Japan's Suica Card and Hong Kong's Octopus Card

Earlier this year we looked at three of the world's leading RFID-powered Smart Cards: Japan's cutting edge Suica Card, London's Oyster Card and Hong Kong's long-running Octopus Card. In Japan and Hong Kong, the cards (and other devices, such as phones and watches) may be used to purchase goods from selected shops.

It's more pervasive in Hong Kong, where the Octopus can be used at more than 1,000 merchants. Furthermore, in Hong Kong the card can be used as an access device for places like apartment buildings and schools.

Mir:ror

Mir:ror is a device from French company Violet that detects the objects you show it and gives them powers. As you wave a device over the USB-attached mirror, you can trigger applications and multimedia content automatically. The "magic" mirror isn't actually sensing the object itself, but is reacting to an RFID tag placed on the object which then tells your computer what to do.

Those tags are embedded in the company's Ztamps, colorful RFID stamps that you stick on the objects you want to connect. They also work with the company's other more well-known internet-connected object: the Nabaztag, an adorable rabbit that can deliver anything from ambient information through lights and sounds to verbal information - like when he reads your email or RSS feeds to you.

Unfortunately, in August Violet filed for bankruptcy. However, in October it was saved by videogame publisher Mindscape.

WideNoise

The iPhone is a fertile ground for Internet of Things, as a product called WideNoise shows. WideNoise is an iPhone application that samples decibel noise levels, displaying them on an interactive map.

With the app you can take a sound reading, and if you so wish share that with the WideNoise community. You can check the average sound level of the area around you, which might be handy if you're house-hunting or simply looking for a quiet spot to relax in.

ioBridge

ioBridge is a web platform for remote control and monitoring, which bills itself (with tongue in cheek) as "one step closer to Skynet." It's a company based in Gainesville, Florida, born because the founders saw "a demand for interfacing real world devices with the web." Their first beta release was in November 2008 and since then the company has been busy building out its product line and watching what developers like Matt Morey do with them.

Morey, who by day is an engineer for Texas Instruments, has developed a two-way, home automation application using Twitter and ioBridge.

Citysense

Sense Networks is a company aiming to index the real world "using real-time and historical location data for predictive analytics across multiple industries." It has a platform called Macrosense that "receives streaming location data in real-time, analyzes and processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and stores it in a way that can be easily queried to better understand aggregate human activity."

The company has so far built one consumer product on top of this platform: Citysense, an iPhone and Blackberry app that allows people in San Francisco to see the most-happening nightlife in real time. Citysense currently accesses cell-phone and taxi GPS data from about four million GPS sensors, to see where the local hot spots are. It then links to Yelp and Google to show what venues are operating at popular locations.

Those are our picks for the top 10 Internet of Things applications of 2009. Let us know your thoughts.