We are glad to announce that we will be attending the Maker Faire Rome 2013.
Come check out a 30 minute workshop session we have planned at 2:30 PM in Room G- Archimede and learn how the connect your gadgets to the Internet. We hope to see everyone at the event!
Maker Faire Rome 2013
Hope to see you at the Maker Faire Rome 2013 where we are going to show the latest news of thethings.iO for developers.
The newspaper Ara is one of the newest newspapers in Catalonia. Every sunday there is a special magazine focused on new technologies and entrepreneurship. Last week, they interviewed our founder Marc Pous.
theThings.IO at the ARA newspaper
Translation in English
Marc Pous is a computer engineer and since some years ago he has been involved on the Internet of Things research scenario. That means, how to connect quotidian objects around us to the Internet and how people interact with them.
“The costs to make processors have decreased a lot and today is much easier to integrate computers inside objects: from watches, glasses, bikes or even plants at home”, says Pous, born in Barcelona. “One thing is to manage three or four mobile applications to interact these gadgets, but when we will have 30 or 40 gadgets connected to the Internet it will be much more complicated”, add the entrepreneur.
In June, Pous created the company Next Big Thing Labs SL with the goal to launch the platform thethings.iO, a kind of social network where users will be able to add and manage the information generated by their gadgets in real-time. “For example, if you run, the running application will share the running information with your scale; you also will be able to turn off your lights from your mobile device or see when do you need to water your plants”, says.
The Next Big Thing Labs team is composed by three people. They are looking for 150.000€ as an investment to make a strong development team during the next years. “We want to lead the Internet of Things from Barcelona”, says Pous. The beta version will be available at the end of the year.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday weekly blog!
When we envision the future of the Internet of Things, we see this scenario that Apple and Google helped to build with their mobile devices and their application market. We see tons of gadgets and objects connected to the Internet each one (or even brand) managed through their mobile application.
Dozens of IoT mobile apps (Photo by: Gonzalo Baeza)
Philips Hue and LIFX are both household light bulbs and both are compatible with the analogical light bulbs that we have at home. However, both require the user to download separate apps to control their own device, this doesn’t make any sense.
Philips HUE and LIFX
People love to monitor their health by using scales but now with the invention of wearable trackers such as Fitbit or Nike+ people are able to also monitor their physical activity throughout the day. There are scales such as the Withings scale but this is not compatable with the Fitbit or the Nike+. We feel as if technology should make watching our health more convenient, not more difficult.
Our solution
We believe that the users of these millions of gadgets do not want to use dozens of mobile apps to interact with their devices. We propose a central place where they are able to aggregate, manage and interact in real-time with all of the devices.
We want to provide a platform where all of the Internet of Things in our market are interoperable and end users do not need to deal with different mobile apps.
Stay tunned and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday blog!
We have good news! We have been selected among 42 finalists of the 108 startups presented for the pitch marathon in Berlin the July 31.
Pitch Marathon in Berlin
We are carefully preparing our new pitch with a demo included to show in Berlin. If you are in Berlin during this time, we can meet up and talk about thethings.iO, the Internet of Things, or the future of technologies.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday weekly blog!
Jan Chipchase wrote a post where he talked about how some of his Internet-connected devices made him feel guilty when he wasn’t using them anymore. The purpose of this post was triggered by an email from Twine telling him that he wasn’t using his Twine enough.
This type of email is one demonstration of the new source of data generated by the Internet of Things. Most companies are becoming interested in the amount of usage of your device. They want to know where you use your things, when, why, what you are doing when you are using this thing, how many times, and what things you use together.
Canon EOS 500D (Flickr by sindykids)
These companies want to gain an understanding on how we use our devices and therefore will try to market us better from that understanding. For example, imagine that you have a Cannon EOS 500D, a basic camera, but imagine that Cannon could know that you have a normal zoom lent and you have been taking several photos with zoom. With the Internet of Things, this is possible and advertisement will be more focused on what you do and how you do it. Thus, privacy will be more and more complicated with Internet-connected objects around.
At thethings.IO we believe that data made from users is user’s data. Therefore, users have the right to own their own data and give access to this data to third parties which will receive ads and coupons.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday weekly blog!
