Machines that sense the environment, thanks to sensors and components like Arduino, and transmit the information over the Internet are becoming increasingly popular. They can post their “status” on Facebook or Twitter. For example, your scale can tweet your weight, you can get updates on the tide level in Cape Cod or the air pollution in Beijing or get tweets from your plants when they are thirsty.
Some people define this concept as Internet of Things, see a Google search for the different definitions.
McKinsey Quarterly writes in March 2010 More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.
Fred Wilson wrote on his blog a post titled Things That Tweet :
It got me thinking about things that tweet (like weather vanes, refridgerators, traffic lights, etc) and their role in the land of social media. I believe that devices and sensors that broadcast their data via social media channels are an important source of social data and engagement. And for some reason, they are way more common on Twitter than any other social platform.
These devices feel and communicate creating a social conversation around the data and the updates they convey. These machines can transmit data but they can also reply and communicate (M2M Machine to Machine communication). They can also create an environment that react, adapt and respond to us – and perhaps more importantly – each other.
Not only Fred’s post gave a good point of view, the comments in the post added a lot of value.
Gonzalo Garcia-Perate, writes in the comments (edited: I have added further links):
At a macro level you have people like IBM with their Smarter Planet initiativehttp://www.ibm.com/smarterplan… trying to build value out of data streams (potentially) coming out of cities to create new types of intelligent services for cities. GE, Philips, Cisco etc all have similar initiatives.
At a smaller scale you have lots of new companies innovating and creating new product and service propositions based on the idea of objects communicating. Some over twitter others over their own proprietary and open networks and protocols. In this space there are two main types of companies, middleware and appliances.
In the middleware camp you have people like the recently acquired Pachube https://pachube.com/ and many others like IOBridge and Thingspeak,http://iobridge.com/, http://www.thingspeak.com Twingz, http://www.twingz.com (not sure what is this) Open sense, http://open.sen.se/ Simplio,http://www.symplio.com/product… ThingWorx, http://www.thingworx.com/, http://yaler.net/, https://www.thingspeak.com/,http://twingz.com, etc etc etc
At the appliance level there are many small and not so small companies that are exploring the IoT (Internet of Thins) space. See Nike + http://www.apple.com/ipod/nike… Vitality Glowcaps http://www.vitality.net/ Wifi scale and body monitors by Withingshttp://www.withings.com/ fitbit http://www.fitbit.com/, greengoosehttp://www.greengoose.com/, www.plantsense.com, http://paraimpu.crs4.it/, http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/htm/tripwire.html, http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/fluidinfo/2010/11/23/watering-a-peace-lily-with-fluiddb/
Andy Stanford-Clark (@andysc ) of IBM has been doing a lot of work to use twitter with various devices and things (see the links about his twittering house or the Isle of Wight ferries off http://stanford-clark.com/).