I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of the internet as something that can come in a box, and that an item can have inside it. The megatrend of connectedness is continuing and with it more nodes are being connected to the web. As the internet becomes a standard piece of infrastructure we can refocus again on the higher-level ideas that this enables – and that’s a really exciting place to be.
Last week I reshuffled my twitter mob to explore the concepts of objects as nodes that can report to the network. Some of these objects will simply send notifications of what’s happening. The Tower Bridge in London is tweeting when it opens and closes, and who for, with the @towerbridge account. Then there is the pot plant (that has more followers than me) that I have been listening to for a while now under @pothos – I’m a bit worried because the last update seems to indicate that the poor thing may have died of thirst!
Those two examples are interesting and show that we have the capacity for almost any type of object to report to the network, but the power of aggregation reveals another level of capability. I was in the RACV Club recently and they showed a plasma screen with a map of Melbourne and the roads highlighted in red, yellow or green depending on how much traffic they currently had. How do they get this data? The sensors on the traffic lights all report their status to the network!
The concept of ‘the internet in a box’ is something I got onto after watching Russell Davies and Matt Jones in their Do Lecture titled How to Make the Invisible Visible. I now consider it every time I plug my 3G modem into my laptop because it literally is the internet in a box! iPhone tethering enables the same outcome now as well. “The iPhone has the internet in it, and you can plug your laptop into it”.
These ideas signal that the pendulum is swinging back from the technical side to the creative side because the recent improvements in hardware are making new things possible. Take Amit’s Bike for example (pictured above, results below). If you see it on the street in San Fran you can shake the handlebars and it will take a photo of you, before uploading it directly to the web. Once it’s on Flickr their API means that anyone can use these photos to do amazing things. Here are some of the photos.
It’s that simple. It’s got the internet in it. Watch this space.
By Ross Hill - June 22nd, 2009 at 4:46pm with 853 views - amit gupta do lectures matt jones racv club russell davies
