The Internet of Things meme is heating up, and next week we will be in Brussels, speaking at TEDx, and at the Royal Academy of Science.

The 33rd America’s Cup opened this Monday in Valencia, and we are here at the Green Comm Challenge base, following the race between the two teams of Alinghi, the defender, and BMW Oracle, the challenger. Well, we would be, were it not that for the second time the opening race has been postponed, first on Monday for lack of stable wind, and now on Wednesday due to the waves which were too big, and could risk damaging the two boats.

Today’s race is about these two teams, and their prowess at sailing, and at designing and building the most advanced sailing machines on the planet.

What will be the next edition? There are too many open variables today to tell. But what we at WideTag want to contribute to the advancement of the field, is the deep understanding of how in the next few years, at an accelerating pace, all our objects are going to be connected, and communicating. And with this process they will be better attuned to the world around them, better able to tell their stories, perform under stress, an edge conditions, up to the task of listening to, and then narrating the stream of data that will form the basis of the strategic, and tactical decisions of the teams of the future America’s Cups.

In the process we will also create a series of new opportunities of technologies to emerge, and to be quickly tested, and adopted by industries. The Internet Of Things, and the products that WideTag is creating for its best foundation, like WideSpime 2, are going to see a great expansion everywhere. And if in the meantime we can participate in some sailing races, that will be an additional nice incentive!

Taking full advantage of the powerful data flows that an always connected device can provide is not trivial at all. The help that we are providing to developers is fundamental to make sure that the complex combination of hardware, software, application, and user experience can flourish, and it is the WideSpime 2 massive data collection system.

If you are developing Internet Of Things applications, reinventing the wheel is the last thing you want to do. You must be able and concentrate on designing your hardware, obtaining the necessary certifications, project and test the user experience… And you know that relying on the scalability, and power of WideSpime 2, you can take the data collection and management tasks for granted!

WideSpime 2 is at the heart of the operating system for the real-time internet.

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!

During 2010 for sure there will be many new announcements, and products, not only from us at WideTag, but also many others. But, hey, we will surely aim to be in the Top 10 list next year as well!

Leandro Agro, CEO of WideTag, is a keynote speaker today at the UXconference 2009 in Lugano, Switzerland, organized by SketchIn.

In his speech, Lee is going to talk about our view that the User Experience today goes way beyond what is enclosed in the frame of a monitor, or even what the mobile devices bring. Thanks to the Internet Of Things, we are now able to relate to objects in a muh more shareable, social manner, which is often playful, and that has not been fully explored yet.

Furthermore, the growing acceptance of user modifiable hardware created a new class of makers, and self trackers, who engage with technology in completely original, and per definition unexpected manners, which cannot be anticipated.

Our keynote will describe what emerges from the intersection of these themes, and will also aim to show an example of what we mean.

Here is the presentation that we gave, with the audio track:

as well as some photos from the workshop:

(Actually the photos are frame grabs from the Full HD video that the Singularity University Media Production team led by Matt Rutherford have been shooting of everything that happened!)

After the lecture, as usual, we engaged the audience to apply what they have just learned in imagining spime-based Internet Of Things applications, and we were delighted to see not only the students forming groups, but also the people from the outside jumping at the opportunity to be active participants in the event.

This event was the first being streamed live from the Singularity University, so while the groups worked, we walked among them asking questions, giving some feedback, and guidance, and chronicling in general what was going on to keep the people watching the stream entertained. When the time came to make the presentations by the groups, there was even one formed by online participants, who created an ad-hoc skype chat and conference call, and created collaboratively their presentation, shown to everybody in the room alongside those of the other groups! This was a real surprise, and a great testimony to the active engagement, and creativity of the participants.

To keep things interesting, we used WideNoise as an applause-o-meter in judging the presentations, and awarding the winning one.

Image by Conference Basics

The Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges.

Funded, among others, by Google and Nasa, the Singularity University, is based at the NASA Ames Research Center’s campus in Silicon Valley. The inaugural Graduate Summer Program ‘09 has started a few weeks ago with forty students selected from over 1400 candidates from all over the world. The interdisciplinary program has seen an outstanding list of lectures by Vint Cerf, Ralph Merkle, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Paul Saffo to mention just a few.

Full disclosure: David Orban is Advisor & European Lead of the Singularity University