"Big Data" is a hot topic these days, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about the specifics of what will most likely be one of the biggest sources of data: newly web-connected devices in the home and workplace.
I spoke this week with Bill Zujewski, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy & Marketing at M2M (machine to machine) platform company Axeda. Axeda is one of the most successful companies to date in the early M2M market and whenever I get a chance to speak with Zujewski, I ask him for as many real-world use cases for M2M connectivity as I can. The company's examples are fascinating, this time about M2M-produced big data used in the cloud.
"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it." HAL; 2001: A Space Odyssey
Editor's note: this is a longer version of ReadWriteWeb Editor-in-chief Richard MacManus' article for the SAY Media newsletter. The newsletter is delivered weekly and features SAY Media's take on media, culture, venn diagrams and the occasional Kubrick homage. You can sign up for it here.
Over half of all devices at this year's CES, the world's largest consumer electronics trade show, were Internet connected. Nearly 60% of those were non-traditional computing devices such as TVs, cars, refrigerators and washing machines. Connected devices are proliferating throughout our homes and the world around us. Which means consumers are about to become a whole lot more connected to the world.
Convergence. Remember that word from the dot com era? Well, it's back and this time it actually has substance. Convergence in the 90s meant combining old media with new media, a.k.a. the Internet. The 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner was a failed $200 billion attempt at convergence. But fast forward to 2012 and convergence is happening for real this time, thanks to Internet-connected devices in the house and a rapidly growing app ecosystem. Entertainment now flows freely through home networks, to multiple devices such as PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and television sets.
According to one research firm, 2012 will be when convergence really hits its stride. A new report by IMS Research states that 2012 will be when the consumer electronics industry "finally realizes the promise of multi-screen content consumption."
Earlier this week I listed 5 signs of a great user experience in a tech product. One sign is that it changes you. I referred to revolutionary products like the iPhone and Twitter, that modified our online behaviors or habits. This trend is becoming more noticeable with the so called Internet of Things, where everyday objects are connected to the Internet. If a device or object has traditionally been a static thing, then it's guaranteed to morph into something different once it becomes interactive.
Over the coming decade, we're going to see a lot of new Internet-connected household devices that will literally change the way you live. A great example is a new device from a very well-funded startup called Nest Labs. At the end of 2011, the company released a Web-enabled thermostat called the Nest. Yes, a thermostat. It was designed by the man who invented the iPod for Apple, Tony Fadell.
The creator, Michael Shirley, describes it like this: "The device is triggered by a reed-switch sensor that monitors magnetic proximity. The signal is sent through an Arduino board to a Processing sketch, which tells the computer to snap a webcam photo of Peterson and upload it to Twitpic with a saying chosen from a pool of prewritten zingers. The Twitpic post is immediately loaded to the BossTracker5000′s Twitter feed. Voila! A chair that tweets." Most importantly, it also updates when the boss is away.
Take two open source projects, do a little creative hacking and ingenuity and what do you get? The Android-Kinect project. An engineer that goes by the name DDRBoxman hacked a Galaxy Nexus smartphone with his a projector, a PC and Microsoft's Kinect API and was able to use "touch" based gestures to control the user interface by interacting with the projection. Everybody has been waiting for The user experience brought to us by the film Minority Report. Well, this engineer might have brought us closer than any other hack before.
We're at a watershed moment for intellectual property. Not a day after online protests drove Congress to shelve SOPA/PIPA, the feds demonstrated that they don't even need new laws to crack down on websites that threaten the interests of moneyed rights holders. They unceremoniously shuttered Megaupload, spooking other services that cloud-host users' files.
TechCrunch reports today that the Megaupload crackdown cut the site off at the knees just before it planned to launch a disruptive and legal music player. Another popular boogeyman for copyright holders, The Pirate Bay, announced a new, legitimate direction yesterday: It's going to host physibles, downloadable models for constructing 3D objects. Are the "pirate" sites actually Big Content's worst nightmare for legitimate reasons?
More than half of the devices launched at CES earlier this month were connected. That's according to the GSMA, a worldwide association of mobile operators and related companies. GSMA calculated that more than 90% of TVs at CES, 70% of automotive devices, 44% of healthcare devices and 30% of cameras were connected.
GSMA predicts there will be 24 billion connected devices in the world by 2020. That's up from 9 billion today. It identified car connectivity as an especially important product category to watch.
As each year passes, the connected car makes more of a noise at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This year several car manufacturers were touting new features, including Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi. The term "connected car" refers to the integration of smartphone apps and content into the car. Typically this is done via the car's dashboard, enabling you to listen to online music, access Web data, stream video to the car's passengers and more. In this post we'll look at three such systems: Ford Sync, Mercedes-Benz mbrace2 and Audi Connect.
What all three of the above car manufacturers, and others like General Motors and Toyota, have in common is that they are leveraging the rapid evolution of smartphone technology - rather than trying to build new Internet devices into their cars.
MakerBot is a company that manufactures 3D printers. A "3D printer" sounds like something boring, so MakerBot Industries has chosen an excellent name. A 3D printer is a device that creates physical objects from digital plans. You can fill it with ABS (what Lego blocks are made of) or PLA (biodegradable and made of corn), download or make designs on a computer, press "go," and create replicable, real objects.
Now it's sounding pretty cool, right? Today, MakerBot announced the Replicator™, its newest model, which will be unveiled at CES tomorrow. Starting at $1749, you can print objects the size of a loaf of bread from a device that can sit on your desk. If you pony up a little more, you can get the Dualstrusion™ model, which lets you print two-color Earths or hearts. Not sold yet? How about in 10 years, when you never need to wash (or even buy) dishes again?
