LSQHA Blog Reviews

I first began writing regularly about the Internet of Things about a year ago. Now it's bubbling up in the mainstream press and we're also beginning to see web apps that are attempting to reach, if not quite a mainstream audience yet, then certainly the iPhone and Android-toting geek community. We've moved beyond the cutesy Internet-connected bunny rabbits and we're now onto barcodes to stick on everyday objects . A new web service called tales of things just launched, which aims to attach stories to objects. It follows on from a similar service that got a good amount of press at SXSW this year, StickyBits . Both services want to get people to 'tag' real world objects, by sticking barcodes onto them and adding information about the object onto the Web (often via mobile phone). The idea is that this will make the objects 'social.' However, I think this is doomed to fail and here's why... Sponsor Tales of things asks on its homepage: "Wouldn't it be great to link any object directly to a 'video memory' or an article of text describing its history or background? Tales of Things allows just that with a quick and easy way to link any media to any object via small printable tags known as QR codes." Both Tales of Things and StickyBits are going to struggle to get mainstream adoption. And it's not because people just won't stick barcodes onto objects - although that is a short-term pain point that both of these companies will likely fail to overcome. No, they won't get mainstream adoption simply because the Internet of Things isn't going to be just another social network platform . What's unique about the Internet of Things is that it adds a huge amount of new data to the Web and allows real-world objects to become part of the cloud network. For example, sensors on a busy road communicate with your car to tell you of impending heavy traffic. Or when you walk into a shop, the store messages your phone to tell you that an item you've been looking for is in stock and on special. I met StickyBits founder Seth Goldstein at SXSW and he told me that his company aims to create a "social object network." Trouble is, I just don't think that Internet-connected everyday objects have much social value. Say I tag a book that I bought and attach the following 'memory' to it: "I read this book in the summer of 2010, it was a great read. I'd give it a 4/5." Even if I wrote a much more in-depth review, what value does that have on a single object? If I uploaded that review to Amazon.com, then it's put into context and gets aggregated with other reviews to form ratings and other 'wisdom of the crowd' intelligence. But on the object itself - my copy of the book - the review has limited value. If a friend of mine happened to scan my book with their phone, they'd see my review...and then probably head straight to Amazon.com to see what other people thought. Or perhaps check out what their own social network thought, via an app like Glue (a social network based on the media you consume - see our most recent review ). Objects aren't social, they never were and they never will be. The real value of Internet-connected objects is that they can become part of the network, which means they can connect to one another and they add more data to the giant computer we call The Cloud. But social networks aren't going to form around single objects, other than perhaps public ones - like the Eiffel Tower, for example. But then you are just talking about a location, which the likes of FourSquare and BrightKite can take care of. The Internet of Things is about utility, not social networking. Neither Tales of Things nor StickyBits offers much in the way of utility, that we can't already get from sites like Amazon.com or existing social networks. Let me know if you agree, or not! Discuss

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Op-Ed: Objects Aren't Social

As a parent (now there's a phrase you don't see here that often), I'm dazzled by the range of entertainment options my kids and I have. From the educational (I swear!) shows we have loaded up on PVR, to the educational (really!) kids' apps on my iPhone to the not-even-a-little-educational clips we watch on YouTube, we could easily while away every hour in a digital haze. But there's this whole other world out there of face-to-face interaction, fresh air, exercise and - loath though our children's parents are to admit it - sleep. And when the time comes to power down the Wii and say goodbye to MySims Agents for another day, tantrums sometimes ensue... and the almighty power of parental discipline has to come into play. Sponsor Sometimes just counting sternly to five will do the job. Sometimes something more stringent is called for - like shelving a game for a few days. And sometimes, well, sometimes we're groping for solutions, like generations of parents before us. At least for the next few years, Alex and I are in the enviable position of knowing the tech better than our kids do. (We're reasonably sure than when our then-two-year-old son locked Alex out of her iPhone, and created a ghost partition on our home server, it was random button-pressing at work.) Ask me in another decade, and you may hear a much different story. With that, let me wish a very happy first birthday to my favourite budding little pair-coding team in the world, and to their parents who could single-handedly make geeky look cool (to me, anyway) all over again. More Noise to Signal. Discuss

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Cartoon: What's a Time-out in 2010?

Even though the myth of the paperless office has been with us for as long as we have had personal computers and printers, most of us still have to print a document here and there. Yesterday, Google announced Google Cloud Print, its new plan for enabling printing from its cloud-focused Chrome OS, mobile apps and browser-based web services. Google essentially plans to outsource most of the software infrastructure for printing to the cloud and establish a standard protocol that every Internet-connected printer will soon be able to understand. Sponsor Cloud-Enabled Printers In Google's ideal world, every new printer will soon support the Google Cloud Print protocol. Under Google's model, these cloud-aware printers will be standalone devices with an Internet connection. Older printers, in Google's vision, will be able to access these cloud-based printing services through a proxy on a desktop computer. This proxy will - at some point in the future - ship with the Google Chrome browser. Once every printer is cloud-enabled, Google envisions that users will simply connect their printers to the Internet, register, and start printing from Chrome OS or any other service that supports this new and open protocol. You can find more details about how Google expects this system to work here . Free and Open Standards According to Google, the standards and protocols for enabling this service will be open and freely implementable. It's important to note that this means that other vendors will be able to offer similar services that should work with all cloud-enabled printers. Thanks to this open protocol, the barrier of entry for supporting these services should also be very low. One of the most interesting aspects of this service is that it will make it very easy for developers on mobile apps on devices like Android and the iPhone/iPad to enable printing from their apps. Right now, printing from mobile devices is almost impossible without resorting to specialized apps that connect to software on a local machine. It's worth noting that Hewlett-Packard announced a similar initiative in the past (CloudPrint), but this service never materialized . Discuss

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Making Mobile Printing Easier: Google Announces Cloud Print

As we mentioned a few days back, the iPhone and Android aren't the only game in town when it comes to handheld devices. Twitter for Blackberry was released on last Thursday and today comes news that Harbinger Capital has purchased almost 10% of Palm's stock. The news might not be as good as it seems, however. Palm's SEC disclosure indicates Harbinger , a New York-based private hedge fund, has purchased 16 million shares of Palm common stock. Sponsor This purchase totals "9.48% (of total Palm stock) based on 168,755,045 shares outstanding as of March 26, 2010." Because it was a common stock purchase, it does not come with voting rights, and the purchase did not have a significant effect on Palm stock, which was up 3.1% at the end of trading. Palm has reportedly secured Goldman Sachs in order to lure a buyer for the struggling company. Discuss

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Harbinger Buys 10% of Palm

Uh-oh, Google Doc's offline mode is going...well...offline. Starting May 3rd, offline access for Google Docs , the Internet search giant's web office suite, home to an online document editor, spreadsheet editor and slideshow creator, will be disabled. Previously, users had been able to take advantage of the offline functionality provided by Google Gears , an open source browser extension which allowed for both the viewing and editing of files when an Internet connection was not present. Soon, the Gears-enabled feature will be no more. But have no fear - this setback is only temporary..at least that's what a company blog post says. In the plugin's place, there will be a "new and improved" HTML5-based offline option which will replace the former solution, but its exact launch date is still unknown. Sponsor Considering all the new features that arrived in Google Docs on Monday, including things like real-time edits, faster performance, collaborative drawing tools and improved document fidelity, it's no surprise that the mention of the improved offline mode (way down at the bottom of the post) was a bit glossed over in the rush by news editors to detail all of Docs' new functionality. However, it's the introduction of HTML5 offline mode that may be the biggest and most important change of them all. From Plugins to Web Standards To understand why, you have to first look at how Google handles offline access now, a feature also found in Gmail and Google Calendar in addition to Docs. At the moment, these web apps go offline if and only if you've installed the Google Gears browser plugin . Unfortunately, not all browsers can properly run this plugin. For example, Mac's Snow Leopard OS and Safari 4 web browser introduced some features which were incompatible with Gears on newer Mac computers. Internet Explorer users could never view spreadsheets offline and users of "alternative" browsers, like the Mozilla-based Flock for example, had to jump through hoops to make it work. And Google Gears on the iPhone? Forget about it. A better solution is HTML5, the next revision to the markup language used to code the web. The benefit to making this switch is obvious: HTML5 is a web standard, not a browser plugin. That means it will be supported across web browsers and operating systems, assuming users have updated to a modern browser instead of continuing to run IE6 (who are you people, anyway?!) It also means that Apple can't kick it off the iPhone and iPad the way they did with Adobe's Flash plugin. In fact, it means that Google doesn't have to worry about Apple's restrictions at all, the way iPhone and iPad application developers do. Google just has to build a mobile-friendly website using standards-based technology. The end result will be an Internet-based document creation tool and editor that can work anywhere, anytime, even when the Internet doesn't. And that, in a nutshell, is the future of the web. Mobilized applications that behave like desktop apps, available with or without an Internet connection and that work on any device. Even the iPad. We can't wait to try it out. No word yet on how long, exactly, we'll have to go without offline access in Docs before the HTML5 solution is ready, but Google's hosting a webinar next week to share more. Hopefully, further details will arrive then. Discuss

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Goodbye, Gears - Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd