Announcement

Check out what the WideTag Social Energy Meter is about with this interactive demo

The Widetag Social Energy Meter brings social objects, and the Internet Of Things to better understand the impact of our individual behavior on issues like the environment, and global warming. Until it is widely available as an easily deployable consumer gadget, it will be helpful to refer to the interactive demonstration site we developed, to understand how it works, and what are its benefits. The WideTag Social Energy Meter demo enables you to choose one of several avatars to represent you actions, and then you can click on various household appliances to turn them on virtually, and start showing your real-time energy consumption.

We believe that the real-time web is more than just humans tweeting! There is a very large information load that is developing through not only our explicit online activities, but also through either our indirect navigation, and interaction with applications, or even more importantly through IP-enabled objects that have the capability of reporting on their status and on their measurements of the environment. We need new infrastructure elements to make sure that “whales don’t fail”, that we can keep counting on the Internet to be a reliable foundation of the real-time web, and tools of data collection, management, and reporting that are up to the enormous tasks required. WideSpime is our answer to these needs, and the SEM demo site takes fully advantage of the scalable architecture that WideSpime provides.

The architecture is only one element of the WideTag Social Energy Meter project, however. As important as it is, the other, complementary feature of social interaction, and carefully leveraged user behavior, and emotional interface is even more crucial to make sure that it is not only a geek toy, but an application that can be adopted, and used daily by everyday consumers. The way the energy consumption is shown both for your individual use, and as reported by your homogeneous social group, talks to you in an intuitive, emotional manner that a single numerical value will never be able to accomplish!