Back in 2010 we put together our first list of the 30 best and worst Web tech tattoos. Here's our latest compilation, including an augmented reality tattoo, HTML tags, Javascript and C++, Debian, Wordpress, Google, Microsoft, RFID, QR codes, even Bill Gates' face. If you have work that's better, or worse, show it off in the comments.

Unix commands/C++/Javascript

Google

Microsoft

Next page: RFID, Augmented Reality, QR codes and Tux sitting on Windows eating an Apple!

RFID

Augmented Reality

Android

HTML

Networks

Tux

Debian

QR Code/Shotcode

WordPress

Sources: Machine gun Tux: wrightzen; Jobs, left: Cult of Mac; Jobs, right: SODAPOP; RIP toe, Geeky Tattoos; Jobs, arm: Cult of Mac; Stay hungry, wrists: Speak Truth, Breath Love; Stay hungry, arm: Gristle Tattoo; Apple/Jobs icon: gadgetpolice.com; "There is no reason": wease.com; "One more thing": Cult of Mac; Unix commands: Geeky Tattoos; Google It: jessversus; Powered by Google: Geeky Tattoos; Windows XP: traviscostrrr; Windows: bremiclem; Bill Gates: Big Tattoo Planet; RFID: The Loom; Augmented reality: iheartchaos.com; Android: eagyn; Android skateboard: the brand show; HTML body: iamdonte; : interbent; : interbent; CCIE: knuckletattoos.com; Tux: Sabrina Ricci; Debian arm: MicheleM_; Debian back: NiNiaX; QR code: Geeky Tattoos; ShotCode: Ad Lab; Wordpress: Hugo Baeta

Avis teamed up with RFID manufacturer I.D. Systems of New Jersey to launch the technology and will roll out the service in the US and Canada next month.

The device itself is a type of radio transmitter that looks like something the Ghostbusters would use. It has two Wi-Fi router-like antennae and a black box with dials on it.

This move marks a change in the way rental companies do business. It's a lot like ZipCar, which enables a customer to pick up the nearest rental car in any neighborhood in their city. Several mainstream rental companies have already made it possible to pick up cars on the street in major cities like Los Angeles and New York.

For those worried about the Big Brother-ification of their rental behavior, it's not uncommon for rental companies to track their cars. It's normally seen as a type of security measure and for the customer's safety. If the car breaks down, it's easier to find the broken vehicle and send help.

Now, keeping track of the identify of ships, their speed and what they carry is automated, at least for a segment of the populous country's water traffic. Almost all waterways Grade IV and higher have been equipped, according to the People's Daily.

The Maritime Safety Administration asserts that China will have 134,000 ships carrying the Automatic Identification System by July of next year.

Li River photo by Misquitos | other sources A Smarter Planet

Now we are in a new era, that of the Social Web. But just as we take our positive qualities with us through time - intellect, compassion, inventiveness - we also take our dumbness. Today I came across two ideas - one a process, the other a product - that shot me back in time to the moment I first read about online dry-cleaning. Both, horribly enough, are food-related; and both are profoundly dumb.

Photo by Ed Schipul

The Answer to a Question No One's Asking

A design engineering student at the Royal College of Art in London named Hannes Harms has decided that we need radio frequency identification tags in our food. Technology Review quotes him asking, "What if there were a way to embed data directly into food?"

"What if" Hannes? Nothing, that's what! No one on God's green earth wants to crap out RFID tags.

Hannes, bless his glue-sniffing soul, believes, "RFID-tagged food would...enable a whole new food system, which he terms 'NutriSmart.' Bar codes on food packaging would become obsolete...and refrigerators...would be able to warn us when our food is about to spoil."

Sniff it. You only have to sniff it.

Even if this were not the very definition of The Answer to a Question No One's Asking, the term "NutriSmart" alone would make me cringe.

A Solution that Doesn't Work to a Problem that Doesn't Exist

Seattle recipe software company BigOven has introduced RecipeScan. Initially, it sounds like magic (or very advanced science). You use your mobile phone to snap a photo of a dish and you get the recipe!

Sort of.

Well, not at all actually.

After you take your photo and upload it via the app, BigOven eventually sends you a recipe for something. No, not for that particular bowl of phad thai or that kind of cheesecake, just for a phad thai or a cheesecake. (And here's me thinking its some kind of groundbreaking mobile spectrometry.)

It seems that a company full of grown-ass men and women thought that you needed an app that would allow you to take a photo and then wait while someone else found you a recipe for something else.

This time it was GeekWire asking the completely unnecessary question.

"Have you ever wanted a copy of your best friend's chocolate chip cookie recipe, but don't have the patience to copy down all of the ingredients?"

No. Of course I haven't. No one has.

Let me be uncharacteristically blunt

To quote H.L. Mencken, each of these is an idea "so bad a sort of grandeur creeps into it." We're fair enough here at ReadWriteWeb, I think. But sometimes, you have to call a spade a spade.

That said, if you think I've missed something here, some essential genius in the products, some implication only a mind of great subtly could detect, by all means (to quote Mencken again) administer me "a harsh corrective" in the comments. On the other hand, if you believe you've encountered an idea even dumber, then you just know I want to hear about that as well.

Like all RFID tech, it requires readers to scan. Those readers will be at all entrance points to the festival. If a band lacks a working RFID chip, the wearer will not be allowed in. The festival is also allowing festival-goers to use the bracelet for a lot more, however.

Updated after the jump.

Given that the festival drones on for four days and people camp out and bring their gear and given that out of almost 100,000 people there are going to be some baddies, Bonnaroo has made it possible for patrons to load their wristband with information, including their credit card number, through the website. The latter element should make it a great deal easier to make purchases at the festival.

So, what's the problem? Adam Gold, writing for the Nashville Scene, puts it best.

"It's inevitable that many a block-headed hippie among the Bonnaroo faithful are likely to cry foul and loose a collective shit fit of conspiratorial, theoretic poppycock bemoaning the addition of Big Brother (sans Holding Company) to this year's lineup...I can imagine that, in the midst of the wrong mid-trip moment, a festival-goer or two is likely going to gaze upon the wristband with his or her third eye and subsequently freak out...(I)f this happens to one of your friends, just remind them that they're probably on Facebook, and the marketing man already knows their lifestyle habits; they have a cellphone that pings their location off their brains at all times anyway; and that their family will find some closure when the puddle their body melted into is found, wristband intact."

You kids have fun.

UPDATE:

Ken Weinstein of Big Hassle Media, contacted me on behalf of Bonnaroo. He told me that my central assertion, which I read in Nashville Scene, was incorrect.

I regret not having contacted Bonnaroo, something I usually do.

Feet photo by Jason Anfinsen

RFID chips are tiny microprocessors that are embedded into real world objects. Data from the chips is read by RFID Readers, which is what ThingMagic specializes in. Over the 10 years of its existence, ThingMagic has diversified its customer base and was eventually acquired last October.

Founded in 2000 by a group of PhD graduates from MIT's Media Lab, ThingMagic aimed to become "the engine in RFID." By the time of acquisition a decade later, ThingMagic's customers included industrial automation firms, manufacturers, automotive companies, retailers, and consumer companies.

The name ThingMagic originated from a goal of "adding magic to everyday objects." However it took a long time for that vision to become a reality. As Gregory Huang of Xconomy put it, in an excellent profile last August, "the technology was strong but its business use was overhyped, so it got stuck on the adoption curve."

Last year, RFID finally began to get successful uptake. ThingMagic co-founder and CTO Yael Maguire told Xconomy that "in most cases it's [RFID] caught up with people's imagination. People are focusing [now] on how to deploy it."

The fact that ThingMagic was acquired by a billion-dollar tracking company proves that RFID technology is fairly mature now and so deploying it is key. What's more, RFID combined with other Web and mobile technologies is an increasingly important part of the Internet of Things. Sensors may be the only technology that is more important.

As ThingMagic co-founder Ravi Pappu told Xconomy, "it's not just about the RFID [it's about] connecting to other systems, like Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi." By combining all of this, he said, "you have the Internet of Things."

ThingMagic will be viewed as one of the early success stories of Internet of Things. Perhaps it sold a bit too early, even. One thing is for sure, RFID uptake owes a lot to this little Boston company powered by MIT Media Lab PhDs.

This week's stories include a big IoT investment by chip maker Intel, two French cities building smart cities, RunKeeper's platform for exercise and health data, and more. Also we continue the countdown to the Internet address apocalypse!

As we noted last week, it's getting down to the wire for IPv4 Internet addresses. It's now down to 5 days, according to the Twitter account @ipv4countdown (data sourced from Hurricane Electric). This time next week, it'll be Armageddon! Well... not really, the Internet will continue to run and most of us won't notice any difference. For the technically inclined though, the age of IPv6 will have officially arrived.

The adoption of IPv6 is a key technology in the Internet of Things, because every object connected to the Internet requires at least one IP address. There will be huge demand for Internet addresses and IPv6 is more than capable of handling that.

Intel invests $25 Million in Internet of Things Research

Intel announced this week that it will invest NT$750 million (US$25.8 million) in joint research with Taiwan's top-ranked university, National Taiwan University. The research project, named Intel-NTU Connected Context Computing Center, will focus on Internet of Things. Specifically it will look at smart sensing, "green sensing" and context analysis.

Vida Ilderem Burger, vice president and director of Intel's integrated platforms research, said that it's Intel's first such center and will probably eventually expand to China. This is significant, because as we noted last week China is well ahead of the U.S. on IoT implementation.

The Quantified Self: RunKeeper Emphasizes IoT Platform

Fitness-tracker RunKeeper announced this week that its iPhone app will remain free, after formally being a paid app. Instead of making money from its apps directly, RunKeeper is going to focus on building a platform for exercise and health data. Other companies have already built RunKeeper integration into sensors, ranging from heart rate monitors to sleep monitors and bathroom scales. RunKeeper says it will launch a public API (Application Programming Interface) this year.

Running coaches are already selling training programs on the RunKeeper site and power-users can pay for the RunKeeper Elite level of service. For more explanation and context, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's analysis of RunKeeper.

French Intelligent Cities

Bruce Sterling, who runs the excellent Spime Watch on his Wired blog, pointed us to a report on "smart city" development in France. The telecoms company France Telecom Orange has been running two smart city pilot projects at Cagne-sur-mer, a city with 40,000 residents located near Nice, and in the Grenoble city center. Reports Louise Joselyn from new Electronics:

"At Cagne, the pilot project has involved the deployment of sensors to monitor, measure and even control certain aspects of the city environment, including water metering in public buildings, street lighting control and the environment.

[...]

So far, the Cagne project has worked well, handling 100 or so sensors. The challenge is to support multiservices simultaneously and to scale to tens of thousands of sensors."

QR Codes Track Ancient Artifacts

As we reported earlier this week, the Center for the Studies of Archaeological and Prehistoric Heritage (CEPAP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona is now using QR codes to ID and track ancient artifacts. The CEPAP team has been testing this process for two years, affixing QR tags on everything from sword blades to bone remains. CEPAP has managed to reduce artifact coding errors to 1% with this process.

Sao Paulo Cancer Hospital Uses RFID to Respond to Heart Attacks

A report in the RFID Journal this week explained how a Brazilian hospital is making use of RFID in medical emergencies. The system "not only alerts responders in the event of a cardiac arrest, but also tracks response times, thereby providing the clinic with information that it can utilize to improve its response processes."

The RFID implementation has been a success so far and the hospital is planning to extend it to "tracking and managing clinical assets, as well as for environmental monitoring of temperature and humidity in patient care areas, and in hospital refrigerators and freezers used to store tissue samples and medications."

That's a summary of some Internet of Things highlights from the past week. Feel free to share in the comments other interesting Internet of Things developments that you spotted this week.

Using a system developed by Ariane Systems, guests check in prior to arrival using the "Allegro web/mobile check-in platform." They click a link received via email or text and establish check-in time, manage room preferences, update their profile and pay.

Thomas Westergaard, senior VP of Comfort Hotels for Nordic Choice Hotels said this was, in part, a matter of playing catch-up.

"The airline industry automated the check-in process 10 years ago, and we feel it is time that the hotel industry follows suit."

One of the make-or-break points on this experiment will be, as always, reliability. There is even less convenience in a time-saving measure malfunctioning than in its lack.

While most will agree that some automation is a boon, the disagreement may lie in what aspects of our interactions should be meat-free. Personally, I love not having to stand in line waiting for one distracted or chatty cash-register specialist for a pack of batteries, I have not found the automated airport experience anything less than panic-inducing.

How much of our travel experience do we want to appear convenient in order to save that last dollar, dinar or dalasi? These days, maybe every last vestige.

Circumstance did not allow for an ice hotel reference. I apologize.

This week we discuss the impending Internet address apocalypse, RFID's sweet spot, why the U.S. is behind China on IoT, emotional sensors, and more!

In July last year, we reported that the Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time. Well now it's down to 11 days, according to the Twitter account @ipv4countdown (data sourced from Hurricane Electric).

We're talking about IPv4 addresses, Internet Protocol version 4. There is a new version, IPv6, but it requires work from ISPs and others to enable it. The reason why this is important is that the Internet of Things is leading to a huge increase in IP addresses. Basically, every object connected to the Internet requires at least one IP address. So the adoption of IPv6 is a key technology in the Internet of Things.

RFID: Retail is the Sweet Spot

According to a report on WTN News, demand for RFID will continue to mature in 2011 - especially in the retail, healthcare, banking/financial and aerospace sectors. Joe Pleshek wrote:

"Retail [...] is currently the sweet spot for RFID, especially with apparel retailers, who are applying RFID to individual garments to limit out -of-stocks, reduce shrink and re-direct labor from the back room to more customer-facing roles."

Drew Nathanson, senior RFID analyst and director of research operations at VDC Research Group, expects the retail industry to consume at least 3.4 billion RFID tags by 2014 - up from 400 million in 2011.

Sensors Getting Better: Emotional Sensors

An interesting report from MobiHealthNews this week discusses the latest in sensor innovation. According to Dr. Joseph Kvedar, director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare System in Boston, an area to keep an eye on in sensor technology is what he calls "non-physiologic" sensors. By that he means sensors that are not measuring something physical. He cited a couple of products that do emotional sensing: Cogito has a product that can predict mood by sensing a user's voice over the phone; and Affectiva has technology to pick up a person's emotional state either by facial recognition or by a more traditional armband sensor (see image to the right, via MobiHealthNews).

Kvedar noted that "we've had too limited of a view of what we can collect from patients remotely and these emotional sensors add a whole new dimension to the objective data part of the connected health story."

Why the U.S. is Behind China in IoT

We've reported on the China government's forward thinking in the Internet of Things. In a recent post by Ron Callari on the blog inventorspot.com, Robert Kong Hai, an American writer and author living in China, neatly summarized why the U.S. is falling behind China:

"You can't rely on the US government to push this technology. It's the private sector that has to step up. Remember, in China it's the total opposite. The government jumps in and the private sector take cues from the government."

Kinect may be the Key to Control Your Internet of Things

Earlier this week we reported that Microsoft is preparing an official Software Developement Kit (SDK) that will let 3rd parties build any Windows software to include Kinect control support. Kinect is a motion-control interface for games, much like Nintendo's Wii system. This has implications for all Internet-enabled objects in your household. Forrester analyst James McQuivey said at the end of last year that "Kinect is to multitouch user interfaces what the mouse was to DOS." He expects Kinect to be "a transformative change in the user experience, the interposition of a new and dramatically natural way to interact -- not just with TV, not just with computers -- but with every machine that we will conceive of in the future..."

New AMD Chips Enable Visual Computing in Embedded Systems

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge reported this week that "the world of embedded systems is going to get a whole lot more visually-oriented." He pointed to Advanced Micro Devices unveiling its G-Series of accelerated processing units (APUs). These add graphics functionality into an embedded processor, which can be deployed almost anywhere. Vizard noted that Microsoft uses AMD processors in its Surface systems, the touch-screen table interface.

"According to Cameron Swen, senior product marketing manager for AMD's embedded solutions division, the world of embedded systems is about to become more visual because people want to interact with these systems, whether they are deployed on a factory floor or your living room. That means these systems will increasingly need to support touchscreen interfaces that allow customers to manipulate graphical images."

Connect Your Mailbox to the Internet

We're not talking about your inbox, we mean Ye Olde Mailbox - you know, where all your bills get delivered. As RWW's Mike Melanson reported today, Make Magazine has hacked together a system that sends push notifications to your iPhone every time a letter arrives. The project uses a switch in the mailbox to sense whenever the door is opened.

That's a summary of some Internet of Things highlights from the past week. Feel free to share in the comments other interesting Internet of Things developments that you spotted this week.

Begole's group at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox) puts more emphasis nowadays on technologies such as predictive analytics, context engines and "Behavioral Ware". It's much more about the software, than the sensors.

According to Begole, "the early Ubicomp [in the late 80's and 90's] was all about making machines aware of the environment." However this was "really hard because the sensors didn't exist - or they weren't cheap enough - and we didn't know exactly how to use sensors to detect the environment."

But the world of sensors is "not hard anymore," Begole claimed. He pointed to accelerometers and gyros on the iPhone and Android, which "any developer can access."

Begole explained that PARC is trying to take sensor technology to the next level, by adding a layer of meaning atop the sensor data. "It's not just the state of the world," he told me, "but what does that state mean to the user? What's important, what's significant about the situation? That's what we're trying to focus on."

He noted that new types of sensors are being developed too. For example, his Ubicomp group at PARC have been experimenting with biochemical sensors. "We haven't done much with biochemical sensors," he added, "although we do some chemical sensing in one of the hardware labs here."

He also mentioned disposable sensors, using print, that can be put on your body like a band aid.

Here is a presentation by Bo Begole that explains PARC's Ubicomp software developments further:

The software side of the Internet of Things is where much of the innovation is happening. PARC, HP, IBM, Cisco and others are all working hard to develop algorithms that will process and make sense of the explosion of data coming from sensors.

Of course, consumers stand to gain too. Data from the food supply chain will enable consumers to more easily judge food quality.

Food safety is the primary concern of consumers. Yet according to an IBM report, only 1% of foods entering the U.S. are inspected. The report further states that imports make up "nearly 60% of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S. and 75% of the seafood."

Data about where food was produced and how it has traveled would increase consumer confidence about food safety. Given the choice of two similar food products, but one has more data about how safe it is - as a consumer, which would you choose? That's an opportunity for food companies to gain an advantage over their competition.

The back story of a particular food item is valuable to consumers, too, for reasons such as managing health to being able to make moral or ethical judgments. As the Christian Science Monitor recently noted, "every gadget, piece of food, or article of clothing comes with a back story."

There is already a growing movement to quantify data about the way we live - and eat. From web apps like Health Month (which enables you to set health goals and track them over a month, including dietary goals) to the self-explanatory TweetWhatYouEat. These apps will become much more sophisticated once food businesses give consumers data from the supply chain.

The web site The Quantified Self, run by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, has more tips and tools for consumers who wish to track and manage the data about their lives.

As a diabetic (type 1), I'm more careful than most people about what I eat. So I can't wait for the day when I'll be able to scan a food item with my smart phone and find out if it's a healthier option for me than a competing product.

This is a huge opportunity for the food industry. Compete on the quality of the data you provide; and win. Let us know in the comments if you've spotted some early examples of food companies utilizing sensor or similar data.

Image credits: psyberartist; IBM

While on the one hand, the idea of these self-aware "social objects" is intriguing, especially when you examine use cases like the "social tennis racquet," as MacManus did, there is a flip side. Social objects can tattle on you, reporting data you don't wish to share.

RFID data helps save Mother Earth, right?

Well, yes...but...

The catch here is that trash carts containing more than 10% recyclable material can lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens, as reported by local website Cleveland.com. The pilot program for these RFID-enabled bins began in 2007 with 15,000 households participating. The city has now approved spending $2.5 million on high-tech bins for 25,000 households and will continue at 25,000 households per year until all of the city's 150,000 residents are covered.

On a personal level, you may support this "recycle or be fined" program, especially given the troubling state of the world's environment. Maybe it's time for recycling to move from being a personal choice to a legal requirement?

Tattletaling Objects

The implications of these data-collecting, tattletaling objects and their use by government cannot be overlooked. It begins with spying on your trash, but what's next? Parking meters that know you snagged a few extra minutes because no one was around to write a ticket? Oh wait, that already exists. Vibration sensors that report when illegals cross the border? Hmm, that was done too. Biometric passports? We're already there.Digital billboards that can be used for surveillance? Yikes. Trees that report back when poached? Done. A plan to coat the planet in billions of sensors that can monitor traffic, analyze climate change, oh, and recognize people, too? In progress.

By themselves, none of these current use-cases alone are a major affront to personal freedom (in this author's opinion, that is). But there are many privacy advocates out there who find measures like these egregious violations of of our civil liberties.

Even if you fall more on the side of "eh, who cares?", try this: imagine a future where all objects are "social" data-collectors who can report their use, their history, their location, etc. Now imagine the government or corporations accessing that data and taking action based on what the objects' data tells them. Did your opinion change? If so, why?

This article is not meant to be alarmist - here at ReadWriteWeb, we're big supporters of the Internet of Things and its potential. However, the trend has other implications for our world which may be less than positive - those need to be examined, too.

According to Forrester analyst Emmet Higdon, the test is less one of the technology involved, but the user interface and whether or not "consumers' current love affair with smartphones is enough to change card payment behaviors that date back more than 50 years."

To make any headway, writes Higdon, "banks need to convince customers that using a mobile wallet can be as simple and convenient as swiping a plastic card". Beyond that, companies would also need to ensure security and privacy, "as well as competitive issues regarding control of the mobile wallet application itself - before any broad consumer rollout could be contemplated."

Perhaps, though, mobile payments aren't entirely about the transaction itself, but the whole experience. Online payment systems could make it much simpler to transfer funds and to put limits on spending, features that might not be available for credit or debit cards. There's also the issue of security. A recent episode of NPR's On The Media discussed mobile payment systems and related how they can actually be more, not less, secure than cash. For workers in South Africa, the story went, everyone would get paid on the same day and often, returning home from work could be a scary time, as the chances of getting mugged were higher. Therefore, getting paid virtually rather than physically, was actually safer. Another possibility is that NFC could replace plastic in locations where completing credit card transactions become difficult, though mobile credit card solutions are becoming increasingly common.

According to Higdon, nearly 50% of iPhone users are interested in mobile payments. Are you one of them? And if so, why, because we can't imagine that the debit card in your pocket is taking up too much room. What is the value added by mobile payments?

SecureRF Corporation, a company specializing in secure RFID software, proposed the project to the school district. Funding for the project could come by way of a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, which the company is close to finalizing.

One of the alternative uses the company has offered to the district is to enable tracking on school busses to see who uses the busses and how often. The data collected from experiments like these could be used to better budget the school funds, potentially opening up more money to underfunded areas of education, like the arts. Some district board members raised questions about privacy, but the experiments will likely be opt-in if they are given the green light.

Anyone who has driven through a toll station on a highway without having to stop to drop a few coins knows the potential for RFID to improve and optimize our everyday lives. For school officials tasked with managing hundreds of students across large campuses, technology like this could make their jobs much easier, keeping kids safer.

According to Reuters, the two companies will begin testing next month the system of paying that "some say could become a primary means of everyday purchases."

With the technology now entering testing by the largest U.S. consumer bank and the world's largest payment processor, it seems that the idea of using mobile phones for making payments is gaining some serious traction, at least in the U.S. According to Reuters, the U.S. has been slower to adopt NFC payments as compared to countries like Japan, where mobile payment systems have been in place for years now. Just this week, PayPal indicated that mobile payment systems are a "top priority" after launching its own trial of NFC payments last month.

One big detractor to the use of NFC technology in turning smartphones into virtual wallets is that most popular smartphones do not come with the required NFC chip installed. For their test, the two companies "will allow select New York-area employees and customers to install small chips, supplied by Visa and its technology vendors", although neither company would say how many people will be involved in the pilot program.

The lack of NFC-enabled devices is, however, likely coming to an end in the near future. Apple just hired its own NFC expert earlier this week. NFC-enabled Android phones are said to be on the way by the year's end.