It was an incredible honor to present thethings.IO at the startup competition of LeWeb London 2013. Surrounded with 15 other stunning startups, Marc Pous, the founder of thethings.IO made the presentation in front of investors and assistants.
The June 2012 Wired magazine (US edition) has an awesome article that talks about the Internet of Things and the future. Called In the Programmable World, All our objects will act as one his author (Bill Wasik) perfectly explains by hand of the CEO of SmarterThing the present and future of the Internet of Things.
Awake and welcome to the Programmable World @ Wired US June 2013
The author explains clearly the next three steps of the Internet of Things:
For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a designable environment, a playground for coders and engineers.
At theThings.IO we fully agree with this evolution of the Internet of Things, with some comments.
For the first step more evangelizers are needed. From my point of view, most of the manufacturers and OEMs are still dubitative about the Internet of Things. The history says that people is not really interested on objects with embedded gadgets, such as the “smart” fridge, the “smart” coffee machine, et al. We must move from the gadget connected to the Internet to the object with a real value. That said, the openness of these objects is needed.
For the second stage, I could say that years of research have been granted innovating on this topic. Brokers, hubs, ESBs, lightweight M2M protocols among other technical names have been developed in order to make the interoperability a reality. As Bill Wasik pointed, Smart Things is doing an amazing work on that field with their hardware. Ninja Blocks is also working on this direction.
The final stage is the most interesting. We are focused on developing to make real this third stage. We truly believe that developers might be able to apply their innovation and creativity on the top of the Internet connected objects. Manufacturers will be empowered with objects with new functionalities. And finally end-users with objects that can be reprogrammed for free or just for few cents.
We love this idea of hacking objects… why a glass cannot be a flowerpot?
We are very happy to announce that we have been selected among 16 semifinalists out of over 350 start-ups that presented at the LeWeb London Startup Competition. This is the first times that thethings.iO, the Internet of Things social network, will be presented to the public. Needless to say we are extremely excited for this opportunity and hope to see some familiar faces in the crowd supporting us.
LeWeb Lodon Startup Competition
If you are in London during the 5th and 6th of June, ping us on twitter @theThingsIO or e-mail. See you in London
Our booth at Make Munich
Last weekend thethings.iO attended Make Munich.
On Saturday, we showed how to connect objects to the Internet using Arduinos and Ethernet Shielts. With the Arduino we were pushing real-time air quality data (with a hacked Air Quality Egg: temperature, humidity, NO2, CO) to Cosm and poll real-time data and embedded that data using D3.js in a map.
Actuators ready to hack chairs
On Sunday, we wanted to show everyone how to connect a chair to the Internet. Sadly, the Wifi at the event went down so we were unable to show off our connected chair, but don’t worry we will explain the use and purpose of the connected chair in a later post.
All around though it was a great event to introduce the Internet of Things and what thethings.iO really is.
Since the Scott’s SXSW presentation, we have been trying to reach the Scott Jenson video of his presentation’s slides and finally we were able to get ahold of it.
The aim of thethings.iO is to offer developers and makers of devices a platform able to reprogram devices, offer new functionalities on top of existing devices and create add-value to real services. Our point of view is that the Web will lead this change. The users will receive benefits from these new programs since things will be inter-connected and accessible through one sole device. We work with a passion to give each user a meaningful product where they will be able to manage and interact with everything they have connected via the Internet.
We truly believe that the Internet of Things will revolutionize the technology market, and we hope that our social network will be part of this change!
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and be sure to check out our #IoTFriday blog!
After two days at the Mobile World Congress 2013 and reading about CES 2013 at Las Vegas, we strongly believe the Internet of Things will be big in 2013.
One of our companions from , had a booth set up and they caught several people’s interest due to their Kickstarter campaign.
The Good Night Lamp at CES 2013 (by todbot at Flickr)
Experts says that Quantified Self has been the guest star at CES 2013 because they create a lot of expectations with HAPIFork, Fitbit, Jawbone and Withing among other interesting companies.
In our opinion, the star of this conference was the Internet connected coffee machines. With an unclear use of companies defended the product saying that people do not want to wait to have coffee prepared when they go to the machine. A coffee takes thirty seconds to one minute to prepare through a machine.
The Cisco coffee machine connected to the Internet
The engineering solution for coffee machines were very intriguing.
Thinking things by Telefonica I+D
At the SMA Connected Cities booth, Jordi Corominas was presenting Ecooltra, an electric motorbike connected to the Internet. The system lets the users rent a motorbike using their mobile devices. Then, they could use NFC to start the motorbike at the Ecooltra parkings.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter @thethingsIO and check out our weekly #IoTFriday Blogs!
