USAT has a very creative press release around enabling Santa’s workforce with LBS. I will let you make the judgement call on whether or not this is real, but it’s highly entertaining and has some great quotes. My favorite piece of the press release is the network topology diagram:

I think it’s very effective when companies use certain events, holidays, and hypothetical scenarios to spread the word about their offering.  One thing’s for sure, I can guarantee that no other company in their space is doing anything like this.  Genius.

I always love the “why didn’t I think of that” product. A good example is Blue Line Innovations’ PowerCost Monitor. The PowerCost Monitor allows home owners to quickly gauge cost of power consumption at a glance. Think about going outside and reading the meter (spinning quickly or slowly) vs. looking at a digital display of cost/hr and total cost.

Products like this are inspirational because aside from coming up with the idea there’s a significant amount of funding and R&D involved. There’s always the hurdle of coming up with the idea vs. actually implementing it. I can’t count the number of ideas I’ve come up with and felt were decent, but I didn’t either have the funds or time or knowledge to implement.  I believe that’s one essential characteristic that separates entrepreneurs from everyone else.  It’s the “just do it” attitude once they get on board with an idea.

Yet there are those ideas that are brilliant and easy to implement, which means it’s easier for competion to mimic what’s being done. In BLI’s case there’s a barrier of entry for most companies to jump into the marketplace. But since we’re talking about power consumption and the multi-million dollar corporations in this market maybe a few million dollar investment is nothing at all.  Maybe BLI’s path to the top is some sort of patent.  We will see.

What’s most appealing to me about this product is the technical approach of hooking up a component to the meter outside the home and then broadcasting data wirelessly to the display inside.  Click here to read how it works.  I LOVE this kind of stuff and the next step will be to hook this up to SensorLogic’s Platform and get your usage remotely.  Yes that was a shameless plug for the company I’m currently working for

If you’re interested in learning more about SensorLogic and what we do then I highly recommend downloading this report and attending our webinar.  We partnered with Aberdeen Group to create this report and there’s a lot of interesting information included.  While I haven’t read it from front to back, it’s on my todo list.  Check it out and see how SensorLogic can help automate/optimize your business.  Or maybe it will give you the million dollar idea and you can use our platform to bring it to life

Just a quick post to say that we launched the new SensorLogic site earlier this week.  It’s clean, simple, and does a better job of conveying what we actually do.  Check out the solutions page to understand what markets we’re targeting and some of our recent projects.  If you click the “Let’s Get Started” button on the homepage you can see a demo of one of our applications.  Much more exciting news is planned in the coming months, so be sure to keep an eye on us!

Since I started working at SensorLogic I’ve been fascinated with the whole machine-to-machine space. I’ve been inspired to connect everything I possibly can to the Internet. A couple of years ago I decided to write a program for my P900 called BlueGPS, which runs on several Symbian devices. BlueGPS allowed my P900 to communicate with a Bluetooth GPS receiver and send location data over the air to the SensorLogic platform. If you look at the diagram below (which I grabbed shamelessly from SL) you’ll see that the GPS receiver is represented as a sensor and my P900 is the access point.

This is a fairly common network topology for M2M communications. I recently retired the Symbian BlueGPS project and am working to make the project open source. The main reason is that I’ve switched phones and haven’t released an update in over a year. I’m hoping developers from the community will pick it up and run with it.

I’m finally getting to the subject of this post. This past weekend I was digging around for some Bluetooth code that would run on my Windows Mobile device (Cingular’s 8125). I stumbled across this article that describes how to do serial communications using the .NET compact framework. The code in the article leverages the OpenNETCF Smart Device Framework, which basically handles most of the communication between my Windows Mobile device and Bluetooth GPS receiver.

So I was able to modify a fair amount of the code to work with my Bluetooth GPS receiver and I can successfully display location information on my phone. The main thing I had to modify was the way the program parsed NMEA sentences. It was parsing the GLL sentence while I wanted to use the GGA sentence, which includes altitude information. You can see an image of the app running on my phone below.

Yes it’s extremely ugly and I hope to design a nice user interface for it in the next week or two. I’m also working on getting the information sent wirelessly to SensorLogic’s platform where the data can be displayed and exported. I’m planning on releasing a version for Windows Mobile users to download once I get everything in order.

I’ve been wanting to do this post for a while and I’m finally able to get around to it. The thought is to use a widget to represent a device in your home that can be monitored and controlled. The term “wiring” may be misleading, but the concept is to create some sort of virtual connection between the widget and remote device. In this example I have a light bulb widget that monitors and controls an LED. The LED resides on the SensorLogic QA table where we have lot of different devices that enable us to easily provide remote demos. You can see in the picture below that the table is monitored through an Axis network camera:

In the image above you can see the light bulb widget next to the video stream of the QA table. The light bulb represents the LED in the off state. It’s hard to make out exactly where the LED is, but you’ll be able to see it in the image below. My ultimate vision is to create all sorts of widgets that represent different devices in your home. The light bulb widget can ultimately be connected to the lamp next to your bed or on your front porch and doesn’t have to be tied to an LED. Using SensorLogic’s M2M Platform you could add the intelligence to tell the porch light to turn on every night at 8:00PM and off at 7:00AM. The possibilities are endless.

The light bulb displays the current state of the LED. When it’s double clicked a command is sent to the M2M Platform telling the LED to turn on. All of this is done with some AJAX, Web Services, and SMS magic. I will go into more details of implementation in a future post. The developer is ultimately responsible for the UI piece which handles the presentation of the widget and the hook into SensorLogic’s Web Services. The widget can be run in a web browser and I’m working on a version that’s compatible with Konfabulator. I also intend on getting a version that runs on a J2ME compatible device. The goal is not only to connect all sorts of devices in the home but provide a rich user experience….something that is exciting and fun for the user. M2M doesn’t have to be a dull experience and in my opinion should be extremely visual.

After the light bulb has been double clicked you’ll see that the LED eventually turns on. Let me explain what “eventually” means. From a UI standpoint the widget is double clicked and the appropriate image is displayed, in this case the light bulb’s on state. The problem is that the LED is not truly on yet. There’s the delay of the command getting to the M2M Platform and the delay with the SMS making it down to the device. The device then takes this SMS message, processes it, and either turns the LED on or off. This entire process can take up to a minute. If you look at the difference in timestamps between the image below and the one above you’ll see that it’s about 15 seconds shy of a minute.

I’m working on some different concepts of how to manage when the UI displays a state that isn’t truly indicative of the device state. This might be some sort of greyed out “pending” image that lets the user know that the command is being processed. I’ll post the completed concept when it’s ready. If the device that controls the LED were connected over ethernet then there would be much less of a delay and the “pending” state might be unncessary.

With all this being said there are a couple of things that I’d like to point out. Connected devices are coming. Actually, they’re already here but I wouldn’t consider them mainstream. Web developers should grasp the concept of M2M and what it means to them. There’s huge potential here for developers to create applications that tie to devices in the home, field, car, office, etc. Think of all the insanely talented developers out there writing applications and the potential of these apps/widgets representing data from connected devices.

The other point I’d like to make is that there needs to be a developer community. At SensorLogic we’re talking about it and I’m starting to pull together bits and pieces and trying to formulate a plan (at least in my head). I think of Amazon, Google, and ebay that released a set of APIs for developers to use and build applications. These companies saw the benefit in doing this and couldn’t even fathom the amazing applications that would be developed using their technologies. SensorLogic already has a majority of the infrastructure in place and I’m going to be sharing any knowledge I can from a UI perspective.

One last note: I’m working with a network enabled thermostat from Proliphix that enables you to remotely monitor and control temperature. I’m going to have a nifty widget available in the next few days and will post the outcome. It seems to a very powerful device and even has a web server built in. I’m excited about the potential of this device and am looking forward to getting it all hooked up.