ReadWriteWeb

Early Internet of Things innovator gets a makeover and a new name: Cosm. It's attempting to become more social, but unfortunately it's likely to turn normal people off - rather than turn them on.

When we first started profiling the emerging trend of Internet of Things back in 2009, one startup stood out as an early innovator in the field. It had an unpronounceable name, Pachube (pronounced: Patch-Bay), but it was the first independent, open platform for sensor data. This week Pachube announced a new name - Cosm - and a redesign that attempts to make the service more social and easier to use.

So far in our series on car connectivity, we've focused on infotainment systems. It's early in the evolution of Internet services in vehicles and up till now, it's been all about information and entertainment. Early in-car apps have focused on music, navigation and news. The next generation of in-car apps will be about providing "smart" services, such as taking some of the cognitive load off the driver - including making the car autonomous in some ways.

At CES in January, Audi showed off futuristic concepts like the gestural-based dashboard above. At SXSW in March, I sat down with Anupam Malhotra, Manager of Connected Vehicles at Audi of America, to talk more about the future of Audi's connected services.

Since jumpstarting the tablet market two years ago, the iPad has found its way into a few distinct niches in our lives. Since its first generation, the device (and those like it) have been used heavily for content consumption: reading, watching video and, to a lesser extent, streaming music.

Tablets have since begun maturing into tools for content creation, including video editing and multitrack music recording. Despite early criticism of their limitations, tablets even help people stay productive at work.

If you think the Internet has changed your day-to-day life, just wait. That massive, glorious network of information that we now connect to from laptops and handheld devices is getting weaved ever more thoroughly into our lives.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, connected cars and TV sets were all the rage. That's just the beginning. Increasingly, everyday appliances and objects are adding Internet connectivity, opening up a world of new possibilities and further altering how we live our lives.

Electric cars are the biggest trend in new vehicles, at least according to media coverage. But Internet connectivity in cars must run a close second. Of all the car manufacturers, Ford is probably giving online connectivity the biggest push. While at SXSW I checked out the latest version of its infotainment system, SYNC with MyFord Touch, in a 2013 model Ford Escape.

The dream for connected cars is to make them 'smart'. Internet connectivity could do things like optimize fuel, predict your travel route on-the-fly and enable vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. But as with other car manufacturers I've spoken to recently, the main focus for Ford right now is providing a state of the art infotainment system. So it wasn't a fancy V2V system that Ford wanted to show me at SXSW, but improved internal acoustics inside the vehicle and a simpler UI for MyFord Touch.

There were only about 15 people at the Smart Homes Meetup at SXSW, which took place in a meeting room at the Hilton Austin. Ironically, the air conditioning didn't seem to be working. Not much smart technology in this room, I thought, mopping my brow and pouring myself a glass of iced water. But as I began working my way around the room, I discovered plenty of human smarts among the handful of Smart Home companies in attendance. I also found out that many of these startups are focused on home security. Turns out that's where a lot of the initial commercial activity is happening around the Internet of Things - where real world objects are connected to the Internet.

Adam Beguelin was one of the smart startup founders I met. He already has a successful track record in Web 2.0, having sold his video search startup Truveo to AOL for a cool $50 million in 2006. Beguelin's latest venture, Sensr.net, is a cloud-based video monitoring service. Using relatively cheap webcams, users can monitor video footage of their homes (or anything else) over the Internet.

At this year's SXSW, I attended a showcase of the latest Chevrolet cars and infotainment technologies. A lead brand for General Motors, Chevrolet had a huge corporate presence at SXSW. But it was the extension of infotainment to backseat passengers, using 4G, that attracted my attention. As I noted when profiling the latest BMW infotainment systems, up till now these technologies have been focused on providing information and entertainment to the car's driver. But at SXSW, Chevrolet showed a conceptual in-car infotainment system that can be separately controlled by the backseat passengers.

Earlier this year, influential venture capitalist Fred Wilson encouraged entrepreneurs and VCs to get behind open data. Writing on his widely read blog, Wilson urged developers to adopt the Green Button, the project that former United States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra launched in 2011 to unleash energy data.

Today, the Obama Administration announced that nine major utilities and electricity suppliers have committed to using and extending the Green Button to enable some 15 million households to access data about their energy usage. As with the Blue Button for healthcare data, the White House asserts that providing energy consumers with secure access to information about energy usage will increase innovation in the sector and empower citizens with more information.

"Would you like to drive it?" asked Rob Passaro, Head of BMW AppCenter, as we finished up our in-car interview from a suburban street in Austin. I'd been admiring the BMW 650i convertible from the passenger seat, particularly the state of the art infotainment system that was the subject of our discussion. But I didn't need a second invitation to get behind the wheel! "Oh, I should tell you," I said as I lurched the sleek black vehicle out into the street, "I'm used to driving on the left."

I had made it my mission to check out car infotainment systems at SXSW Interactive. Most of the major car manufacturers were present at the trendy Internet event. A couple of them made a big marketing splash. General Motor's Chevy division had a a showcase at Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop in Austin and its Catch-a-Chevy taxi service was well used. Meanwhile its US competitor Ford threw an electronica-fueled party at Stubb's. Others, like BMW, were relatively under the radar. Which gave me the opportunity to drive a BMW, in order to check out its latest technologies.

At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car's API. You'll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms. What can you do for starters? Things like read real-time data about your car's position and speed, and a dozen other measurements about your car's performance. "OpenXC opens up a previously opaque environment to an entirely new class of developers, who will bring more ideas and solutions to the table than any one company or industry consortium could dream up," according to information posted on the site.