Our recent list of 6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home, looked at the IoT from a domestic standpoint. From handling toxic waste, to watershed management, to building design, to transportation, to the smart energy grid, a whole new green way of thinking is going to be made possible by IoT.

'Future sustainable technologies linking the physical and virtual world'

Different industries have have already been able to increase the efficiency of freight shipping by using sensors to tell them the location and condition of their product in real-time. This includes FedEx's SenseAware, which is designed to constantly keep track of the vital signs of all its packages. In future posts we'll be covering IoT-driven growth in the fields of virtual factories, digital cities, agriculture and forest management.

'Novel services and applications to facilitate environmental responsibility'

Did you hear about the guy who wired his house up to a Twitter account so that it alerted him whenever an appliance was used? Following that experiment, Matt Morey figured out a way to use iobridge to turn that one-way Twitter alert system into a two-way system that makes it possible to turn appliances on and off via Twitter. These ideas, which may seem novel at first, signal the direction towards the development of whole new industries.

'Emerging Internet of Things business models and process changes'

Companies as large as IBM have invested heavily in IoT. It has a website called Smarter Planet, which is dedicated to "smarter solutions," of which they say they've already developed 12,00 hundred. We've also written about ThingD, which is creating a registry of things, as well as REZZ.IT, which is building a business based on the idea that "things have a network and their own audience."

'Communication systems and network architectures for the IoT'

Pachube is the IotT business that has earned the most coverage and analysis from us. Pachube is a service that stores and shares real-time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments. MQTT, which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, is also noteworthy. It is "a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world." More recently, Google launched an API for PowerMeter, which allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. Also worth mention is our article on Arrayent that aims to be the "Cisco of small things" - which is basically middleware for companies wanting to connect their products to the Internet. In particular it's targeting smartphones.

'Experience reports from the introduction and operation of networked things in areas such as healthcare, logistics & transport'

IoT is still so new that we have only just begun to see the results of research. But with RFID, for example (which is one of the more mature IoT technologies), we've reported on how there have been challenges that limit predicted growth. There's also still impediment to to the viable use of IofT-like location-based services.

'Emerging applications and interaction paradigms for everyday citizens'

From preventing lost luggage, to the latest IoT gadgets, telling the story of what a person's everyday daily life is an integral part of IoT. Most notable is the presentation by Carnegie Mellon professor and ex-imagineer Jesse Schell, who describes how sensors in everything may one day mean the sensor in your toothbrush gives you online gaming points if you brush for the full three minutes. He also envisions sensors that track if you are watching TV commercials and again rewards you with online gaming points. Core to Schell's ideas is the belief that these incentives may seem a bit creepy, but they have potential to help us create a less corrupted, more accountable and ethical world.

'Social impacts and consequences: security, privacy, opportunities and risks'

In our What The Internet of Things Means For You series we covered privacy issues related to the use of RFID and barcode readers. The latest reports show how advertisement, RFID and geolocation have combined to raise serious privacy concerns. Additionally, location-based data can be a threat to personal privacy in the context of how the U.S. congress has started to draft location-based privacy protection laws.

Are you going to the Tokyo for Internet of Things Conference? What do you hope to learn there? Let us know in the comments, or by emailing tips@readwriteweb.com, what we should be discussing in the months leading up to the event.

The result of that will be "a kind of global data field" the video says. "If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That's where societies become more efficient, that's where more innovation is sparked." Check out this artistic, succinct, optimistic and inspiring video explaining what could well become a big factor in how the future unfolds.

This is heavy stuff, clearly aimed to fostering positive and substantial cultural change through technology - by opening up a new plane of options for humanity. Of course there's little critique of this movement in videos like this; that's something we're still exploring but we imagine surveillance is one down side. There's also some risk of paying so much attention to our machines that we lose track of the joy of engaging directly with the world around us.

The upside as described in the video is big, though.

"When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us."

To track this trend across multiple vendors, check out ReadWriteWeb's Internet of Things archive.

Photo by Svilen Milev.

Here are six ways this Internet of Things family can see their lives change. They exercise more, save energy and water, budget better, know where their kids are at any moment, and they'll always have the right lighting for activities in the house.

We talked last month about Green Goose, which is a green egg with an ethernet connection that can sense how many miles a person has ridden on their bicycle instead of a car. This data ultimately could be synced up with each family members' bank account. So if they chose to ride a bike instead of a car, an automatic transfer of the allotted monthly gas money saved goes from a checking account into a savings account. Green Goose has plans for other similar sensors.

Health and Fitness

When it comes to physical fitness, this family has all the devices we explained in our sensors to keep you fit post. From Nike Plus running shoes, which sends running data to Mom's iPod via a sensor, to grandpa's exercise games via Wii Fit to their youngest son's training program via NordicTracks iFit, to Dad's miCoach pacer, this family is being encouraged by sensors to better understand and improve their physical health.

Water Conservation

The Waterpebble is a simple sensor that's placed in the shower. It measures the duration of the first shower, and when the next person takes a shower a green light inside the pebble will turn to orange to let the person know that their shower-time is half way up. Once the shower goes longer than the recorded time, the pebble gives off a red light. The best part is that after each shower the Waterpebble will fractionally reduce the amount of time the person will be allowed to shower. There's also a reset button for when someone in the family is having a bad day and needs a longer shower.

Energy Use Scoreboard

All electrical appliances in this house plug into Picowatt Wi-Fi smart plugs, which allow the family to communicate and control energy usage via a command center like Intel's prototype home energy monitor. This monitor is what the New York Times refers to as an Energy Use Scoreboard, which calculates energy usage and displays costs in real-time. Once this technology hits the market, the family will be able to add a few goal-setting apps to the control panel and they'll have the tools they
need to minimize their energy use.

Alert Services

Last January we reported on Trackle and the emerging era of alert services. In the Internet of Things house not only does Trackle alert the family about vital events and information going on in their neighborhood, but when Mom wants to make sure her daughter gets safely home from school on her own, she simply puts a Touchatag RFID tag in her backpack, which alerts Mom when her daughter is safely home.

Lighting Optimization

Finally, this home's lighting can be regulated by Pachube (pronounced patch-bay) and Arduino. As we reported last summer, light sensors can be connected to Arduino, which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform. The light sensor data is then sent to Pachube, which connects the sensor data to the Web where the lighting can be controlled via twitter or via a home energy monitor.

Overall, it's important to remember that we're still in the early days of Internet of Things. As these products continue to develop we'll find more and more ways for our devices to coax us to refine our health and our environment.

Did we describe your dream home? Would you live in the Internet of Things home? Let us know in the comments below.

Photo by Svilen Milev.

McKinsey sees two categories for emerging applications: "information and analysis" and "automation and control." Many of the applications listed are for large companies or specialized industries (for example automobile manufacturers). But consumers should take note too, because there will be a lot more data about us flowing onto the Internet.

In the "information and analysis" category, McKinsey firstly lists tracking behavior. An example is insurance companies installing location sensors in customers' cars, allowing them to base the price of policies on "how a car is driven as well as where it travels." Another example is Tesco's use of sensors to capture shoppers' profile data via membership cards. According to McKinsey, this "can help close purchases by providing additional information or offering discounts at the point of sale."

On the B2B side, McKinsey points to companies using sensors to track RFID tags placed on products moving through supply chains. We've written before about IBM's activities in this market.

The next information and analysis application is enhanced situational awareness. This is when large numbers of sensors are deployed in infrastructure such as roads and buildings, in order to report on real-time environmental conditions such as weather or temperature.

Sensor-driven decision analytics shows how revolutionary sensor technologies could be, without most consumers even realizing it! The report explains that some retailers are presently studying ways to gather and process data from shoppers as they flow through stores. Sensor readings and videos will be able to "note how long they linger at individual displays and record what they ultimately buy," data which McKinsey says "will help to increase revenues by optimizing retail layouts."

The second major category for Internet of Things apps in this report is "automation and control." By this McKinsey means "converting the data and analysis collected through the Internet of Things into instructions that feed back through the network to actuators that in turn modify processes."

The first class of apps listed under this category is process optimization, for example for chemical production and assembly lines.

Next is optimized resource consumption, for example power companies that provide so-called 'smart meters' so that customers can better manage their power expenditure. This is particularly useful for companies that use a lot of power every day, because they can "shift energy-intensive processes and production away from high-priced periods of peak energy demand to low-priced off-peak hours."

The third and final automation and control use case is complex autonomous systems, which McKinsey calls "the most demanding use of the Internet of Things" because it involves rapid, real-time sensing of unpredictable conditions. For example the automobile industry is developing systems that can detect imminent collisions and take evasive action.

The report ends by saying that the Internet of Things holds great promise, but there are many issues to resolve - including privacy, legal and cost of sensors and actuators. However McKinsey thinks that energy consumption efficiency and process optimization are "good early targets" for businesses using Internet of Things.

Overall, this is an informative, useful report for companies who want to get their heads around the potential business opportunities of the Internet of Things. For ReadWriteWeb's ongoing coverage and analysis of this important trend, check out our Internet of Things archive and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Modern web applications are packed with features that ostensibly connect us more to the real world and our activities in it. Foursquare uses location data to connect us with places and people. Nike+ shoes deliver data from your feet to your iPod. All of this new data from the real world is good progress, right? Yes, the more data the better! On the other hand, is our focus on data distracting us from actually enjoying life?

Technology has always had an anti-social element to it. For example, Twitter. When you're in a social situation and you stop to tweet it, that disconnects you from the real world (at least for 30 seconds while you tap out 140 characters on your mobile phone).

Step back further into the mists of technological progress and there is the issue of cellphone calls in social situations. When you're talking with someone and that person's cellphone rings, then they answer it and have a conversation with someone else on their cellphone - is there anything more annoying than that from a social point of view?

So technology can be anti-social; nothing new in that. But is a mobile location-based app like Foursquare not only anti-social, but also distracting us from enjoying our surroundings because we're so intent on documenting where we are?

The counter argument is that products like Foursquare make it easier for you to meet up with your friends in real life, particularly if you're young and socializing a lot. For example you might see that a few of your friends are at a local cafe or pub, so you go out to join them there. That definitely makes Foursquare a fun product. But it's a use case that mostly applies to young, highly social people.

It's not just location-based apps that are potentially killjoys.

Greenfield also spoke about his experience with Nike+ running shoes, which come with a sensor that tracks your run and sends the data to your iPod. As we explained earlier this month, Nike+ has its own social network. Nike+ can also send updates to Twitter and post a status report on Facebook.

According to Adam Greenfield, Nike+ changed the way he ran. Because the shoes could quantify his running performance, he said that they made him faster and more competitive. However, he also began to feel guilty if he missed a run - because the data would suffer as a result. So despite making him a better runner, the Nike+ shoes resulted in him "not having as much fun."

What do you think - are you finding that modern web apps, whether location-based mobile apps or products with sensors or something else data-driven, are making you enjoy life just a little less? Are you focusing too much on the data, rather than just living life? Let us know in the comments.

See also Part 1 of our interview with Adam Greenfield, in which we discussed the impact of the iPhone and other smartphones on the Internet of Things. We also talked about the differences between the U.S. and Asia in adoption of these technologies. In Part 2, we focused on how the iPad may become the missing link between Internet-connected items in your home, for example the Internet fridge, and the Web.

Photo credits: whatleydude; Ed Yourdon

If you're unsure what the world will be like when everything is connected to the Internet (hence the term 'everyware'), then read on for Greenfield's acute observations and examples of what's already happening. This will be a multi-part post, published over the course of this week.

Since it's been nearly 4 years since Everyware was published, I asked Greenfield how Internet of Things has evolved since that time. In particular I wanted to know if anything major had changed since the book was first released.

He replied that the mobile phone has been the biggest change. According to Greenfield, the "single biggest failure of imagination in the book was that someone would decisively re-imagine what the phone is."

I think he's being overly harsh on himself, as the iPhone wasn't announced until January 2007. So in 2005/06, nobody but Steve Jobs and some of his team at Apple could have possibly imagined what the phone would turn into. It should also be noted that Adam Greenfield was a very early adopter of mobile blogging (he coined the term "moblog") and he is currently Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services. So if the evolution of the mobile phone since 2005/06 surprised even him, that tells you something about how much of a sea change the iPhone has been.

RFID

One thing that hasn't changed as much as first thought is RFID. Greenfield ruefully noted that "this stuff is taking so long." There are scenarios in Everyware that haven't come to pass yet, such as RFID in credit cards and home theatres.

However he thinks that RFID will eventually be usurped by superior item identification and tracking technologies. See this ReadWriteWeb post for more background on the state of RFID.

The City

Currently Adam Greenfield is working on his next book, called The City Is Here For You To Use. I asked him what cities he's been most impressed with, in terms of their use of Internet of Things technologies.

He mentioned Korea and Singapore, noting also that municipalities in East Asia have made a lot of progress.

According to Adam Greenfield, a more interesting question may be: what kind of responses are those cities getting from companies? He said that technology companies like Cisco and Intel are responding with products and services for Internet of Things.

I asked Greenfield what he thought the differences were between adoption in Asia and the U.S.? He replied that public motivation in Asia may be one differentiator. In many Asian countries, there is a belief in 'progress' and a future life that will be better because of the "heroic investments" of governments and big companies. He said that quality of life can be delivered as a service in a place like Korea, for example an Internet fridge. Whereas westerners tend to question the utility of things like that.

To get a wider understanding of Internet of Things, I recommend you purchase Everyware now on Amazon. Neither myself or RWW is making any commission on this, I just think this book deserves a wider audience. Stay tuned for more from Adam Greenfield in Part 2 of this series.

In the past, we've looked at companies building the "internet of things," where we've discovered how everyday objects can be linked to the web using sensors, RFID, and even Twitter. In many cases, the applications of such technology are practical, such as with IBM's investment in food supply chain tracking or the web-connected bathroom scale. But web-enabled objects don't have to simply be useful - they can also be fun. The Nabaztag, for example, is an adorable little rabbit that sits on your desk delivering ambient information through lights and sounds according to changes and updates to information found on the web.

But now "augmented reality" is moving beyond the conceptual and practical stages meant to inform (or merely amuse) technology enthusiasts and is reaching out to a new generation: today's web-savvy children.

About Mattel's New Toys

According to Mattel, each action figure, vehicle, and creature in their new Avatar toy lineup will come with a 3-D web tab called an i-TAG which can be scanned using any computer webcam. After doing so, special content unique to that product will be revealed onscreen. The content will vary by toy, but will include things like biographical information, additional images, and 3D animated models showing off the action figures' "engaging, evading, or defending moves." Even better, scanning two of the i-TAGs will reveal an onscreen animation showing 3D images interacting with each other.

Although this isn't the first time we've seen augmented reality integrated into a product, this new way to "play with toys" is notable for being among the first attempts to integrate technology in what is clearly a mainstream consumer product. And a product for kids, at that.

With each new generation, children are becoming increasing comfortable with technology starting at earlier ages. Where today's kids may tote around toy computers, it seems the upcoming generation will have even more options for interacting with the web-enabled world, such as with these new internet-connected toys.

Assuming the Avatar toys are popular (and since they appeal to the comic-obsessed adult fans too, they probably will be), we'll likely see more augmented reality-powered toys like these launched in the near future.

Images of Avatar toys via TheHDRoom

It's fun to look at what is being developed now, because it gives us a glimpse of the Internet of Things of the future. For example a site called The Daily Duino recently experimented with a project involving two light sensors.

Morgellon explained why he did this:

"The idea is to compare inside light levels to outside light levels and adjust for energy consumption. If the light level outside is equal or greater than inside, then perhaps I should open the blinds to let in more light... or maybe even go outside... *gasp*

The two light sensors are connected to an Arduino running the Standard Firmata. The Arduino is connected to a PC running a Processing sketch that sends the sensor data to Pachube."

This is the kind of project that Pachube encourages, as it wants users to interact with sensor data and use it to actively engage with their environment. Morgellon's example is simple, but it illustrates the point: that web-connected sensors help him optimize his living environment. Here he is explaining the set-up, including showing his interactions with Pachube on an Android phone:

Pachube + Arduino from Morgellon on Vimeo.

Below are a couple of graphs generated from the sensor data on Pachube. The higher the number, the less light is present. The aim, according to Morgollon, is that "the Inside Light Sensor will stay a nice high number as I sleep [...] while the Outside Light Sensor should lower over the course of the day."

As the Internet of Things evolves, experiments like this show its potential. Maybe having your household lighting system hooked up to the Web for optimization and interaction is not too far away.

There are Twitter Terms of Service that help dictate how content is shared, and there are generally accepted community guidelines for attribution. Zarrella shared his researched insights on how to get more retweets and leverage Twitter to increase mindshare and drive traffic. He also talked about the value of Twitter as compared to other social networks in terms of conversion.

Zarella said people love to retweet new blog posts from users they follow. They also love retweeting content containing links and don't mind being asked for a retweet. Finally, retweets have a snowball effect; a retweeted tweet is more likely to be retweeted again by other users.

If I never type "retweet" again, it will be too soon.

Check out Zarrella's presentation below:

Other than the trends we've already listed, what else did our readers identify as new this year?

Babak Samii pointed out that in 2009 there has been an increase in "real, defined business models that can actually generate revenue." MacStories agreed, noting that we'll see many innovations in revenue models as a result.

Aaron Fulkerson of Mindtouch commented that "Web Oriented Architectures are redefining ROI and TCO for enterprises." I had to google the second acronym (shows how long I've been out of the corporate world - it means "Total Cost of Ownership"). Aaron is right that enterprises are taking the Web seriously now for business apps - the slow rise in popularity of Google Apps in enterprises is evidence of this.

Willi commented that there is a "new lightweight" about the current Web. "There is a new granularity, atomicity and a kind of chemistry," he remarked. He noted the way that people can "jump in Twitter from persons to hashtags to new interesting persons and their social bubble in real-time." As examples, he pointed to products like Evernote (a note-taking app - our most recent review) and Mir:ror (we reviewed Mir:ror earlier today - it's an Internet-enabled device which enables you to create actions on your computer via everyday objects such as coffee mugs and books). Willi noted that while they may appear to be relatively trivial products, "new use patterns and user benefits emerge" out of them.

Open Data... Except Export

Not everyone in our previous post agreed with the initial set of trends. RWW commenter William claimed that 'open data' is a misnomer, because users mostly cannot export their data from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Friendfeed, Google, et al. We wouldn't go as far as William and label this "web 1.9.8.4.", however it's fair to say that - as far as users go - the promise of open data far outweighs the reality.

Having said that, the other meaning of 'open data' is that it's open for developers to build on top of. The plethora of Twitter apps built on top of Twitter's API is evidence enough of this. While Jason Barone called this "a one-way stream back to their closed system, in the form of an API," it's better than what we had before - which was fewer APIs and not many Linked Data sets (see the Linked Data graph from just 2 years ago, in this recent post). So overall we're encouraged that API data - or even better, Linked Data sets - will enable more and better connected web apps. This makes for a richer ecosystem of Web apps and social connections, which is a very good thing.

But point taken William and Jason, today for users the idea of 'open data' is half-realized at best. It won't be truly open until we have data portability - when you own your identity and content on the Web.

Real-time in the Real World

So far much of the focus on real-time as a new(ish) trend on the Web has focused on trendy apps such as Twitter and FriendFeed. However, Andria Krewson pointed out in the comments to our last post that real-time will spread much further than the early adopters:

"Real-time is huge. Many companies are built on timed data dumps, with the timing affecting workflow and cash flow, but the always-on generation will soon pressure businesses to provide real-time online information. Banks that don't post real balances in a timely way, or insurance companies that take weeks or months to process paperwork, or government agencies that don't provide timely transparent data will face pressures from millennials demanding faster, more accurate information."

On this note, a commenter called Joe remarked that we may be mis-using the term 'real-time.' "For the record," said Joe, "none of those sites you mentioned are doing REAL real-time, they are simply doing interval-based polling for new data on the server." Joe advised us to check out http://obama.collecta.com to see a good example of pushing to the browser using long-polling, not interval polling. We did indeed check that out, and wrote up our findings. While we were impressed that the search results were all less than a minute old, we're not convinced that just more speed means a better form of real-time than Twitter or FriendFeed. Time will tell.

Note: for a very mathematical explanation of why Twitter isn't really real-time, read this comment by Falafulu Fisi (made on a recent RWW post).

Conclusion

Well, there is no conclusion because the Web is an evolving beast. We're excited to see open data becoming more prevalant, even if it hasn't fully opened up yet. We're excited to see real-time making such an impact this year. We're excited about mobile and Internet of Things. There is a lot of innovation happening this year, which is pleasing to see.

Once again we invite you to list in the comments any other trends you're noticing - and just as importantly, what products you're seeing that exemplify these trends.

Here's the original 5-minute presentation which kicked this series off:

Image credits: cartoon screenshot from Geek And Poke; nano:ztag by aaron schmidt

The ztamp:s also work with the company's other internet-connected object: the Nabaztag, a cute robot 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.

Cute, But Clunky

When you watch the videos, you can't help but feel that the process is a little clunky. While the functionality is generally useful, you have to physically apply RFID stamps to objects, download and install the Mir:ror software on your computer, 'program' the stamps, and finally wave the objects over the "mirror" to trigger actions on your computer. Eventually, RFID stamps will just be embedded automatically in objects by their manufacturers, little or no programming by the user will be required, and data will flow in a more automated fashion - not just to your computer but a variety of output devices.

For example, one scenario in the first video was waving the fish food container over the mirror, so you can tell when the fish was last fed. This is actually quite a useful scneario - more useful than the one where the guy puts his coffee cup on the mir:ror to inform his Facebook friends that he's drinking coffee. The funniest scenario on the website, I thought, was this one: "Keep track of every time you use your tools, take your medication, or pour out a glass of Vodka." Technical writer having a little fun there?

Currently, even assuming you've set the mir:ror up already, you need to program the stamp, stick it onto the fish food container, and then when you use it bring it over to the mirror (which one assumes will be in a home office somewhere, not sitting conveniently next to the fish bowl) wave it, read the data on your computer screen, and finally go back and feed the fish. Too many manual steps.

In the hopefully not too distant future, the RFID chip will be embedded in the fish food container already. Even more futuristically, the data will be displayed either on the container or the fish bowl, or at least your mobile phone.

But this is nit-picking with a future that hasn't arrived yet. Mir:ror shows what we can expect from Internet-enabled objects in the near future. For now if you want this functionality, you'll need to buy yourself a mir:ror and some ztamp:s - which you can do for USD$50. That bags you a mir:ror, 2 nano:ztag rabbits, and 3 ztamp:s. If you've already used one of Violet's 'Internet of Things' products, let us know in the comments what you used the stamps for and your thoughts on them.

This type of environmentally aware Internet technology will become increasingly important, so in this post we look at the business model of Pachube and an early product built on top of the service.

On the Pachube site, as we explained in our earlier post, users can either input a feed or use one of the feeds available. The feeds come from devices, buildings, or interactive installations that are already connected to the internet or that send out SMS messages. Also supported are Second Life installations.

Where's The Business Model?

In an interview with Tish Shute's excellent UgoTrade site, Usman Haque said that "Pachube came about as a direct attempt to enable the production of dynamic, responsive, conversant 'environments'." However it's not all scientific endeavour - there is also a business model behind Pachube. Haque explained that there are 4 current facets:

1) Pro accounts with "a more sophisticated set of services", ala Flickr.

2) A set of tools and applications for medium scale manufacturers and developers who want to web-enable their offerings, who according to Haque "will be able to take advantage of the growing repository of Pachube.Apps and add-ons, and who want the convenience, security and economy that Pachube will be able to offer."

3) Involvement in large-scale urban infrastructure projects.

4) A "killer" business model, currently being kept under wraps!

The service is far from finished. Upcoming features in Pachube will include a range of privacy options on feeds, the ability to create "aggregates" from collections of feeds, groups, and open environment-level tagging (so that anyone will be able to tag environments).

Day of the Networked Triffids

An early example of a product built on top of Pachube is one created by Usman Haque's company, Haque Design & Research, called Natural Fuse. It uses house plants, energy-monitoring sensors, and Pachube to create "a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants that act as carbon-cycle circuit-breakers in much the same way as conventional electrical circuit-breakers do". If that sounds like Greek to you (it did to me), basically these "networked plants" enable people to "cooperate on their energy expenditure. Then, the plants thrive (and they can all use more energy); but if they don't the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network's energy capacity."

It doesn't sound too pleasant for the plants, but it is probably good for the environment.

Conclusion

We've only scratched the surface of Pachube here. It's an ambitious new platform for sensor data - sorry, environments. Expect this kind of Internet service to be a key part of your urban environment in the not too distant future. You can keep track of progress via the Pachube community and of course their Twitter account. Also, read Tish Shute's blog post for more details about Pachube, and/or check out the slideshow below.

It's not only in scientific realms. We're seeing this on the Consumer Web too, as Marshall Kirkpatrick explained this morning in an article about social media monitoring tools. He wrote that data mining tools are being democratized and used more nowadays, similar to how online publishing tools were democratized in Web 2.0. The cloud computing servers that the University of Washington will utilize are relatively cheap and easy to use Web platforms that will enable data mining on a scale not seen before. These projects will access a cloud datacenter established for educational use in 2007, through a partnership between Google, IBM and six academic institutions (including the University of Washington).

Oceans and Galaxies of Data

Bill Howe, a researcher at the UW's eScience Institute, explained the impact of cloud computing on his ocean climate simulation project. Instead of running a simulation to test a single hypothesis, he said, climate scientists are now running long-term simulations and then sifting through tens of thousands of gigabytes of resulting data to discover trends.

Andrew Connolly, a UW associate professor of astronomy, explained that for his project analyzing astronomical images, cloud computing makes it easier to store and process information in the cloud and make the information available over the Web. He said that whereas scientists once competed for time on telescopes, recorded data and then studied the individual images in detail, now "telescopes continuously record high-resolution images that are available to all, providing millions of times more information." So the shift is that the data gathering has been automated and is available on a much larger scale than before for scientists to analyze it.

Data Rich - And Useful

This current era of the Web, which some are calling 'Web 3.0' (but we frankly don't know what it's called yet) is increasingly data rich. The same thing could have been said about the Web 2.0 era, when oceans of 'User Generated Content' were created. However the world of sensors is rapidly pouring even more data onto the Web. Ed Lazowska, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, noted that "the rapid evolution of sensors is transforming all sciences from data-poor to data-rich." He said that "the challenge is to use modern cloud computing resources, such as Amazon Web Services, and modern computer science advances, such as data mining and machine learning, to explore these massive volumes of data." He claimed that this new computational science will be pervasive and will have enormous impact.

We're always pleased when the Web has a meaningful impact on the 'real world' - and particularly on science projects such as this, where the findings could be profound.

The integration of sensors with social networks will lead to real-time data and more useful web apps.

In recent posts we reviewed an MIT experiment called WikiCity, that gathered real-time location data from mobile phones in Rome and graphically mapped trends from it. We then looked at a more commercial product doing similar real-time location data analysis, called Citysense. That product aims to let users find the most popular night spots in San Francisco and the most efficient ways to get to them. The next stage of projects/products such as Wikicity and Citysense will be to enable users to social network, using data from sensors as one input.

Emerging Trend: Integrating Social Networks and Sensor Networks

Sensors have become much more prevelant in mobile devices over the past few years. This means that when we talk about sensors, we're not necessarily talking about the microchip embedded in your fridge door. Increasingly, sensors are attached to a human via their mobile phone. Both the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95 contain GPS and accelerometer sensors. Sensor data is transmitted via GPS if available or via Wi-Fi positioning techniques.

In a recent W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, held in Barcelona in January, the trend of sensors mixing with social networks was discussed. An accompanying paper entitled Integrating Social Networks and Sensor Networks provides some useful information. Again, these are mostly research projects right now so not much has filtered into the commercial Web yet.

One application for sensors in social networks is to help people to meet others, using alerts based on their location at a particular time. These alerts could be triggered by either explicit opt-in by the user, or by implicit means. An example of the latter is a user receiving an alert on their mobile phone when someone that they exchange messages with on a blog is in the same room. There would need to be the appropriate permissions and privacy controls in place, of course - and this is one of the challenges that these applications are facing.

Sensors Aren't Just About The Socializing

Social networks are often still thought of as fun, consumer applications such as Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. However, the W3C paper notes that social networking + sensors can also be used in 'serious' markets such as healthcare. For example, the paper suggests that collaborative rehabilitation is possible using sensor-enabled portable devices:

"More and more portable devices are supporting sensor-based interactions, from peripherals (Nike+iPod) to integrated sensors (the original iPhone made good use of its accelerometer, while the latest iPhone 3G has added various proximity and light sensors). We can make use of the Social Web and Sensor Networks to create collaborative applications for portable devices to encourage exercise, à la the Wii. As an example of how this could be done, we could begin by finding contacts on the social network with similar interests or by GPS location (e.g. using FireEagle). This social network of friends can then be used to power collaborative applications (CAPTCHAs, the ESP game, quizzes) where progress can be made by the group when a certain level of exercise has been achieved. Then, as a final step, the resulting sensor data is sent to physicians for analysis."

The conclusion of the W3C paper is that "the integration of sensor networks with social networks leads to applications that can sense the context of a user in much better ways and thus provides more personalized and detailed solutions." The paper also outlines how the Semantic Web can be used to manage the interoperability between sensor networks and social networks.

Real-Time Data is Actually Useful Now

These kinds of sensor-enabled social networking applications are still far from being widespread. Citysense, after all, is limited to just one U.S. city right now (although a New York version is coming soon). But we can see how this could become the future of social networking, in a couple of ways. Firstly, for the younger generation, mobile phones will be the primary way they access and make use of their social networks. Just as kids today use Facebook and AIM and the like to organize their social activities, imagine being able to find out in an instant where all the "young and edgy" kids are hanging out in your local town on a particular Saturday afternoon by using a mobile app like Citysense or Brightkite (our pick last December for Most Promising App for 2009). Secondly, these apps hold equal promise for most other demographics, in areas such as healthcare and enterprise.

In the Web 2.0 era, real-time data has mostly been used to power fancy visualizations. It hasn't been used extensively yet to change peoples behavior or their environment. Indeed, a current criticism of Wikicity is that it doesn't do much more than provide nice looking charts; and hence, it's been labeled "info porn" by some. But with the next era of web apps, we will move beyond just data being 'visualized' and have it start to affect peoples decisions and actions. Hopefully, this will be in a positive way by improving peoples ability to connect with like-minded folks. There are still significant technical, social, and privacy challenges to overcome though, before apps like Citysense and Brightkite go mainstream.

Citysense isn't the only such app doing this, there are currently a lot of location-based social networking plays. They include "social compass" service Loopt (our review), Nokia-owned Plazes (our review), Pelago's Whrrl, ULocate, and GyPSii. Probably our favorite right now is mobile social network app Brightkite, which at the end of last year we named our Most Promising startup for 2009. All of these apps offer something unique. For example Brightkite relies on actions from its user base to make it useful, whereas Citysense's strength is its 4 million sensors and the aggregate data it derives and analyzes from those.

Sense Networks was the subject of a recent review by MIT's Technology Review publication, which described how the next release of Citysense will show "not only where people are gathering in real time, but where people with similar behavioral patterns - students, tourists, or businesspeople, for instance - are congregating." So we can see that Citysense is slowly evolving into a social networking tool, like Brightkite. In the next release Citysense will categorize people into "tribes" - so far 20 tribes have been identified, including "young and edgy," "business traveler," "weekend mole," and "homebody." In order to do this, Sense Networks not only uses GPS data, but company address data and demographic data about people from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The company's monetization plans are predictably centered around location-based mobile advertising. This involves providing GPS data about city activity to advertisers, however the company insists that it will be aggregate data only - so user privacy is maintained. The user also can turn off the tracking and delete their existing data. An example of how advertising could work, via Technology Review, is data showing that "a particular demographic heads to bars downtown between 6 and 9 P.M. on weekdays. Advertisers could then tailor ads on a billboard screen to that specific crowd."

We think this is a good example of how sensors and mobile data are being used to provide real value to consumers. Let us know other examples you've come across lately.