Today at 2.45 PM PST we will be speaking at CISCO Live! about sensor networks, and their applications together with Adam Dunkels, and Jean Philippe Vasseur.

Some of the issues that we plan to touch, in the panel session moderated by John Jainschigg are:

• What are sensor networks and what are they used for?
• What is their state of the art today?
• What does ‘The Internet of Things’ mean?
• How do network scale at various levels?

From the panel presentation:
Convergence of micro- and nano-devices, RFID and smart tagging, mobility, HPC, and IPv6 are framing emergence of “the Internet of Things” — a spectacularly fertile field for research and innovation that will in relatively few years, some predict, add 50 to 100 billion endpoints to today’s internet, changing both the architecture of the net and life as we know it.

In this eye-opening panel discussion, you’ll hear from experts in each of the critical core technologies enabling emergence of the Internet of Things: from the micro-operating systems, pseudo-thread architectures and tiny IPv6 stacks powering the next generation of nanodevices; to the wireless and
physical network architectures and protocols connecting them; to the ultra-high-performance data-acquisition and application platforms coordinating their myriad inputs to produce value.

Embedded systems, wireless and other engineers attending this session can expect a concise update on low-level and high-level components for contemporary sensor network solutions. Software architects, insight into the logic of platforms and tools required to wrangle self-organizing distributed networks. And business decision-makers will gain understanding of the bottom line importance of this exploding field to the future of virtually every field of industry and commerce.

The event is free, and to attend you can register directly online.

That’s why we are so excited that at the world’s premier sailing event, the 33rd America’s Cup we’ll have the chance to lend a hand and deploy the massive data collection capabilities of WideSpime with Green Comm Challenge. It is still a long road until the races*, but in the meantime, here’s the press release!

We feel that Green Comm’s adoption of WideSpime is very significant, since the environment, and the constraints under which these teams operate only admit the best!

We had some very good discussions with Francesco from Green Comm, and believe that we share not only the goals but also the passion for great performance, and outstanding results. We are very much looking forward to deploy WideSpime with him, and the partners in the challenge.

In the photo, left to right, David Orban, Francesco De Leo, Massimo Sgrelli, Leandro Agro, and Roberto Ostinelli. Massimo’s Wave Group recently established with Francesco, CEO of Green Comm, a new research center called Green Wave on the Garda Lake. Feels like we’ll have to hang out there too.

*[update] I was told that it would be worth giving a little more information here. As far as I understand the 33rd Cup was bound to be a race between Oracle the challenger, and Alinghi the defender. Green Comm wants to change this, and it is challenging the challenger. Some courts are involved, high flying drama, etc. Apparently it is part of the fun.

- Read full article on WIRED.it (well… in Italian)

During our interview, we introduced our vision and products about Massive Data Collection plus last iPhone magic: WideNoise 2.0, now TWITTERING.

It was a nice experience being both interviewed by Emil, and being shot by Zoe. Backstage images…

Wired has an Italian edition now, since four months, and a month ago a second non-US edition also started to be published in the UK. We wish good luck to all three! Wired has been an inspiration, and a reference for all of us for the past fifteen years.

The Spime Design Workshop hosted at CISCO that we together organized has been a great success, and has been amply reported and documented by Dennis Mancini of CISCO on the Virtual Worlds blog. Dennis very perceptively says: “…the implied given opportunities that present themselves in the near future remain dependant upon your organizations willingness to disrupt, change or shape itself. The increasingly expanding scope necessary to adopt and craft our performance in our virtual rolls will ultimately develop goodwill and trust between clients and customers as we share and experience our digital stories together.”
There’s been a fair amount of twittering about it too…

We are setting up more events, and you are invited to apply to the next Spime Design Workshop in Second Life, which is going to be held in the second half of June, hosted by L’École de Design.

An article in the New York Times* entitled “Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google” is centered on the move to Twitter of Douglas Bowman, Google’s top visual designer. It’s a very good article, detailing the challenges that Bowman has had to endure, and the new creative freedoms that he now apparently found. What is interesting is how it presents the data-driven engineering culture at Google, as if it were a negative, a hindrance.

Image via CrunchBase

Google’s insistence on being able, and test its hypotheses, measure the consequences of its decisions, from small changes on its website, to the introduction of entire new services is a great achievement. Maintaining, and enhancing this is going to be fundamental for the company in the future. It even spreads its attitude, by teaching the website owners, and the advertisers using its tools, how to implement tests, and experiments similar in fashion if not in scope to the ones Google itself sets up.

What does this have to do with WideTag? Google can measure things because the visitors to its sites leave traces that are analyzed. We believe that this approach not only is great for Google, but that it should extend beyond websites, and the traditional Internet. We are aiming to develop the infrastructure, and the tools that similar to website analytics, enable people producing, and using everyday objects to achieve the level of understanding that Google enjoys today. This approach, we believe, will start a virtuous circle of product enhancement, usability, and usefulness.

WideTag’s WideSpime is the first component in this platform, and its development, based on a massively scalable architecture, is progressing steadily.

*Linking to it, even if apparently the people behind the NYT website do not very much believe in the value of links…

For the past few months we have been holding a successful series of interactive events at the conferences where we are invited, called the Spime Design Workshops.

We have found that even people who are familiar with technology, have a hard time getting adjusted to the new orders of magnitude involved in thinking about the Internet of Things. As it is sometimes the case in phase-changing systems, the quantitative changes have substantive qualitative consequences that are not necessarily intuitive.

Now we are extending these workshops by eliminating one of the limiting factors in their success, geographic proximity: we are announcing today a new series of events, the Spime Design Workshops in Second Life!

The advantages of setting the Spime Design Workshops up in Second Life, on top of the usual ones of virtual worlds, are that everything we want to achieve in the physical world is already available there:
every object is connected, and knows about its own structure, capabilities, permissions, life-cycle, etc.!

We also feel that being able and get the event hosted each month by a different entity playing out its view of the Internet Of Things, and applying its unique slant to our message, is going to guarantee a heightened interest for the series. We are starting in Second Life, but of course the concept can
be extended to other online worlds as they become relevant, and capable of sustaining a complex collaborative effort like ours.

Vulcano-Lipari, CISCO, Feeding Edge in association with Eightbar, L’École de Design, ScienceSIM are some of the initial lands and organizations that are hosting the workshops in the coming months.

The workshops are held once a month on different lands, and last two-three hours, starting at 1PM PST. They begin with a brief but provocative assignment, and concentrate mostly on the brainstorming work of 3-4 groups of 3-5 people who at the end of the event present their ideas and their findings.

Participation in the workshop is free, and in order to maximize its value, each workshop is for a limited number of participants. Make sure that you reserve your place by filling out the application form! You will be notified in case of approval, and you will receive all the details that will enable you to effectively prepare for the workshop of your choice. The first event is next week already, and we still have some positions available…

Of course if your organization is interested in hosting an event on your land, let us know, and we will be more than happy to accomodate your request in our calendar.

Spime Design logo image cc-by Dennis Mancini

One consequence of the innovations that we introduce, and of the open, and transparent manner that we talk about them at conferences, and post about them on our blog or the OpenSpime twitter account, is that people come to us with their very welcome feedback, criticism, advice, which in turn of course influences our way of thinking, and implementing the new generations of ideas that we develop in the meantime.

We spoke about these issues at the recent TechnoArk 2009 conference in Switzerland. Here is the video alongside with the slides of our talk.

Get your own WideNoise widget!

It’s easy! Just go to the Widget tab on the WideNoise website, input your WideNoise iPhone ID (yes, it’s long…), select the size of the map that you want to show, and you get the code that you will put in the source of your web page. That’s all. Have fun!

If you have been reading about spimes, the Internet of Things—and since you are here it is very likely that you have, about our libraries, the Spime Design Workshops, of the awareness of spimes, and more—it is now time that you also directly get a taste of the future. As we anticipated at one of our conference speeches, we are very proud of having just released WideNoise to the public. Go and get it for your iPhone on the AppleStore for $1.99 only!

What is WideNoise? It is an OpenSpime inspired iPhone application. With WideNoise you can monitor the noise levels around you, everywhere you go. You can also check the online map to see the average sound level of the area around you. Do you live in a “sleeping cat area” or in a more noisy “rock concert area”?

Noise is pollution as well… We live every day surrounded by all kinds of sound around us. We are accustomed to this background noise, but in the end we feel relieved when, maybe in a park, that stressful noise disappears. WideNoise helps you better understand the soundscape around you.

We hope that WideNoise will be successful in illustrating with its example a series of possible applications on the iPhone, which is a wonderful, human–powered and –dispersed spime. If you feel inspired, don’t hesitate to head over to the OpenSpime Developer Network, and give our libraries a spin. You will be quickly coming up with your own applications in no time!

Then, for unavoidable reasons of thermodynamics—as the energy density of processors became such that their surface temperature was projected to become higher than that of a furnace, then of the Sun maybe—, something had to give, and the relentless increase of the clock speed was it. The new generations of processors introduced in the first decade of the third millennium barely change clock speeds, and the fulfill Moore’s promise through the parallelism of multiple processor cores. We have spoken recently with Roberto Ostinelli, CTO of WideTag, and asked him what this change meant to him, and the goals of OpenSpime.

“Nowadays”, commented Roberto “we have already experienced a consistent shift in hardware trends, moving from single CPU to multiple core machines. This is necessary as single CPU speeds have inevitably leveled out. Yesterday’s exponential growth of single CPUs has often made programmers loosely think about hardware implications, counting on the abundance of processor resources and RAM availability. Today, especially in intensive applications such as the ones in the IoT field, we are experiencing a whole new programming paradigm that multiple core machines and system architectures require. You can’t pretend to exploit the massively distributed systems that represent the leading edge applications of today programming without a change of mentality foremost, but also the adoption of new algorithms, and new programming languages. The shift from single to multiple core and the need for fault tolerant, distributed and scalable systems will have to be undertaken by concrete efforts in software optimization and programming techniques in order to fully unleash the power of new hardware solutions and to satisfy the forecoming requirements of IoT.”

WideTag’s goal is to provide tools, and platforms for an effective implementation of vast sensor networks that constitute the forthcoming Internet Of Things. These platforms have to provide their users, the new generations of programmers, who are ready to take advantage of these networks, with an effective set of tools. “There is no perfect universal programming language: you normally wouldn’t want to program desktop applications in the same language you program SOA applications, for instance. Each of them lives in its own ecosystem of applications. This seems obvious, but programming-language wars are more common than one may think, and it is not rare to see languages being adopted with ‘religious’ faith motivations, or programmers’ availability, more than real evaluation of requirements.

We have decided to use Erlang, one among a series of interesting languages which also include Haskell, to implement the platform with high concurrency for spime communications which we call WideSpime.” added Roberto. “WideSpime takes advantage of the concurrency, scalability and fault tolerance that Erlang provides for distributing processes over variable-granularity architectures. We see it as an ideal environment for the development, and deployment of very scalable, and extremely robust applications.”

WideSpime, available in the spring of 2009, is going to be supplied through a flexible SaaS (Software as a Service) model by WideTag, Inc. to its Enterprise customers, who want to take advantage of its features of high concurrency, large scalability, and robustness.