Last week the New York Times broke news of a top secret lab where secret Googlers are tinkering on more than 100 fantasy projects that may or may not ever come to market. It's called Google X Lab and it's filled with robots, self-driving cars (those are definitely real) and real-world devices not traditionally connected to the Internet that will be wired-up into a future Web of Things.
What if Google doesn't get connected devices any better than the company allegedly "doesn't get social" technologies, though? Just because the advertising and search giant is working on it doesn't mean Google can really build an elevator to space, of course. In the mean time, other companies are building connected device technology that sounds futuristic but is actually going to market right now. Those companies may compete with Google in the future; just as Google didn't invent the search market it now owns, incumbents can't rest easy yet just because they're first, either. But what they're bringing to market already is pretty cool.
According to a new study from Forrester Research, 5% of U.S. adults now scan 2D bar codes - including QR codes - with their smartphones, up from 1% in 2010. Compared to consumer adoption, the development of 2D bar code reading software has grown much faster, while business adoption of the codes as a strategy has grown much slower.
"Too few eBusiness professionals use best practices to offer consumers good experiences once they've scanned a bar code," writes author Julie Ask. The study's conclusion is that consumer habits are driven by ubiquity and ease of access; just like with traditional 1D bar codes, consumers will get used to them the more prevalent they are. That means it's up to businesses to use QR codes wisely while not being afraid to keep up with consumers' interest in new technologies.
The QR code is a weird side effect of the mobile Web revolution. The idea is so nice; a link between the Web and the real world through the powerful computers in our hands. But even though they've been around for a while, QR codes are still mostly used for mundane purposes, rather than innovative ones.
The technology has three problems at a pretty low level: smartphones are still an elite product, the scanning process can be clunky, and QR codes look more like robot barf than something meant for humans. The potential is there, though. How can we make a better link between the Web and the world outside?
The Internet of Things is one of our favorite trends at RWW. When it finally becomes ubiquitous, we'll be that hipster blog that liked IoT before it was cool. To help usher in the future, the Danish Alexandra Institute has just released a comic book called "Inspiring the Internet of Things," which explains the benefits of networking everyday objects - as well as the ethical issues - through 15 illustrated scenarios. The PDF version is available for free download.
"We need a new medium to communicate the idea of the Internet of Things, its challenges, its problems and its benefits; encouraging people to think about this new disruptive technology," writes Mirko Presser of the Alexandra Institute. "This 'comic book' is aimed at everybody."
An innovation called Android@Home was unveiled at Google's I/O conference in May that intends to bring Android into your living room. Not much has been heard about Android@Home since but that does not mean that the little green robots have been shirking their duties in an attempt to take over the world. Yesterday, Myriad Group, a global mobile technology company, unveiled Alien Dalvik 2.0, a software kit intended to spring Android from smartphones and tablets to any device that has a screen.
Next week at CTIA, one of the largest mobile conferences in the country, Myriad will show off how it ported Android applications to Apple's iPad. If Android can invade the iPad, it can go anywhere. Myriad intends to do just that, porting Android apps to Internet TVs, automobiles, e-readers and avionics.
In case you've fallen behind in your farm machinery reading, a recent video from Farm Equipment Magazine is worth giving some special attention. The video below gives a preview of a new product called the Kinze Autonomy Project, a new set of tractor and grain cart unveiled this Summer that drive themselves to harvest crops and that can make "intelligent operational decisions in real time based on field conditions."
Designed to reduce the need for skilled labor operating the machinery, the system would mean that farmers could do other higher-level planning work and operate the tractor all night long by itself. Presumably the whole thing is networked, collects data and will make some analytics available. Hello, Internet of Things, goodbye Old MacDonald? I'm not sure what to think of this - but large scale agriculture has probably been far enough from a city dweller's idyllic vision of farming to be creepy for a long time anyway. There's something about this video that feels especially creepy to me though.
Avis, the global car rental company is testing an RFID technology that will enable it to keep 5,000 of its cars at the parking lots of client businesses. Clients will be able to use a PIN with their mobile devices and pick up a car kept on their own premises.
Avis teamed up with RFID manufacturer I.D. Systems of New Jersey to launch the technology and will roll out the service in the US and Canada next month.
Adam Greenfield was the author of what is still my favorite book about the Internet of Things, Everyware (first published in 2006). Greenfield is now walking the talk with a IoT business called Urbanscale. I've been following its progress, via Greenfield's weekly newsletter on the Urbanscale blog.
One of Urbanscale's projects is developing an iOS application called Transitflow. It's in the design phases currently, with the goal of being a real-time transport notification and timetable app. It's fascinating to watch this app unfold, piece by piece. It's also an indicator of where the Internet of Things is heading.
In a review of Sherry Turkle's book Alone Together, John Battelle notes a familiar experience in regards to technology: "this cake ain't baked. I mean, think about it. Facebook: Not quite right. Smart phones? Not quite right. Desktop computing? Even though we've had nearly three decades of interaction, it's still not quite right."
This issue is only going to get worse, as more and more devices get connected to the Internet. John referenced several separate instances of not fully baked cakes... er, products. Those issues are magnified when a lot of imperfect products are connected together in a network, whether it be a home or work network - or the Internet at large. Plus those products run on software that is never perfect and is always being iterated on (an Operating System, as probably the biggest example). And did I mention the problems with syncing data across different devices?
What would you do after building a successful Dot Com business that was acquired by SAP in 2005? Many entrepreneurs would do their earn-out in the bigger company, then repeat the same formula with a new startup in the next Web era. That's exactly what the founders of a forward-thinking Internet of Things company called ThingWorx are doing.
Earlier this month we reported on the sale of Pachube, a pioneer in the evolving Internet of Things [IoT] landscape. ThingWorx is a similar company, in that it provides a platform for connecting real world objects to the Internet. Where ThingWorx differs is that it has a solutions and services model primarily targeted to the manufacturing sector, whereas Pachube created a community platform. I spoke to Rick Bullotta, Co-Founder and CTO of ThingWorx, to find out the origins and assess the chances of this next generation Web company.
