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The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things - when everyday objects are connected to the Internet - will enable. Imagine a refrigerator (so the story goes) that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you're low on, for example, milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. This fridge knows what kinds of foods you like to eat, based on the ratings you have given to your dinners. Indeed the fridge helps you take care of your health, because it knows which foods are good for you and which clash with medical conditions you have. And that's just part of the sci-fi story of the Internet fridge.

During my recent visit to MIT I met up with Henry Holtzman, Chief Knowledge Officer of the MIT Media Lab. We discussed the Internet of Things, which Holtzman has been actively involved in since the 90s. Holtzman said that consumer apps for Web-connected objects are becoming more common; he refers to this as an emerging "ecology of devices." There are many real world objects being connected to the Internet nowadays, he said, and they are beginning to act in concert.

Read on to find out which Internet of Things products have most impressed Henry Holtzman lately, plus we explore some of his own projects.

If you think augmented reality is just a bunch of hype with no usable applications as of yet, think again. Major toy manufacturer Mattel has just announced a new line of products tied to the upcoming 3-D adventure movie "Avatar" directed by James Cameron. While normally we wouldn't cover toys here at ReadWriteWeb, there is something special about this new lineup: these toys are integrated with augmented reality. By way of a 3-D web tag which can be scanned with any computer's webcam, the new toys are linked to an online world of content which makes them "come alive" in an entirely new way.

Earlier this week we brought you the story of the house that twitters. In this post we explore another experimental system that uses Twitter to automate tasks. Matt Morey, by day an engineer for Texas Instruments, has developed a two-way, home automation application using Twitter and ioBridge. We all know about Twitter, the now massively popular 140 character messaging service. ioBridge will be new to many. It's a web platform for remote control and monitoring, which bills itself (no doubt with tongue in cheek) as "one step closer to Skynet."

Those with sensitive natures about the Singularity are advised to look away now. For the rest of you, let's see what Matt has built using these two services.

MQTT is an IBM-developed protocol for real-time messaging that could become a keystone of the emerging Internet of Things. As the BBC explained recently, MQTT (which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is "a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world." MQTT is used as a messaging protocol for sensor and actuator solutions - for example in the house that twitters, which we covered earlier this week.

According to one of its creators, Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, MQTT is "going to explode" in popularity this year and next year. The protocol has just turned 10 years old; indeed there was a party to celebrate in London this week. In this post we explain MQTT and look at a health care product that uses it.

In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. It was a good couple of years before they were spotted at the Web 2.0 conference, for example. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter.

I recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Yesterday we wrote about how Stanford-Clark has hooked his house up to Twitter. Today we delve more into what his employer, IBM, is doing with the Internet of Things.

I recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He's been working on a number of Twitter and real-time monitoring projects, many of them at the intersection of two big trends we've been tracking in 2009: The Real-time Web and Internet of Things.

Stanford-Clark has set up various systems for real-time monitoring of the Internet of Things, many of them using Twitter (he calls the resulting tweets "tweetjects"). One example got a bit of mainstream media coverage lately: a house that uses Twitter to monitor its energy consumption.

Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a wearable computing system that allows users to display and interact with the Web on any surface - including the human body. The video shows the system's main developer, Pranav Mistry, taking photographs with his hand, summoning up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, displaying information about a person he's just met on their tee-shirt, and calling someone by inputting a phone number onto the palm of his hand.

Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web!

During my recent trip to MIT I met with Andrew Lippman, an Associate Director at the MIT Media Lab and a Senior Research Scientist. Lippman heads up the Lab's Viral Communications program, which "examines scalable, real-time networks whose capacity increases with the number of members." Among other things, we discussed an interesting new product his students are working on called Fluid Voice. In a way it works similar to how CB radio did for truck drivers in the 1970s - providing a mobile group communication system.

As the Internet of Things continues to slowly but surely ramp up, we're beginning to see more everyday 'objects' being connected to the Internet. One which caught our eye is a new web-connected bathroom scale. The company behind it is called BodyTrace and the product has been labeled 'eScale.' It wirelessly and automatically uploads a user's weight to the BodyTrace website, creating charts and recommendations from the data. The company claims that no software configuration is required from the user to get it to work - perhaps because it relies on mobile technology (specifically the GSM cell phone network) rather than WiFi.