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.

Industrial equipment, hospital equipment, ATMs and kiosks are among the products that Axeda is working with other companies to rig with sensors and cellular connections.

Use of those devices can then be monitored remotely, so that their supply, maintenance and management can all be optimized, without having to go and look at the machines themselves.

"Typically engineers would find logs through customer tickets and it would take months to find trends based on call center traffic," Zujewski says.

"100 people called about this specific problem, for example. But now we're able to do pattern recognition across alarms and breakage data and see if there was a bad batch of a certain part or a glitch in this manufacturing plant. We're able to catch quality issues with real time data. In most cases this is advanced pattern recognition and we're providing ETL [Extract, transform, and load] tools to get the data into the cloud."

Leveraging the Data for Apps

One company's hospital autoclave machines, the washing machines that steralize surgical equipment, are connected to the internet using Axeda's technology. What does that enable? Zujewski says the customer turns the data about uptime, need for repairs, machine run completion and detergent levels into a smartphone app that hospital employees can use. Instead of having someone sit around waiting for the rare instance that a machine breaks down, now the labor costs can be slashed and an alert can be sent out when it does happen.

Hospital diagnostic equipment that's connected can incorporate benchmarks based on aggregate data from across the network. These blood tests you're doing? Here's how they compare to the results other hospitals in the area are seeing right now. Zujewski says that hospitals also benchmark their own employees' use of the machines so they know wether enough tests are being performed, whether they might be better served by more machines, etc.

From drastically cutting down on product recall costs with the advantage of knowing which specific parts are in each smart connected device, to capturing large amounts of use data and delivering them into cloud-based systems to better optimize development of future products, there are a lot of things that can be done when devices are connected.

This is of course just one vendor, but Axeda works with more than 150 other companies to connect their devices to the internet.

Use of devices can be measured with sensors, then that data can be delivered in real time with celular or wifi connectivity, and then any number of parties in the value chain can make use of that data to offer entirely new or improved products and services.

I think that's one of the most interesting types and uses of Big Data in the cloud.

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.

Reaching Consumers in Their Connected Cars

At this year's CES, car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi were touting new media and communications features. Commonly referred to as a connected car, the prevailing trend is to integrate smartphone apps into the car's dashboard. This enables drivers and passengers to listen to online music, access news and other content, stream video and more.

To give you an indication of how pervasive the trend of connected cars is becoming, look at the evolution of Ford.

The American firm first introduced Internet technology inside its cars with Sync, launched in 2007. Sync is voice-activated technology which connects your smartphone and MP3 player to your car's dashboard and steering wheel. There are currently 4 million Ford cars in North America that have Sync running. The latest evolution of Sync is called MyFord Touch, an in-car communications and entertainment system which makes it even easier for drivers to consume Internet content.

In short, the connected car is going mainstream. In Ford's newest hybrid car, the 2013 Fusion, one of the main features is its connection to the Internet.

Connected cars are set to ramp up rapidly in the coming years. The GSMA predicts that the automotive sector will account for 1.4 billion (nearly 6%) of the world's 24 billion connected devices by 2020. If you're a marketer or publisher, that's a platform you'll want to be on!

Internet TVs & Personalized Media

For the consumer, it's all about personalizing one's media experience. The TV is another device where this trend is playing out.

While popular TV network shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad will continue to reach a large swath of people, Internet TV opens up opportunities for new types of video content to emerge and become popular too. Formats will evolve. We'll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web. But also, we'll see web applications arise that mix TV content with Internet programming. This is fertile ground for publishers to innovate and for marketers to latch onto to reach niche audiences.

The rise of Internet TV was evidenced at this year's CES by Samsung's announcements.

Samsung is the world's No. 1 TV brand and it launched significant upgrades to its Smart TV product line. Samsung's 2012 model TVs will enable users to consume a mix of traditional TV programming and Web apps. The devices are ready, now it's time for new types of content and apps to bloom.

The next big thing in computing isn't a new model smartphone or laptop. It's the Internet empowering everything else around us. Our cars, TVs and many other devices. Which means we all need to think about engaging digital Internet experiences for the car, TV and every device imaginable - because that's where audiences are heading.

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."

It's not just Web connected hardware which is proliferating. Software is also finally fulfilling the long-held promise of convergence. We saw a great example earlier today, with version 3.0 of the video aggregator app Showyou being released. ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell described it as "the remote control for web video."

The beauty of Showyou is that you can watch videos on a variety of devices: PC, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire, Apple TV. While I was eating my lunch today, I sat down in the living room and opened both my iPad and TV. I surfed to a music video on Showyou that I like and pressed the Apple "airplay" button on the iPad to transfer the video to my TV (via Apple TV).

I'm not entirely convinced that 2012 will be the year when this multi-screen promise is realized. During my lunchtime, I fiddled around a bit with Airplay before I got it working. Also home networks are not particularly user friendly for non-technical people. 2012 may well be a tipping point, when convergence within the home begins to take off. But we're not at the point of great user experiences yet.

In its report, IMS Research noted that an apps ecosystem for devices like the TV will be a key enabler of convergence in home entertainment. It also pointed to the growing amount of digital content available to consumers and "the changing habits of consumers regarding accessing, consuming and sharing digital content."

IMS Research predicts that the market for IP-enabled CE devices will grow from 2.2 billion devices shipped in 2011 to 3.5 billion in 2016. Note that this is just for home entertainment and portable consumer electronic devices. We reported last week that mobile industry group GSMA is predicting growth from 9 billion to 24 billion Internet-connected devices worldwide. The GSMA's figures include things like connected cars and IP-enabled washing machines.

Have you begun to consume entertainment in your home across multiple screens? If so, let us know in the comments what your current favorite household apps are.

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 idea behind Nest was directly inspired by the revolution in smartphones, which transformed the mobile phone into a full-fledged mobile computer. Nest labs co-founder Matt Rogers explained in a blog post how he and Fadell aim to do the same for the thermostat:

"The gap between the consumer experience in mobile products and the ones in our homes is enormous. I've been a programmer my entire life and could not program a thermostat for the life of me. I looked at it and thought, this beige plastic box cannot be the best our generation can come up with. Surely, there must be a better way."

So other than the elegant design of Nest (another of the 5 signs of a great user experience), what makes the product different from the traditional thermostat? The main difference is that Nest is powered by 6 sensors and proprietary algorithms, which enables it to "learn" your living habits and adjust the temperature automatically throughout the day and night. The company claims that Nest will have created a personalized temperature schedule for you after just one week of use. Nest has WiFi, which enables it to monitor weather patterns. You can also control it via an iPhone app or on the Web.

Nest is a lot more expensive than the traditional thermostat you'd buy from your local hardware store. It costs $249, plus an installation fee of $119 if you want to get it professionally installed (which All Things D's Katherine Boehret learned is a good move). The idea is that Nest will save you money on your energy bills. Note that Nest is currently sold out, but you can add your name to an email list to be notified of availability.

The thermostat is the first home device out of Nest Labs, but it intends to expand to other devices. In a CES video interview with Techcrunch, Nest Labs co-founder Matt Rogers noted that "there are lot of things in the home that have not been changed in 20-30 years." The smoke alarm is one example of a device ripe for Internet connection, given that it operates via sensors.

It remains to be seen whether Nest can capture a large chunk of the thermostat market, especially given its high price relative to traditional thermostats. But there's no doubt that this is where household devices like the thermostat are heading.

Using data and the Web to learn your living patterns and change your life for the better. Get used to that, because it's what the next generation of home appliances will do.

Photo credit: Seth Frankel, via Nest.com

The BossTracker5000 from Michael Shirley on Vimeo.

DDRBoxman downloaded the Android 4.0 ICS source tree from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and created a custom ROM for his Galaxy Nexus. He then sends command to the Nexus with TUIOForAndroid. TUIO is, "an open framework that defines a common protocol and API for tangible multitouch surfaces" according to TUIO.org. The PC is then configured with the touch interface through the open source Kinect API and voila! We have a tangible user interface on the wall.

The Kinect API is fascinating. Some of the greatest innovations of using motion-based input methods are being cooked up at the MIT Media Lab where they use Kinects and its API as a cheap implementation of motion computing. That includes 3D interfaces, motion tracking and an array of other innovations.

Now, think of the potential with mixing Kinect with Android. One of the untapped potentials of Android is that it is not just a mobile platform. Android could run on set-top televisions boxes or control all of the electronics in your household. The concept of the "smart home" takes a step forward in the marriage between the two open source projects. It is all the more delicious that the sources come from two companies that have historically been at each other's throats: Google and Microsoft.

Google announced a framework at I/O last year that can bring Android to all of your appliances or devices. Called Android@Home it was the first notion that Google has projected that Android could be have far more uses and be more ubiquitous than most people originally believed. Now, add the Kinect API to Android@Home and you could walk into your kitchen, wave to turn on the lights, program your microwave from across the room with just a few waves of you hand. Then, go into your living room where you have an Android smartphone hooked to a projector running the Netflix app and stand in the middle of the room, swiping the air until you find your viewing material for the evening.

This all sounds like some crazy science fiction movie a la Minority Report. It is not. The fact of the matter is that right now, this technology exists. The hack by DDRBoxman is just the beginning. Within the decade, we will see this type of functionality in homes across the world.

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?

A "physible" is a digital plan for an object that can either be designed on a computer or uploaded with a 3D scanner. Those plans can be downloaded and used to assemble real, tangible objects using a 3D printer. Printers are getting more affordable, but they're still limited by the kinds of materials they can use. But that just means it's the dawn of this technology, and The Pirate Bay is getting in early. "We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare [parts] for your vehicles," TPB writes on its blog. "You will download your sneakers within 20 years."

"The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We'll be able to print food for hungry people. We'll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We'll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one."

As a renowned hub for trading files, The Pirate Bay is in a perfect position to be the go-to place for free physibles, which it can facilitate while making money from ads. "We're thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay," the announcement jokes, but hopefully it's half-serious.

It's a perfectly legitimate business, and it blows the 2012 conception of intellectual property to smithereens. There's competition, too; Shapeways and Thingiverse are already on the market, and there's even a Google Warehouse for 3D models. Lobbyists for Old Media love to bang on sites like Megaupload and The Pirate Bay, but those very sites have hatched plans to usher in the future of digital media. When we can download a drum set, pirated MP3s will be the least of the copyright lobby's worries.

Check out The Pirate Bay's physibles category, but it's not our fault if you click on porny spam links.

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.

The trend towards increasing connectivity in devices will accelerate in upcoming years. As one example, GSMA predicts that more than 40% of vending machines will be connected by 2020. It estimates that connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020.

GSMA also listed some less traditional connected products seen at CES:

• A smart window pane with built-in apps, including computerized "blinds".
• Connected, roaming vacuum cleaners.
• Tablets built for underwater computing or designed for home and office video surveillance.
• A space-age personal work environment complete with a reclining chair, multiple computer monitors and a connected air filter.

GSMA has come up with a catch-phrase for this trend: "The Connected Life." It defines this as "a world where all technology devices intelligently connect." A more common term is Internet of Things. Either way, everyday products and devices are increasingly getting connected to the Internet.

There are approximately 9 billion connected devices today, according to the GSMA. About 72 percent of those are mobile devices. That figure will drop to 48 percent by 2020.

Put another way, by 2020 the GSMA predicts there will be 24 billion connected devices in the world and over half will be non-mobile devices. These will include connected home devices, healthcare devices and automotive technology.

GSMA is particularly bullish on the automotive sector, which it predicts will account for 1.4 billion connections by 2020. To put that into perspective, in 2011 just 1 percent of the world's 1.8 billion road vehicles were connected. However, by 2020 GSMA expects that figure to reach 14 percent. Car connectivity features will include new in-vehicle applications, phone features and navigation.

We knew the Internet of Things was slowly becoming a reality, but these new statistics and predictions by the GSMA show that commercialization of this trend will be driven by cars, home appliances and healthcare devices.

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.

Today Mercedes-Benz announced "mbrace2," which connects web apps and smartphones to its vehicles. It will include new apps for Facebook, Yelp and Google Local Search. There will also be iPhone and Android smartphone apps that enable users to track car usage, control door locks, see diagnostic information and more. Mbrace2 is expected to be available in 2013 editions of Mercedes-Benz cars.

Audi

This week at CES, Audi announced new features for its Connect system. Audi defines Connect as "networked mobility" for its cars. The new features include a seven-inch 3D screen, improved control wheel and integration of LTE (Long Term Evolution, designed to handle large amounts of data). The A3 will be the first car to get these upgrades, but not for another 18 months or so.

What's more interesting is the next generation of Audi's heads-up display (HUD), which can project information onto the windshield just below a driver's normal field of vision. it reminded the New York Times of the film Minority Report. The system can be used by passengers as well as the driver, for example to look at travel routes.

Ford

Perhaps the car company doing the most with web and smartphone app integration is Ford. The American firm first introduced Internet technology inside its cars with Sync, launched in 2007. Sync is voice-activated technology which connects your smartphone and MP3 player to your car's dashboard and steering wheel. There are currently 4 million Ford cars in North America that have Sync running. The latest evolution of Sync is called MyFord Touch, a "cabin tech" system which we covered at last year's CES. Ford recently announced free upgrades for MyFord.

At CES, Ford announced a new hybrid car called the 2013 Fusion. One of the main features in this car is the integration of Sync and MyFord Touch.

According to Ryan McGee, a technical expert at Ford interviewed by Technology Review, "with Sync we empowered the driver [and] our next leap is into empowering the vehicle." It hopes to do this using Internet technology. In other words, making cars smarter. Use cases include fuel optimization, predicting your travel route on-the-fly, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication (which could help reduce crashes, among other things).

Smartphone as Car Component

All of the systems we discussed above - mbrace2, Audi Connect and MyFord/Sync - are enablers of smartphone applications and content. In other words, the smartphone becomes a component of the car via its connection to the dashboard system.

It still feels like early days for these technologies, but Audi's futuristic heads-up display is an indicator of where the car manufacturers will eventually take us.

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?

Today's MakerBot is positioned for "personalized manufacturing," but it's mostly for practice. You can only make whatever you're able to make out of Lego-like materials. That's still amazingly powerful, though. Earlier this year, MakerBot got its own artist in residence. But MakerBot's marketing talks mostly about what it will do in the future.

"[P]arents and educators with a MakerBot Replicator™ offer the next generation an opportunity to learn the digital designing skills required to solve the problems of the future," today's blog post says. "Students with access to a MakerBot have an edge in the future job market. Just like the youth of the 1980's, who had access to computers, children with access to a MakerBot Replicator™ will become the leaders who make a better tomorrow."

So what will it do tomorrow? Here's the example I always use when I talk about the potential of 3D printing. Imagine never having to wash the dishes again. While you're getting dinner ready, just pick the plates, cups and cutlery you need on your computer, hit "print," and they'll be ready by the time you set the table. After dinner, you don't need to wash them. You don't even need to rinse them. Just drop them in the tank of your 3D printer, which will melt them down and get the material ready for reuse.

That one isn't even farfetched, since it would only require the same kinds of materials MakerBots already use. Think about 3D printing of organic materials: Heart valves? Whole organs? What about food? Imagine nanoscale 3D printing that can assemble things atoms at a time! At that point, the possibilities become almost limitless.

If(/when) 3D printing becomes commonplace, imagine the market on the Web for designs. Not only would it be a new economy for people with 3D design skills, it would have profound effects on retail. Instead of buying preexisting objects, we could simply download the plans and print them out.

If you're still having trouble imagining the world 3D printing could (literally) create, crazy sci-fi man Cory Doctorow has written a book about it. It's called Makers, and the digital versions are free, DRM-less, and available in all kinds of formats (you'll see on the download page). It's about a near-future with some of the trouble towards which our present world seems headed, but the ability to print custom tools is the one cutting edge regular people still have.

With MakerBot pushing things forward in 3D printing, we already live in a world where the Web allows us to transmit physical objects. If you're interested in a high-tech future, 3D printing is a trend to watch closely.

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.

Ten year old Massachusetts firm Axeda is a leading provider of what it calls "a cloud for connected products." It provides a cloud-based software layer that draws in streams of device sensor and machine data originally intended only for monitoring the firmware of say a dishwashing machine, translates that into discernable business objects like temperature, location and performance metrics, then offers an application programming interface for developers to interact back with the real-world devices that the data was gathered from.

I don't often take calls from companies that say they want to tell me about themselves based on a well-known story in the news, like Google X, but Axeda is really interesting and has some great stories to tell about connected devices that are on the market today or will be very soon. The following are the examples they shared and a good overview of the kinds of things that connected devices, what Google calls the Web of Things, what others call the Internet of Things and what Axeda calls the cloud for connected products, is shaping up to look like.

The connected device market is dominated today by healthcare applications, and some examples of those are discussed below, but the paradigm is already extending into other applications throughout everyday life.

Speed Signs as a Service

If you've ever driven past one of those big signs on a road that show you your own driving speed, you might have wondered who else was seeing that information. Originally, no one else was. A company called AllTraffic sold those signs to government agencies around the US as a hardware play. Stick it on the side of the road and show people how fast they are going - hopefully it will cause speeders to slow down.

About a year and a half ago, though, they connected those blinking signs to a web portal accessible by police headquarters and citizens, using Axeda's connectivity technology. Now they sell access as a subscription and they've changed from being a hardware vendor into a software and service vendor.

Bill Zujewski, EVP of Product Strategy and Marketing at Axeda, says that the effect in that case is the same kind of thing Google is going to try to do: to change the consumer experience by adding connectivity to devices. Everyone knows what it means to have OnStar added to a car, for example - it enables emergency services on a whole new level. Now think of that same kind of experience-changing connectivity added to other products.

Meanwhile, insurance companies are working on pulling the information out of a car's engine that mechanics do during diagnostics and sending it persistently over a cellular connection, up to a web portal for end-user applications. Teen drivers won't be able to speed, hit the brakes hard or drive through geofences without that being visible to any approved eyes.

Managing the Machines

Zujewski says Axeda works primarily with B2B companies, traditionally in the form of asset management. One company that provides high-end industrial equipment for cutting fabric, outside the price range of many small firms in the clothing and apparel industry, has begun using Axeda's technology to embed a "pay as you go" model. A sensor takes data off the equipment, sends it to the equipment provider via cellular connection and then sends a monthly bill charging for the amount of use the machine saw.

Likewise, there are places around the world, Zujewski says, where fabric cutting machines get used in excessively high heat and humidity. The machines keep breaking and it's expensive to repair them under warranty - so machine manufacturers find it quite valuable to be able to monitor that the conditions their equipment is being used in are compliant with the terms of those warranties. All it takes is a USB port. It's too bad they can't monitor the working conditions of the factory wetware the same way. There may be eternal judgement for that, though.

Machines in the Home

Medical devices are one of the primary use-cases for device connectivity, but that doesn't always mean in-hospital inventory. Sometimes it means enabling people to avoid hospitals.

"Some of these efforts may connect to mobile apps, but we connect to the cloud as our primary focus," Zujewski says.

"I think Google may think there's an Android play here as well, connecting things like sports equipment, your home and your car to communicate with your mobile device.

"That's the future where things are going: your appliances in your home are getting more computerized, they are running more on software than on mechanical parts."

This Dishwashing Isn't Just Magic, It's Efficient

Zujewski shared a story with me about a dishwasher manufacturer that made a mistake. The company didn't program its rinse cycle to be long enough and was getting thousands of phone calls from customers complaining that the machines weren't working well. The company sent a technician out to reset the rinse cycle timers - but future iterations of the machines saved all those costs by adding read/write cellular connections to the dishwasher computers that could be re-calibrated remotely.

Ovens, dishwashers, all kinds of appliances get shipped from the factory with certain assumptions. Add connectivity and they can be optimized, in the field, remotely.

That appeals to manufacturers and consumers - but once the computer is on board, you may as well start building apps that add value directly to the consumer as well.

Want to start the pre-heating cycle from your phone, while on your way home? Can't remember if you turned your oven off or not? An application framework layer on those devices enables engagement with the devices themselves via mobile device.

If you can engineer connectivity right into the product from the start, the price drops dramatically. The sales cycle is long, though, because it takes years to bake connectivity into the core of a device.

And cellular carriers still need to adapt, Zujewski says.

"Carriers are set up for consumer plans, not M2M [Machine to Machine] - that will require unique data plans."

The Challenges Ahead

If you think Twitter and Facebook spew out a large quantity of data, imagine a refrigerator "checking in" about its temperature and contents all day and night.

"Ideally you could put some intelligence on the device itself so you don't have to send all your data over the network all the time, but process it locally," says Zujewski.

"You can now build mini-computers that run the whole Linux kernel on an intelligent agent, locally, and only send data when it changes, with threshold rules, for example. People are starting to put M2M computers on devices and make the processing local.

"The other thing happening is that a lot of early customers use 2G, but they are upgrading to 3G and 4G so even if they have to send a lot of data, the price is falling.

"Storage prices have come way down and we're using non-relational stores to keep our costs down."

Will Google Flush M2M Down the Crapper?

What of Google's entry into the market, though? Are incumbents like Axeda scared?

"Google getting in is a good thing for us," says Zujewski.

"It's going to raise the awareness of M2M. When executives in the board room say 'I see Google connected a smartphone to a dishwasher, why can't we connect to our equipment or our products?' it's going to raise the visibility of what you can do.

"What Google is going to find out is that connecting is pretty hard, a lot of devices aren't serving data that's usable. There is a need for a layer that turns the raw available data into usable data like temperatures, etc. into a data model that programmers can use.

"That's our secret sauce, our unique value proposition: our technology converts raw data into business data.

"It comes in obscure message format packets, with headers etc. we've got a whole set of parsers and translators that turn that into an asset, temperature. We have a rules engine that allows you to create notifications, web services layer available by REST, can do mashups with HTML or javascript."

Zujewski says that most of these data production schemes were implemented by dishwasher or road sign producers five years ago, with no intentions of offering a standardized web services application data layer. They didn't want to shoot data over pricey networks and store it in expensive storage systems. They just wanted to use a computer in the machine. Everything has changed since then, though. Add connectivity and you're talking about a qualitatively different phenomenon. Bridging the gap between the status quo and the future is, in this case, non-trivial, Zujewski says. Axeda has to do the work to turn low-level protocols into semantically rich protocols.

"That's changing," says Zujewski of the device manufacturers.

"They are going to start embedding our protocol and sending intelligent data over networks. One of our goals is to get our protocol in as many devices as possible.

"We're fine if Google takes the time to push a protocol, we could embrace that if it takes off. We've got a codex server that will translate anything into Axeda protocol and we'll probably just adopt whatever Google does or support it.

"It's hard to tell what they're really aiming to do because you can't tell what their business driver is. Fortunately for them, they have the luxury of setting up these labs without worrying about that too much right now."

Axeda has been around for ten years and has seen the technology intended for manufacturer cost-savings turn into a nascent platform for value delivered to consumers and a point of competitive differentiation.

"The business case to date today has been about taking costs out of managing your products, remote service and software management," Zujewski told me. "That's been paying our bills. But we're also starting to see revenue generation of connected products where the connectivity serves the user. It's a competitive differentiator and device vendors will soon begin competing with value added services based on connectivity."

How fast will this paradigm reach ubiquity? Zujewski says Axeda is working with one vendor that's network-connecting...toilets. From prisons to large exhibit halls, you don't want water running day and night from a large number of toilets. Axeda's sensor-cloud-application platform can detect, report and facilitate management of one toilet out of a thousand that's broken. That's not live yet, but toilets will be connected to the Internet in 2012, Zujewski says.

That may be the future, but not by very far.

What have you got, Google?

"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 study found that 5% of U.S. adults with a mobile phone use a 2D bar code reader, up from 1% in 2010. Among smartphone users alone, 15% use bar codes, up from 5% last year. Android users use 2D bar codes the most, thanks to more native integration of bar code scanning software. 23% of Android users scan 2D bar codes, compared to 19% of iOS users and 5% of RIM and Windows Phone users, respectively.

As previous studies have found, bar code users are typically younger, affluent adults. Of the recent users of bar codes in the study, 66% were between 23 and 45 years old. The largest income category, with 39% of respondents, was $100,000+.

How Can Businesses Get In On Bar Codes?

The study points out a few key ways for businesses to use 2D bar codes to lead consumers, rather than simply slapping them on everything and hoping people will scan them. Bar codes help consumers discover what to buy by linking to contextual content, and they help them decide between alternatives. 23% of smartphone users use their phones to find pricing information, and 2D bar codes are an effective way to provide it.

Since 2D bar codes can contain more sophisticated data than their 1D predecessors, they can even help consumers make purchases with their smartphones. Target's smartphone app offers this functionality, as does the Korean subsidiary of British supermarket chain Tesco.

Most importantly, though, businesses should only use 2D bar codes if they clearly support their overall mobile strategy. Having the codes all over the place will make users aware of them, but they'll only adopt and use the technology if it provides a pleasant and efficient experience. The study's findings urge business owners to "think of the experience beyond the scale" and incorporate bar codes into a complete end-to-end experience.

The study is available for purchase from Forrester.com.

We've collected some great feedback from RWW readers about QR codes. Do you use them? Join the conversation in the comments.

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?

Even if most people only use QR codes like old-school ads, we've seen some truly innovative uses here at RWW. There's Wikipedia's sci-fi museum service, QRPedia, and there's a great solution to the awkwardness of business card-based networking called QR Card Us. If consumers with smartphones would only get into the habit of using this technology, these kinds of interactions could be rich and engaging.

But QR codes still aren't easy to use. Software to read them isn't even built into the camera apps on popular smartphones, and scans using QR apps often fail or miss. And the robo-barf critique is more fundamental than that. Maybe people just can't get over how ugly QR codes are.

A very nice developer named Andras Nagy reached out to me today to show me a tool he and three other Carnation Group devs made called QR Hacker. It's free, requires no prior skills, and it lets you make QR codes that look totally wild just by using click-to-draw pixel art. Of course, talented artists like Nagy can make codes that actually look branded and nice, instead of like psychedelic cyborg vomit.

The point is, with only a little effort, it's possible to make QR codes that look human-made. Does that help? Will it make more people want to use this technology? I asked RWW fans what they think of QR codes and got some great responses. Please feel free to share more thoughts in the comments below.

"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."

This comic book isn't the first public awareness effort for the Internet of Things. We covered a great 5-minute video from IBM that describes a future "global data field" driven by sensors and networked objects. IBM told us more about its plans for smart cities at Web 2.0 last week.

Xerox is also looking at these problems. They even sponsored a RWW post about it. But tech behemoths are not the only ones in this game. There are also small startups working on the Internet of Things.

So where is it? Why isn't the Internet of Things cool already? What's not cool about fridges, lights and toasters that talk to your phone and your car? The answer is "nothing." Nothing is not cool about the Internet of Things. The idea must seem geeky to the average person, or something. Well, geeks, that's why we run the world.

Do you see the benefits of an Internet of Things? Or would you rather your fridge and your bathroom scale remain dumb? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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.

Alien Dalvik 2.0 allows Android applications to run unmodified on any device using Google's Android Package (APK) files. From a technological standpoint, Dalvik is trying to let Android out its cage by making it a standard format for how applications work on all devices. The key for the consumer is that it just works. The average consumer just wants to play Angry Birds on their television and does not care if it is running Android, Windows, iOS or another framework. Making a seamless, invisible experience will be key for Myriad to truly bring Android everywhere.

Myriad & The Open Handset Alliance

Myriad has been working on Android since nearly the beginning. It is a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance that is the original group of companies (including Google) pushing Android innovation. Myriad was launched after the merging of two mobile technology companies, Esmertec and Purple Labs, in 2009. The company claims to have 3.8 billion software applications running on 2.2 billion mobile phones worldwide.

From the perspective of Android@Home and Myriad's Alien Dalvik 2.0, Android begins to look a lot less like just a smartphone operating system and more like the backbone software to all Internet connected devices. That brings Android in to Microsoft's territory, where Windows is designed to be the OS that runs everything. Apple has done some interesting things with iOS that allows apps to run on different screens, like AirPlay, but Apple has not really shown an interest to this point to make iOS the backbone of the Internet of Things.

Alien Dalvik is a virtualization technology. As anyone who uses virtual machines knows, that often means that the imported system is buggy and does not operate as intended. Myriad's challenge will be to smooth the kinks when Android is ported to different devices. We will be at CTIA next week and try to grab some video of what Myriad is up to.

Note: This article has been updated to present the proper spelling of Dalvik.