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What would you do after building a successful Dot Com business that was acquired by SAP in 2005? Many entrepreneurs would do their earn-out in the bigger company, then repeat the same formula with a new startup in the next Web era. That's exactly what the founders of a forward-thinking Internet of Things company called ThingWorx are doing.

Earlier this month we reported on the sale of Pachube, a pioneer in the evolving Internet of Things [IoT] landscape. ThingWorx is a similar company, in that it provides a platform for connecting real world objects to the Internet. Where ThingWorx differs is that it has a solutions and services model primarily targeted to the manufacturing sector, whereas Pachube created a community platform. I spoke to Rick Bullotta, Co-Founder and CTO of ThingWorx, to find out the origins and assess the chances of this next generation Web company.

My favorite startup in the fast emerging Internet of Things market, London-based Pachube, has been acquired by Woburn, Massachusetts-based LogMeIn. The deal is worth "approximately $15 million in cash," some of it dependent on performance. LogMeIn provides provides cloud-based remote access solutions, such as the remote PC control app Ignition that we wrote about earlier this month. Pachube (pronounced Patch-Bay) is a platform for connecting people and devices to the Internet. The acquisition allows LogMeIn to extend its reach beyond computers, smartphones and tablets to "potentially all Internet-connectable devices." For Pachube, it allows them to scale up its operations.

I'm rather surprised that Pachube sold itself so early. Since its founding in 2008, Pachube has aimed to be the leading open development platform for the Internet of Things - and it appeared to be building that out quite nicely. So why didn't it continue to ramp up independently, potentially becoming a much more valuable platform in a few years?

Over the weekend there was a hackathon held to promote the Internet of Things (IoT), when real world objects get connected to the Internet. The event was run by London-based IoT platform company Pachube. So what got created at this hackathon and what does it tell us about how the Internet of Things is progressing?

I took a look at a number of the projects that were worked on. In this post I'll highlight three, two from the U.K. and one from NYC. What all 3 projects show is that development around the Internet of Things is still very experimental. Perhaps too experimental. While there was lots of creativity on display, in all honesty I was hoping to see more projects that showed commercial potential. So I have to ask, as an open question at the end of this post: is there enough commercial activity currently happening in IoT?

Pioneering Internet of Things startup, Pachube, is running a global hackathon starting on April 8, 2011 at 2pm U.K. time. Internet of Things (IoT) is a term for when real world objects and environments get connected to the Internet. The hackathon runs for 24 hours and will bring together over 100 developers working on IoT apps.

The main hackathon event is in Pachube's home city of London, but there are also events in New York City, Tokyo, Zurich, Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Lancaster (U.K.). Pachube is encouraging "developers, designers, makers, mixers, mashers, tinkerers, philosopher-mechanics and sales engineers" worldwide to meet up and tinker with IoT technologies.

The need to just do something is a real reason people aggregate data from real-time sensors, create maps and share their findings online. Crowdsourcing is a manifestation of that desire to contribute in a way that helps us understand and better define the overwhelming amount of data available.

In Japan, crowdsourcing is emerging as a way for people to keep track of the radiation levels around the country, levels that are spiking at times due to the pollution escaping from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Pachube is being used to monitor Geiger counters across Japan.

The Internet of Things took a step closer to mainstream adoption today with the announcement of Pachube's first enterprise offering. Pachube (pronounced "patch bay") shares real-time sensor data and enables users to analyze data or trigger actions in a variety of ways through its SaaS. For example, temperature sensors could trigger an alarm if a temperature gets too high or low in your server room. See our coverage of Pachube's applications for more use cases.

One of the emerging trends of 2010 has been the Internet of Things, a term for when real-world objects get connected to the Internet. One of the key aspects of this trend is the data explosion that will occur when millions of objects send data to the cloud - mostly via very small sensors. Just as the 'web 2.0' era led to platforms for user-generated and 'social' content (think Facebook, Twitter, Google's OpenSocial), the Internet of Things era will lead to platforms for sensor data.

It's still very early in this era and the platforms we'll profile here are at this point more about experimentation than commercialization.

This week at the second annual Internet of Things 2010 conference in Brussels, British service Pachube announced a partnership with Current Cost, a producer of real-time energy monitors. Current Cost is using Pachube's Internet of Things platform for the Bridge, an ethernet device that connects Current Cost electricity monitors to the Internet.

Pachube founder and CEO Usman Haque called this "a major step in making the 'internet of things for consumers' a reality."

Apps on the iPhone, there are so very many of them - how's a person to find the best ones? We look at a whole lot of them here at ReadWriteWeb and we'd like to share with you some of our favorites we've discovered in the month of February.

Some of us on the team are proud Android users but most of us are still using iPhones. I just discovered how incredibly effective the Genius recommendations on the phone can be, so I've been going nuts downloading new apps. Here are the ones our staff is most excited about this month.

Yesterday we analyzed some of the applications being built with Pachube, an open source platform enabling developers to connect sensor data to the Web. We at ReadWriteWeb think that Pachube is an excellent example of one of our Top 5 Trends of 2009: Internet of Things. So we're exploring Pachube in-depth in a 3-part series.

This is Part 3, where we'll look at Pachube's business model and delve into its platform. I spoke at length to Pachube founder Usman Haque to find out how Pachube intends to make money, how it will compete against big vendors such as IBM and Microsoft, and why it chose to be an open source platform.