ReadWriteWeb

The next time you have to get an MRI or CT scan you might not know it but if the equipment is made by GE it is phoning home. No, the actual scan data is still between you and your doctor, but the broad stats of when and where the scan was taken is reported back to GE. In the true spirit of the Internet of Things, everything has an IP address, even an MRI machine. The analysts at GE have created some interesting data visualizations. About 125,000 scans are taken each day around the world with their equipment, and you can see time series information and other interesting stats on their blog.

Earlier this week I listed 5 signs of a great user experience in a tech product. One sign is that it changes you. I referred to revolutionary products like the iPhone and Twitter, that modified our online behaviors or habits. This trend is becoming more noticeable with the so called Internet of Things, where everyday objects are connected to the Internet. If a device or object has traditionally been a static thing, then it's guaranteed to morph into something different once it becomes interactive.

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 creator, Michael Shirley, describes it like this: "The device is triggered by a reed-switch sensor that monitors magnetic proximity. The signal is sent through an Arduino board to a Processing sketch, which tells the computer to snap a webcam photo of Peterson and upload it to Twitpic with a saying chosen from a pool of prewritten zingers. The Twitpic post is immediately loaded to the BossTracker5000′s Twitter feed. Voila! A chair that tweets." Most importantly, it also updates when the boss is away.

Mobile UX designers and marketing and analytics firm Nellymoser today released a comprehensive study of print magazine action codes. They took the time to review every 2011 issue of the top 100 national magazine titles: all 164,000 pages' worth. They found a total of 4,400 QR Codes, MicrosoftTags, Spyderlynk SnapTags, BEE Tags, JagTags, Digimarc watermarks and other codes with an iPhone or Android device. For each tag, they scanned and ran the resulting Web page or video. At least give them props for being thorough.

The results show to no surprise that despite their problems, tags are becoming more popular, from an average of two per issue at the beginning of the year to more than six nearing the end.

Richard MacManus explores the shift from watching tv to experiencing it. This and more in today's Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

More than half of the devices launched at CES earlier this month were connected. That's according to the GSMA, a worldwide association of mobile operators and related companies. GSMA calculated that more than 90% of TVs at CES, 70% of automotive devices, 44% of healthcare devices and 30% of cameras were connected.

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 picture recently painted of a network of ubiquitous connectivity for each and every class of processor-endowed device on the planet goes so far as to suggest that things such as shipping tags, pacemakers, pipeline stress sensors, thermometers, and nuclear radiation monitors expose their methods to the world - perhaps with a RESTful state. Only through such openness could the spark of ingenuity for a standardized, all-purpose API be generated.

As KORE Telematics President and COO Alex Brisbourne told us in Part 1 of this three-part discussion with ReadWriteWeb, the engineering of such specialized devices may actually work against the creation of such an API. But commonality and generalization of functions are what drive costs down for device manufacturers - the more specialized something is, the smaller its potential market. Is there anything that "intelligent device" managers could learn from the design of existing, specialized, narrowcast (to use Brisbourne's term) devices that developers may apply to the architecture of the devices that real-world apps will remotely monitor and manage?

It is no surprise to anyone who has covered either the computing or telecommunications markets for any length of time that manufacturers' visions of the future are centered around the ubiquity of the products they create. The 2007 vision of ubiquitous communications among carriers revolved around a kind of flip-phone with a detachable antenna you might wear on your head or in your pocket. When the iPhone happened, it was called "disruption," but really in the sense that a bad dream was disrupted by a better reality.

The 1995 vision of ubiquitous computing from Microsoft revolved around a universal acceptance of the role of packaged software; the word "Internet" was surgically inserted into a later draft of Bill Gates' The Road Ahead. So when you look carefully at concepts of an "Internet of Things" (IoT), if you're a veteran, you might want to focus on what these things are supposed to be. KORE Telematics President and COO Alex Brisbourne (whose business is machine-to-machine communication, or M2M) has done precisely that, and shares his thoughts with us in part 2 of his three-part discussion with ReadWriteWeb.

The way IBM sells the concept of the "Internet of Things" is as a new, fully functional, and perhaps even separate Web for the exchange of data between devices. "It makes it possible, potentially, for every device on the network to communicate and share information with every other device," reads an IBM blog post last month. As ReadWriteWeb's conversation with IBM software architect Andy Piper discovered, that marketing characterization may not be entirely in alignment with the actual MQTT architecture - and for good, solid reasons.

Some types of real-world communications that IBM claims requires a new Web that's the stuff of dreams, are already happening on a practical level without such a Web. This is what we've learned from Alex Brisbourne, the president and COO of KORE Telematics. Since 2003, KORE has been developing wireless connectivity systems for devices that need to share data with other devices, often over limited distances, in the machine-to-machine (M2M) market space. Brisbourne is an outspoken advocate of inter-device communication, though he warns that the scale of the systems on which this communication is, and should perhaps continue to be, limited.

Every addressable resource on the Web has what W3C now calls a Uniform Resource Identifier (not URL, but URI). Anything that can provide information to a client in response to a request, may be addressed using this syntax. It takes care the what, where, and how.

How will the Internet of Things make everything addressable by every other thing, as explicitly promised by IBM - which is proposing one candidate for an IoT protocol in the form of MQTT? In the concluding part of ReadWriteWeb's discussion with MQTT engineer and WebSphere MQ community lead Andy Piper (continued from part 2 last Tuesday), we learned how IBM is actually now in its second decade of working out a kind of "thing taxonomy" - a way for its messaging queue protocol to resolve the where and how of contacting a small, MQTT-enabled device by first sorting through what it is.