I spent the weekend off-line, with friends and family. The whole weekend was a glorious respite from the overly hot first week of summer, and the overly hot press of business. It was set up by some re-assertions of natural rights over the rights of government by the Supreme Court. And the garden, despite the ravages of the deer, is beautiful.
First, on the blessings of Hurricanes...
Last week I watched live multi-vendor demonstrations using the new specifications vPoll and vAvailability. These extend calendar interactions to support live negotiations about schedule and performance. These negotiations can be machine-to-machine (M2M) or augmented by human input. These were not applications, these were live interactions between mainstream calendar servers. The testing used simple user interfaces, just enough to operate the tests. These simple information exchanges extend existing systems for schedule negotiations into automated polling and bidding.
Smart Energy uses schedule negotiation and schedule coordination to operate systems and equipment at the right time to take maximum advantage of variable energy supplies. As the internet of things grows up, it will move from gathering data from sensors to coordinating things to enhance our lives. The future of business breaks down into smaller entities with stronger missions that coordinate activities over time to support customers as if by a single business, only better. We all took steps closer to these seemingly simple coordination results, at a meeting at AOL headquarters.