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thethings.iO Appeared on Expansion Newspaper

Some days ago, thethings.iO appeared on the Expansion newspaper on wearables and Internet of Things article. The article is called “T-Shirts that saves lifes: these startups are going to change the world“.

Fragment of the Expansion article

Fragment of the Expansion article

On this article, startups such as FirstV1sion who are also at Wayra Barcelona and Nuubo. We were interviewed by an Expansion journalist. This is a partially translation of the Expansion’s article:

The next big thing
By the year 2016 the wearables will suppose a market of 6 billion of dollars. Here you can include professional devices and massive market gadgets. “We are still on the beginning. It’s hard to imagine how many things we are going to have, in some years, thanks of the wearables technologies.” mentions Marc Pous, founder of theThings.IO, a startup that develops software to interconnect several wearables. “We integrate APIs from dozens of vendors,” specifies Pous.

Send us a comment about the future of the wearables and the Internet of Things. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to check out our week;y #IoTFriday blog!

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How To Connect Things To The Internet – #iotFriday

Welcome to the first edition of thethings.iO #IoTFriday whiteboard video.

Today we want to talk to you about how to connect things to the Internet.

Transcription of the video

Hello thethings.iO friends! This is a new edition of the #IoTFriday!
Today i’m going to talk about how to connect things to the Internet with my new Koubachi, a sensor plant that help me to water my plants.

Internet of Things is today a trendy topic. Introduced at 1999 by Kevin Ashton englobes a bigger picture of how to connect anything to the Internet.

The tools that we have today enables anyone to connect cheap and easy to programme hardware inside everyday objects. This new connectivity allows designers, programmers and engineers build different uses for those objects for different industrial or consumer applications.

[…]

Below is the whiteboard in which Marc explained how to connect things to the Internet.

Whiteboard of how to connect things to the Internet #iotFriday

Whiteboard of how to connect things to the Internet #iotFriday

 

We hope you like it and see you at next week’s #IoTFriday. Be sure to use thethings.iO  to connect anything to the Internet.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!

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theThings.IO is a Wayra startup

We are very excited to announce that thethings.iO has been selected as winners of the Wayra Weekend at Barcelona last week on the 23 of June.

Wayra

Wayra

After our efforts to be accelerated at Wayra Munich in the past year, we were selected among more than 600 startups to be accelerated at Wayra Barcelona for the next 6 months.

Following some month of intensive development and meetings, we are ready to take the first accelerated step down our road ahead of us. Our mission is to help Internet of Tings companies and users to improve their Internet of Things experience, and we plan to make that happen with Wayra and Telefonica.

Since the end of July, we moved into the Telefonica Tower located in Barcelona to work out of the Wayra headquarters. Lets introduce the team from left to right: Jose Manuel is our CTO Maverick, Martí our Data scientist, Marc is our CEO and IoT Advocate, Adrià is our SysOps Robot and Andrés is our Maker in Residence.

 

theThings.IO team

theThings.IO team

Also checkout our startup for a quick synopsis of what we do here at thethings.iO

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday blog!

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thethings.iO at the X Seedrocket Campus in Madrid

Last week our founder, Marc Paus, was presenting thethings.iO at the X Campus of the SeedRocket. Thethings.iO was one of the nine startups selected among 220 companies that applied for the SeedRocket accelerator program.

 

Marc pitching at the SeedRocket investors during the Demo Day

Marc pitching at the SeedRocket investors during the Demo Day.

Among all the accelerator programs that exist today in Spain, SeedRocket is one of the oldest and best in existence. Made by investors that have their own internet companies, they were the first ones to advise the new entrepreneurs that were attending the SeedRocket Campus.

Although we weren’t able to pass the selection process, it was worth it to attend the event and get a lot of good advise from successful Spanish businesses. However, we didn’t spend all of our time conducting business, we were able to visit Makespace Madrid and the MediaLab Prado.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday blog!

 

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Jam Packed Week at thethings.iO

Last week was an interesting one here in Barcelona.

We started with the Internet of Things Barcelona meetup, which was one of the biggest, with over 85 attendants at the venue. Some of the discussions included Jiri of Claro Partners, Telefonica presenting their Thinking Things, Alicia Asín introducing Libelium and Adam Dunkels showcasing his Thingsquare last novelty (in a live demo). It was also awesome to meet Hugo Fiennes from Electric Imp and hear some of his experiences on the Internet of Things field.

On Tuesday Marc went to the radio, he went to RAC1 to talk about the Internet of Things. Checkout the podcast

On Friday Marc was invited to the IoT tapas organized by Claro Partners. It was one of the best brainstorms related to the Internet of Things we’ve ever attended. We have continued the development of our beta website and look forward on showing it off soon enough.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday blog!

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One App For Each Gadget? No Way! This Is Not The Internet of Things We Want

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)

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

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!

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Selected For The Startup Pitch Marathon in Berlin

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

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!

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thethings.iO at the Sonar+D 2013 with One Seat Away Project

As we mentioned some weeks ago, we attended the Sònar 2013 collaborating with the One Seat Away project. Simone Rebaudengo, Ken Frederick, Daniel Kluge and Marc Pous with thethings.iO were working hard to have the One Seat Away at Sonar and their hard work paid off!

The Sofa of the One Seat Away project

The Sofa of the One Seat Away project

Our main vision was to offer a new kind of interaction to citizens and Sonar attendants with music. Usually, we are familiar with interacting with music the our ears but why not convert the music into a haptic experience? By connecting objects to the Internet, we could send the physical music far away from the speakers played by DJs at Sonar music festival. In this case, we were exposing a sofa that was vibrating at the DJ’s Sonar Village vibe.

Getting interviewed by TVE during the Sonar+D

Getting interviewed by TVE during the Sonar+D

The architecture

The components to connect an IKEA sofa

The components to connect an IKEA sofa

The IKEA sofa was connected to the Internet through and Arduino UNO and Arduino Ethernet shield. At the Sonar Village sound technician table, we set up a laptop connected with a MAX/MSP software in which was converting music into analog music and pushing it into thethings.iO every second. Through thethings.iO API connected to the Arduino, it was able to request a “music package” to thethings.iO API and sending the signal to the motors installed inside the sofa, making them moving at the vibe of the music.

The modulator of the vibe at the connected sofa

The modulator of the vibe at the connected sofa

With some components we were able to modulate the potence of the vibe and the Arduino PWM. Like the volume on the music stereos.

Laptop converting music into analogical music

Laptop converting music into analogical music

The experience

The experience of people feeling the music was a great! The visitors were showing up at our space sitting on the connected sofa experiencing a new way to feel the music. People were impressed with the sofa and the vibe. We enjoyed receiving positive feedback and we hope next year we have the chance to repeat this experience!

Do you want to connect anything to the Internet? Just try thethings.iO and make it happen! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

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