And now... the tweeting house

After the tweeting plants, the tweeting home has arrived. It seems that the owner of the house, inventor Andy Stanford-Clarke, is using the Crossbow family of motes (maybe MicaZ from the images) to report tweets of information about windows, electricity meters and even... a mouse trap!
As so geek as this may seem, I am sure that we will witness in the next 2-3 years more and more things that tweet. In fact, Twitter has become a convenient communication channel for the Internet of Things: public information can be posted by objects, while other fellow followers may react accordingly. The only...

RFID-enabled pet doors

You will never stop finding new uses of RFID. Check this: a pet door that automatically opens in the presence of your RFID-enabled pet (obviously with the RFID tag in the collar).
This application has 3 remarkable characteristics that makes it good to demonstrate the power of RFID in different environments:
The RFID tag is located in a mobile element (your dog, cat, crocodile, ...) that wanders around without any control, so it is a perfect scenario for tracking. There is one point of control, the door, where you want to allow the authorized pet to enter, and at the same time deny...

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...