The Internet of Things
One innovative trend that really excites me is the internet of things. The internet of things is exploding. It is riding the wave created by smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Here are some examples:
- Fitbit scale (auto uploads your weight based to your correct profile on their website)
- Tesla Model S (smartphone app features include lock/unlock, climate control, charging control, sunroof control, horn, lights)
- Samsung Fridge (see below; gimmicky in my opinion)
- Nest thermostat (control your home temperature from your phone)
- Fitness watches: Jawbone Up, Fitbit Force, Basis, Note 3, Nike, Garmin, and more (I’ll do a post on these someday)
- Dropcam
Some of these are super useful. Some are gimmicky, like the fridge which comes with integrated apps like Pandora, weather, twitter, and news headlines. I would never use those apps on the fridge. So I bought the $200 cheaper version without the apps.
Over a year ago, my co-founder and I started working on an idea to build a device that would monitor and control many different types of arbitrary appliances, etc. You can tell from EM signals, vibrations, sound, and temperature most of the salient characteristics of any physical thing. We got sidetracked with other projects and it fell by the wayside. It would have been similar to this Spotter device that is super cool:
David Cummings has recently posted twice about the internet of things (here and here).
What are your thoughts on the internet of things?
Related articles
- REVIEW: The Nest Thermostat
- 18 things that happen on the Internet every minute
- Here’s why 2014 will be the year of the ‘Internet of things’
- The Simplest “Internet Of Things” Product Yet
- Bluetooth 4.1 takes on Internet of Things with flexibility boost
- REVIEW: Fitbit’s New Fitness-Tracking Wristband, The Force
- SmartThings Rolls Out A New iPhone App To Simplify Adding Your Home To The Internet Of Things
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
Michael Munroe
You almost have it right. Ubiquitous computing is a more informative phrase. Heterogenous computing fabric might also do.
Some time ago, I was working on two laptops at the same time (one had a fully loaded cpu for a compute run, the other was powerpoint) and I tried to drag and drop something from one screen to the other. It was a tired/dopy/insightful moment. They should have been connected. I should have had a bridge across the uncanny valley of usability. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) The space should have been continuous, not fragmented by OS, software appliance, or hardware boundary.
The question behind the idea, behind the question, might be “If we make boundaries fuzzy or at least connected with wide enough bridges, what are the places where people are going to go that are going to return value, whatever that is?”. What are the arbitrage opportunities for technology in the landscape of information measurement, transformation, and presentation between the the human and its world?
In my personal opinion, that is part of why Apple bought PrimeSense – to attack the uncanny valley of the user interface.
Don’t forget things like smartpens – it puts the brain in the pen and not the paper/tv/phone. The smartwatch, and the smart-shoes are also neat.
melonakos
In reply to an earlier comment
Wonderful comment, thanks! We are working on some ideas that use browsers as the way to overcome these challenges.