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?
Today is the day, thethings.IO will be at Sonar+D presenting its new project, One Seat Away, in collaboration with Simone Rebaudengo, Ken Frederick, Daniel Kluge and Marc Pous.
The One Seat Away project at Sonar+D
What is One Seat Away
One Seat Away is an artistic project that aims at the exploration of the relationship between the rhythms of a musical performance and the hidden rhythms of a city such as Barcelona. The rhythm of a musical performance is typically measured in BPM (beats per minute), an easily detected value. However, within an urban space, there are multiple ways to define rhythm. There is a physical layer of people, noise, temperature, bikes shared systems. Then there is a virtual layer of activity in a city such as Foursquare check-ins, Facebook likes, Instagram pictures, Tweets among others, that remain mostly “hidden”. Their value reveals another side of how the rhythm of a city can be understood.
We will define the BPMs of the two environments and translate them into an experience that binds these two disparate contexts in real-time: bringing the rhythms of the festival into the city and the rhythm of the city into the festival.
The main goal of One Seat Away is to use connectivity and sensing to augment the sense of the urban space around us and merge it with music and rhythms as a way of experiencing data in a tangible way: something that one can feel and not necessarily have to understand in detail or rationally decode.
How does it work
The project will connect daily objects such as sofas and chairs to Internet. The sofas and chairs will receive the sensed data processed from the real-time Sónar music being played and converted into vibration. In the same way that one can feel music outside of an event without “hearing” it via vibrations of physical structures, we want people to feel and experience the rhythm without actually hearing it.
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!
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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.
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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.
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