Internet Fridges: State of the Market. The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things - when everyday objects are connected to the Internet - will enable. Imagine a refrigerator (so the story goes) that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you're low on, for example, milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. This fridge knows what kinds of foods you like to eat, based on the ratings you have given to your dinners. Indeed the fridge helps you take care of your health, because it knows which foods are good for you and which clash with medical conditions you have.
This type of 'smart home' fridge has actually been attempted before, in the dot com era, and flopped. This is What We Want... This video shows a prototype of a fridge that uses RFID tags to automatically notify you when milk needs to be bought. Wait, There Are Some Good Uses for Internet Fridges. MQTT Poised For Big Growth - an RSS For Internet of Things?
MQTT is an IBM-developed protocol for real-time messaging that could become a keystone of the emerging Internet of Things. As the BBC explained recently, MQTT (which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is "a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world. " MQTT is used as a messaging protocol for sensor and actuator solutions - for example in the house that twitters, which we covered earlier this week. According to one of its creators, Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, MQTT is "going to explode" in popularity this year and next year. The protocol has just turned 10 years old; indeed there was a party to celebrate in London this week. In this post we explain MQTT and look at a health care product that uses it. The topic of MQTT came up in my conversation with Andy Stanford-Clark this week, when I asked him for his thoughts on Pachube - an open source Internet of Things platform that we have featured a couple of times on ReadWriteWeb.
St. Commiot2009.pdf (Objet application/pdf) Mir:ror: A Glimpse Into The Future of an RFID World. Mir:ror is an Internet of Things app from the company Violet (follow on Twitter @violetOS). As the name suggests, it is literally a mirror - but an Internet-connected one which detects the objects you show it, triggering applications and multimedia content on your computer.
It works via RFID stamps, known as "ztamp:s" in the company's terminology. These are colorful adhesive stamps that contain a relay chip. When the user waves a stamped object over the mir:ror, a pre-programmed action occurs. For example waving a stamped coffee mug over the mir:ror might trigger your computer to read the news aloud to you. The ztamp:s also work with the company's other internet-connected object: the Nabaztag, a cute robot rabbit that can deliver anything from ambient information through lights and sounds to verbal information - like when he reads your email or RSS feeds to you.
Cute, But Clunky When you watch the videos, you can't help but feel that the process is a little clunky. Fear and Impatience are Killing the Nabaztag Bunnies. In the latest Gartner Hype Cycle report, ReadWriteWeb commented on RFID as being stuck in the "Trough of Disillusionment". While the report argues that RFID is likely to emerge in 5-10 years for inventory purposes, this far off glimmer of hope is not enough to hold back the tidal wave of ennui washing over the industry. According to a recent article by Engadget, consumer RFID company Violet has filed for bankruptcy. Best known for programmable RFID rabbit Nabaztag, Violet needs another company to step in before September 4th or unfortunately its rabbits and mirrors will be nothing more than inanimate plastic. While RFID tags are primarily used for inventorying purposes, the concept has also been used to create games and track bicycles, passports and luggage.
Nevertheless, just as the RFID is currently inappropriate for warehouse use, it's also inappropriate as an entertainment device or a security measure. Thanks to Daniel Williams for the tip!