Internet of Things

Choosing a Light or a Dark Mirror

Last month, in the July issue of Automated Buildings, Ken Sinclair called for smart buildings to spearhead an improved relationship between the physical, the virtual and the emotional world. Relationships go two ways. When we consider how buildings can manipulate our emotions, we also are considering how our emotions can manipulate buildings, The sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror explores a near-future where humanity's greatest innovations and dark side collide. Last week, Daikin and NEC announced that they have developed a system that monitors the movement of the employee's eyelids and hits dozing worked with a blast of cold air.
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IOT Apps and Competition for Resources in Seattle

Tomorrow I am talking about a Resource Framework for the Internet of Things (IoT) at the summit of the AllSeen Alliance. Traditional consumer programming has concerned itself with only a few resources, i.e., RAM (memory), storage (disk space), and communication (network speed). These programs live atop operating systems and device drivers that engage directly with physical things. Third-wave Apps in the IoT, though, deal directly with resources....
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AllJoyn and the Azure Cloud

This was a fascinating week at the TechIntersection conference. TechIntersection is a new conference with three intertwining tracks, Architecture, Security, and IoT (Internet of Things}. The need for such cross pollination is obvious. Apps built for the Internet of Things rarely take account of the issues they will require to scale to millions of installations, each potentially interacting with other Apps from other developers. Security doesn’t really understand the special needs of things, just as IoT Apps often violate enterprise expectations for security and privacy. Enterprise architects have some nifty new tools that will provide great value to IoT developers, but they have no idea what an avalanche of data and connections that is headed toward their data center.
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Resource Frameworks for the Internet of Things

The first wave of the Internet of Things (IoT) was widespread but disorganized. SCADA operated nearly every industrial process, and was proprietary and the network rarely left the building. Power grid sensors and telemetry, if available, only extended to the substation. Home Security systems bundled sensors and a hardware-based app to provide fixed functionality. Building systems moved slowly off of pneumatics and onto digital controls. Hobbyists built apps on X10, but they enjoyed the making as much as the function. Over all of them, security was non-existent. The second wave was ...
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