The technology behind this is based on nano-sensing research done by HP Labs. The sensors are similar to RFID chips, but in this case they are tiny accelerometers which detect motion and vibrations.

Use Cases

Peter Hartwell, senior researcher and project team lead, listed some example use cases for these sensing nodes. The nodes could be "stuck to bridges and buildings to warn of structural strains or weather conditions [and] they might be scattered along roadsides to monitor traffic, weather and road conditions." A bridge like the San Francisco Golden Gate might take 10,000 nodes, said Hartwell.

Other uses include embedding the CeNSE nodes in everyday electronics, tracking hospital equipment, sniffing out pesticides and pathogens in food. Ultimately they may even "recognize" the person using them and adapt.

According to HP Labs, CeNSE sensors will enable real-time data collection, analysis and better decision making.

Potential Issues

This is an ambitious project by HP Labs and there are other large IT companies, such as IBM, building out similar platforms for sensor data and services.

HP senior fellow Stan Williams noted that for CeNSE to work, "we have to make sensors that are vastly more sensitive than anything else that have ever existed before, while being absolutely dirt cheap so that we can deploy them in very large numbers."

RFID technology has had numerous cost and technology issues over the past decade, so HP Labs will surely run into similar real-world obstacles in this project. HP Labs admits that existing sensitive detectors are expensive; but it hopes to make them much cheaper.

The Race to Build a Worldwide Sensor Network

HP Labs' ultimate aim is to have a worldwide network of these CeNSE sensors. A trillion of them "should do the trick," says HP. The company is hoping that at that scale, sensor nodes will cost "next to nothing, yet measure everything." HP is also positioning this, boldly, as a technology that could "save the planet" by enabling it to be monitored.

These are big claims and the proof will be in the pudding. One thing is for certain: sensor technology will become as pervasive as HP Labs says it will, in due course. The questions that remain unanswered though are: how long will it take, and which company (or companies) will gain the biggest footholds in this network?

With today's current crop of social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, the decisions about who you "friend" are made consciously, based on a number of criteria unique to the individual. Often, these networks become crowded with people who you barely know, but find interesting. That's a social network, yes, but it's not one that reflects your real-life relationships. Even Facebook, the current social darling, has moved away from being about real-life friendships. With the ability to friend public figures and brands and the ability to sort friends into lists, the push is on to expand your network beyond close, personal connections.

Similar issues face the mobile social networks emerging now. Applications like Loopt and Brightkite still require you to add friends which leads to, again, networks that consist of acquaintances and other folks you only know marginally well.

How Friendlee is Different

Because there really isn't a network that taps into your real world relationships, the HP researchers decided to build one. In Friendlee, the social graph is automatically constructed with minimal input required from the user since the software tracks the call and messaging history to determine your connections.

In addition, Friendlee introduces a set of "ambient awareness" indicators that provide useful information about your friends' statuses. For example, indicators will include current location, time spent at that location, local time, weather, a status message, and even your friend's phone's status: busy, phone on hold, engaged, silent, or vibrate. Imagine how useful it would be to know if your friend's phone was busy or turned to silent before you even dialed it!

Friendlee isn't just a contacts-replacement application, though. It is a network. The app actually lets you see your immediate contacts, of course, but it lets you see your friends' contacts as well. These lists are sorted by the strength of the connections, something that's determined by the frequency and duration of the interactions.

Because not everyone would be comfortable sharing their contact information with a social network, intimate or not, Friendlee includes privacy controls that let you configure who gets to see what. That way, you could configure anyone in the "Family" category to see everything, but other groups would have access to less information.

Friendlee consists of three components: the phone-based client, a web interface where you can interact with the data, and a backend server that stores a copy of all the information in a database. The client would sync with the server several times per minute, updating the system with call history, location, time, and other information.

Still a Prototype Only (Boo!)

At the moment, Friendlee is in prototype form for both the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems, so you can only drool over it now. The prototypes will be put into field testing while improvements are made before it ever becomes publicly available.

We normally wouldn't post about an application which you can't even try out yet (we hate to tease!), but this one sounded downright revolutionary. We were just too excited not to share the news with you.

Note: we requested more information about Friendlee's public availability but have not heard back yet from HP.

Restored Book (Image Courtesy of VentureBeat)

The books created with the service can also be customized for yourself or as a gift for someone else.

The pilot program for BookPrep is Foodsville, a community-based site for food and cooking enthusiasts. Here, members can read and purchase cookbooks, even rare, older cookbooks, at the site's online bookstore. The books can be found at the site's free library, where members can search for books by keyword, by author, or browse by tags.

Foodsville Library

According to Prakash Reddy, system architect of BookPrep at HP, further down the road, BookPrep could help consumers find hard-to-locate items such as newspapers, blog posts, magazines, books, event schedules and special-interest articles.

BookPrep offers a nice complement to the current lot of print-on-demand services (our coverage), as it provides a way for consumers to access rare, out-of-print books as well as modern ones.