“tools for understanding complexity”

“some of them even work largely without human intervention”

“tremendous storage and computing resources linked with advanced software systems”

“complex autonomous systems”

“energy consumption efficiency and process optimization are good early targets”

“established companies can seek partnerships with innovative technology suppliers”

The latest issue of McKinsey Quarterly, available free upon registration, covers the Internet Of Things. Hey, is it a good sign when a leading global management consulting firm covers your industry? We hope so!

In the report, which has been analyzed elsewhere, including in Read Write Web, there are plenty of great quotes which at least to us have everything to do with projects, applications, and the vision of WideTag!

All good stuff, with plenty of concrete examples in various industry fields. McKinsey doesn’t list some of our favorites, Internet Of Things applications that you can buy today at Fry’s, social objects that anticipate the way everything we use is going to be designed:

• Withings, the Internet connected body scale
• Zeo, the sleep coach
• the Philips DirectLife activity package

Let’s also not forget the glorious Nabaztag, the internet connected rabbit sold in almost two hundred thousand units!

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

Today at 2.45 PM PST we will be speaking at CISCO Live! about sensor networks, and their applications together with Adam Dunkels, and Jean Philippe Vasseur.

Some of the issues that we plan to touch, in the panel session moderated by John Jainschigg are:

• What are sensor networks and what are they used for?
• What is their state of the art today?
• What does ‘The Internet of Things’ mean?
• How do network scale at various levels?

From the panel presentation:
Convergence of micro- and nano-devices, RFID and smart tagging, mobility, HPC, and IPv6 are framing emergence of “the Internet of Things” — a spectacularly fertile field for research and innovation that will in relatively few years, some predict, add 50 to 100 billion endpoints to today’s internet, changing both the architecture of the net and life as we know it.

In this eye-opening panel discussion, you’ll hear from experts in each of the critical core technologies enabling emergence of the Internet of Things: from the micro-operating systems, pseudo-thread architectures and tiny IPv6 stacks powering the next generation of nanodevices; to the wireless and
physical network architectures and protocols connecting them; to the ultra-high-performance data-acquisition and application platforms coordinating their myriad inputs to produce value.

Embedded systems, wireless and other engineers attending this session can expect a concise update on low-level and high-level components for contemporary sensor network solutions. Software architects, insight into the logic of platforms and tools required to wrangle self-organizing distributed networks. And business decision-makers will gain understanding of the bottom line importance of this exploding field to the future of virtually every field of industry and commerce.

The event is free, and to attend you can register directly online.

That’s why we are so excited that at the world’s premier sailing event, the 33rd America’s Cup we’ll have the chance to lend a hand and deploy the massive data collection capabilities of WideSpime with Green Comm Challenge. It is still a long road until the races*, but in the meantime, here’s the press release!

We feel that Green Comm’s adoption of WideSpime is very significant, since the environment, and the constraints under which these teams operate only admit the best!

We had some very good discussions with Francesco from Green Comm, and believe that we share not only the goals but also the passion for great performance, and outstanding results. We are very much looking forward to deploy WideSpime with him, and the partners in the challenge.

In the photo, left to right, David Orban, Francesco De Leo, Massimo Sgrelli, Leandro Agro, and Roberto Ostinelli. Massimo’s Wave Group recently established with Francesco, CEO of Green Comm, a new research center called Green Wave on the Garda Lake. Feels like we’ll have to hang out there too.

*[update] I was told that it would be worth giving a little more information here. As far as I understand the 33rd Cup was bound to be a race between Oracle the challenger, and Alinghi the defender. Green Comm wants to change this, and it is challenging the challenger. Some courts are involved, high flying drama, etc. Apparently it is part of the fun.