I Made It

If not IFTTT, then something like it will be needed to control the Internet of Things in your home (and elsewhere).

Having had an experiment using IFTTT with my WeMo sensor and plug as well as the Hue bulbs I have found some actually useful functions. Rather than the rather peculiar ones people have been using, like making your lights flash when you get an email, or making your lights turn blue when it’s raining. For example, the WeMo switch has a physical button on it, so I can set up a rule so that If the switch is turned off, via the physical button, then my lights would turn into the nice relaxing patterns me and my partner use when we’re having dinner. Saving the rather irritating hassle of getting out my phone, navigating the to the Hue app and selecting a preset.

You don’t need to make a TV if you control every input into it. Let’s see if Microsoft is clever enough into controlling the whole house through this.

Microsoft’s vision for television’s future looks a lot like the future of personal computers. The company today revealed the Xbox One, a combination Windows device, videogame console, and set-top box meant to inject Xbox — and Microsoft — into everything you might use a television for, whether it’s watching a football game, video-conferencing with family, playing games, or browsing the Web.

Xbox One effectively creates what might be called the first genuinely “smart” television. You’ll be able to talk to Xbox One by saying “Xbox” and issuing a command; the device is capable of reacting to your gestures and movements, thanks to the built-in Kinect sensor; and you can control it with a smartphone or tablet via the integrated SmartGlass service. Using a television set or videogame console used to involve a game of let’s-find-the-remote and a series of button presses; now it will be more like talking to a personal assistant who reacts to every word and motion.

IR is one the big networks in your home and desperately needs better control.

Hat tip Wireless Sensor Blog.

IR Remote is a small shield that allows you to record any infrared command sent by a remote control and resend it from the Internet. It works connected to Arduino and Raspberry Pi, and let us to control any HVAC system including heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and thermostats from the Cloud.

Education kickstarter starting @ $40. The “clever bit” is the software / courseware they’re developing. The hardware is Grove from Seeed.

We are creating a collection of sensor kits for science classrooms. Each kit will be accompanied by web-based interactive lessons that incorporate live sensor data. These interactive lessons will guide students through using the sensors and exploring scientific concepts.

Good for Intel. How about a SoC with ARM, WiFi and Bluetooth LE built in and make a Raspberry Pi “killer” so that every toy and product in the world has an Intel chip in it?

Via TIOT Council.

Well, that didn’t take long. A mere five days after Brian Krzanich took the reins as the new CEO of Intel, he’s shaking things up at an organizational level.

… “The group will be tasked with turning cool technology and business model innovations into products that shape and lead markets,” Intel said in a statement to AllThingsD.

… I’m left thinking of a cryptic statement Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy shared when, in the course of researching the “Next-gen CEO” article, I asked him if Intel had any plans to move into embedded devices and the Internet of Things.

“Oh, without any specifics you should assume it’s all fair game,” Mulloy told me, “…but nothing definitive yet.”

“Ontario is ranked alongside California, New York and London as a top center for innovation,” says Reza Moridi, Canada’s new Minister of Research and Innovation. Toronto with its 2.6 million people energize the state. Moridi says Ontario is ranked third for foreign direct investment in all of North America. “The big banks are setting up offices here. Facebook is here. Twitter is coming here because they see what the state is doing. They see we have the talent. Toronto has more start-ups than anywhere else in the country,” says Moridi, bragging about the hundreds of them setting up shop each day at some incubator here or in Waterloo, nearly two hours away by car.

Beowulf Cluster using Raspberry Pi. It looks like something from The Matrix.

Covering old ground, but notable because this is The Economist.

If the internet of things is going to expand as some enthusiasts predict, ultimately comprising trillions of objects and encompassing entire cities, practical experiments like the one at Google I/O will be invaluable. Each sensor mote at the conference cost about $50 to build and it turned out that “you really need density to build good insights,” says Michael Manoochehri, an engineer at Google. Nevertheless, deploying such networks outside the rarefied atmosphere of a tech gathering will be expensive, not least because nifty sensor motes could simply be pinched. There are also unresolved issues around standards for machine-to-machine communication and interaction, as well as the perennial privacy bogeyman.

All or most networking with Bluetooth Low Energy. 2017 is so far away it’s science fiction, so take that into account with any of these reports.

Sports and fitness monitors, including wearable sensors and running and cycling computers, will hit 56.2 million global shipments in 2017, up from 43.8 million this year, according to IMS Research. Over the five years, the research firm predicts 252 million units will ship.

I can’t help but read “Logmein” in a WWII movie voice. Note the $1000 year for real applications.

LogMeIn acquired the company back in 2011, by which time it was already processing seven million data points daily and burning through $4m in annual running costs which LogMeIn took on when it bought the company for $15m. LogMeIn already had its own cloud, monikered Gravity, onto which the Pachube service was grafted.

To recover those costs, Xively will charge a sliding scale kicking off at thousand dollars a year, but not until commercial deployment. Developer and hobbist accounts are free to use, and the deal with ARM creates a Jumpstart kit complete with an mbed Application board and LPC1768 Header board with which to start logging data.

GMail allows you to add structured data to your GMail (and some other Google services) messages via JSON-LD. Structure information are things like Event invitations, Person info, description of a thing. GMail already has the ability to insert event invites - this is that concept generalized.

Via Manu Sporny, who has a lot more here, including some worries that Google has already broken the spec.

Gmail, Search Answer Cards, and Google Now rely on structured data in emails to work. Schemas in Gmail supports both JSON-LD and Microdata and you can use either of them to markup information in email. This lets Google understand the fields and provide the user with relevant search results, actions, and cards. For example, if the email is about an event reservation, you might want to annotate the start time, venue, number of tickets, and all other information that defines the reservation.

Leap Motion wants you to build wicked forearm and shoulder strength.

W3C wants to help keep important URLs alive forever. 

I’m slightly confused by the lack of name spaces - it looks like you can grab any URL on w3id.org. Why not make your namespace a top-level disambiguator? E.g. to get this URL

http://w3id.org/imadeit.davidjanes.com/somethingsomething

You’d need to prove you own “imadeit.davidjanes.com”.

The purpose of this community is to setup and maintain a secure, permanent URL re-direction service for the Web. This service, located at w3id.org, is run exclusively by members of the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group.

Summarizing: Why is Qualcomm doing this? Because they’ve perfected small and connected for phones, why not for everything.

Technomoaning about how our standards changes as things get better.

But what if that’s simply not true? What if technology of the 20th century didn’t actually create more leisure time? What does that mean for the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed technophiles among us who are making sure that all of our gadgets can speak the same language?

Just about every generation of the last hundred years has debated whether their new-fangled appliances and gadgets were indeed making life any easier. One of the most interestingly counterintuitive studies on the effects of technology on housework and leisure came from Joann Vanek in the mid-1970s. Vanek argued that the time American women devoted to housework hadn’t actually declined from 1920-1970. She explained that with the rise of electric appliances like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, housework had obviously become more efficient. The only catch? That the standard for what constitutes a clean house (or a clean person for that matter) had simply evolved along with the technology.