WideNoise has a long history, from being a pioneering iPhone “spime” to being the showcase product of WideTag’s OpenSpime protocol and WideSpime infrastructure. After being awarded the inclusion in the ADI Design Index 2011 and being cited as the Top 10 Internet of Things object of 2009 by the New York Times and Read Write Web, now version WideNoise 3 has been updated as a social research tool within the EveryAware project.

EveryAware is a project of the European Union, intending to integrate environmental monitoring, awareness enhancement and behavioral change”, in collaboration with the ISI Foundation, Institute for Scientific Interchange and CSP ICT Innovation of Turin, Italy, and the University of Rome, and the L3S Research Center of the University of Leibniz in Hannover, Germany.

EveryAware integrates environmental monitoring, awareness enhancement and behavioral change by creating a new technological platform combining sensing technologies, networking applications and data-processing tools.

While the old rusted style was in many ways a trademark that distinguished WideNoise 2.0, we decided for the research project to go through a full redesign and make it more like a professional tool, with a sheer metal surface and orange lights. With the cooperation of the whole EveryAware project we added also some additional features like the slider to try and guess how much noise is there and the panel to add more details about the sampled noise itself.

All the raw data detections are being sent to the EveryAware server for collection and analysis. The App is free, its source is released with an open license.

WideNoise 3 has its own minisite where you can download the app for iPhone and for Android, and visualize the results on a shared dynamic online map.

Well, the sense of creating WideTag, for us founders, has never been that. 
 
We set ourselves the mission to contribute, as we did, to

• give a name to the change, which is now called by everybody “Internet of Things”
• trace some of its possible products
• partly solve some difficult technological constraints

We also defined scenarios using them, launching into a new world of Spime that on one hand leads to Gaia, and the other to the Singularity.

The field of investigation for WideTag is very large. We started from the open source protocols (OpenSpime), the prototype for crowdsourced ecology (CO2), projects for energy efficiency (Social Energy Meter), iPhone applications for environmental monitoring (WideNoise), and then again with the open source Erlang Library misultin, and all this while participating as speakers in over thirty international conferences, creating the Spime Design Workshops, and more.

WideTag co-generated a lot of experience and knowledge, and made us feel proud to be part of it.

Conversely, if we start from the definition of research—as the transformation of money into knowledge, versus innovation, understood here as the transformation of knowledge into money—it is time to acknowledge that we prefer a search without giving too much attention to those project opportunities which are certainly profitable, but objectively incapable of producing new knowledge.

This is accelerating and as we progress towards the future. Today, our cultural challenge is more alive than in the early days, and we founders, changed by the journey undertaken with WideTag, have now irrevocably become the agents of change. A change too large to be contained (only) within the walls of WideTag’s network. For this, we redesigned WideTag as a cultural startup!

A place of the mind where we can carry out the applied research that corporations are not yet considering as products or services, viable for the market. 
 So while the startup culture (according to Google this is as well a non-trivial innovation) takes two steps forward and takes care of open projects, the founders’ day jobs will be elsewhere. We’ll go—indeed, we have already gone—in those companies and those places that have a dimension and a market such that can allow us to design relevant solutions.

Leeander, as Global Director of User Experience of Publicis Healthware, will contribute to accelerate the adoption of Internet of Things technology and industry in a sector—that of the Health and wellness—that is a leader in the development of Internet of Things projects. 
 
 Roberto, is helping many companies from California to Israel to make their technologies truly scalable. And David took the position of CEO of dotSUB, which is in the cusp of the three exponential trends of the social Internet, online video, and the globalization of communication, education, and commerce.

So we’re all going to do things that WideTag has already allowed us to experiment at least in part. And for this reason, feeding this cultural startup is a benefit for all.
 


The Internet of Things meme is heating up, and next week we will be in Brussels, speaking at TEDx, and at the Royal Academy of Science.

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The 33rd America’s Cup opened this Monday in Valencia, and we are here at the Green Comm Challenge base, following the race between the two teams of Alinghi, the defender, and BMW Oracle, the challenger. Well, we would be, were it not that for the second time the opening race has been postponed, first on Monday for lack of stable wind, and now on Wednesday due to the waves which were too big, and could risk damaging the two boats.

Today’s race is about these two teams, and their prowess at sailing, and at designing and building the most advanced sailing machines on the planet.

What will be the next edition? There are too many open variables today to tell. But what we at WideTag want to contribute to the advancement of the field, is the deep understanding of how in the next few years, at an accelerating pace, all our objects are going to be connected, and communicating. And with this process they will be better attuned to the world around them, better able to tell their stories, perform under stress, an edge conditions, up to the task of listening to, and then narrating the stream of data that will form the basis of the strategic, and tactical decisions of the teams of the future America’s Cups.

In the process we will also create a series of new opportunities of technologies to emerge, and to be quickly tested, and adopted by industries. The Internet Of Things, and the products that WideTag is creating for its best foundation, like WideSpime 2, are going to see a great expansion everywhere. And if in the meantime we can participate in some sailing races, that will be an additional nice incentive!

Taking full advantage of the powerful data flows that an always connected device can provide is not trivial at all. The help that we are providing to developers is fundamental to make sure that the complex combination of hardware, software, application, and user experience can flourish, and it is the WideSpime 2 massive data collection system.

If you are developing Internet Of Things applications, reinventing the wheel is the last thing you want to do. You must be able and concentrate on designing your hardware, obtaining the necessary certifications, project and test the user experience… And you know that relying on the scalability, and power of WideSpime 2, you can take the data collection and management tasks for granted!

WideSpime 2 is at the heart of the operating system for the real-time internet.

We believe that the real-time web is more than just humans tweeting! There is a very large information load that is developing through not only our explicit online activities, but also through either our indirect navigation, and interaction with applications, or even more importantly through IP-enabled objects that have the capability of reporting on their status and on their measurements of the environment. We need new infrastructure elements to make sure that “whales don’t fail”, that we can keep counting on the Internet to be a reliable foundation of the real-time web, and tools of data collection, management, and reporting that are up to the enormous tasks required. WideSpime is our answer to these needs, and the SEM demo site takes fully advantage of the scalable architecture that WideSpime provides.

The architecture is only one element of the WideTag Social Energy Meter project, however. As important as it is, the other, complementary feature of social interaction, and carefully leveraged user behavior, and emotional interface is even more crucial to make sure that it is not only a geek toy, but an application that can be adopted, and used daily by everyday consumers. The way the energy consumption is shown both for your individual use, and as reported by your homogeneous social group, talks to you in an intuitive, emotional manner that a single numerical value will never be able to accomplish!

During 2010 for sure there will be many new announcements, and products, not only from us at WideTag, but also many others. But, hey, we will surely aim to be in the Top 10 list next year as well!

Leandro Agro, CEO of WideTag, is a keynote speaker today at the UXconference 2009 in Lugano, Switzerland, organized by SketchIn.

In his speech, Lee is going to talk about our view that the User Experience today goes way beyond what is enclosed in the frame of a monitor, or even what the mobile devices bring. Thanks to the Internet Of Things, we are now able to relate to objects in a muh more shareable, social manner, which is often playful, and that has not been fully explored yet.

Furthermore, the growing acceptance of user modifiable hardware created a new class of makers, and self trackers, who engage with technology in completely original, and per definition unexpected manners, which cannot be anticipated.

Our keynote will describe what emerges from the intersection of these themes, and will also aim to show an example of what we mean.