freshmen.

The assignment was to use LISP to implement a context free grammar — basically a set of rules for computer-generated mad libs. The subject was whatever we wanted. Good ones from past years include computer-generated mystery novellas, course-guide...

Philosophy of the Day

New Philosophy

You press button. Button tell robot hand “pick up Henry David Thoreau, move over next to pond.” Robot hand pick up Henry David Thoreau, put him next to pond. Result recorded.

How we get the philosophy of the day

Honda Needs a Tune-Up

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=sJFGacuxcSM

This is the story of how Honda engineers screwed up a big expensive project with a simple arithmetic mistake, tried to fudge their result with sound editing software, and congratulated themselves for being totally awesome.

When I was a kid, my family used to drive up to The Pinery in Ontario, a beautiful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour outside of the park. To discourage reckless Canadians from barreling past the houses and barns, the local government carved five sets of grooves in the road before...