Local Unmentionables: Notes on YOUR corner of the world

Have you been drinking?

If not, start.

Headed back from London on Sunday after two weeks in UK. It has been a great trip, spent time with Filemaker types in addition to "unconference", plus visited lots of museums and saw lots of English parks and countryside. Maybe I will even begin taking vacations more often than once a decade.

We plan on supporting Adobe CS 6 on Windows XP and Windows 7 (and eventually Windows 8).

See what I did there?

Oh, and it's looking quite likely I'll be sticking around at Adobe for a while. Though nothing's solid yet...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2011 01:16PM by Robert Taylor.

Not quite a dead ringer, but close enough that most people seemed to get the point (I don't usually have a ten-day growth of beard, and I got my hair cut extra short this weekend for the event). I taught the first five minutes of my Civil Procedure class in full Stevenote mode-after all these years, I have a pretty good sense of the mannerisms and phraseology, and the laughter in the room and concluding applause suggested that a surprising number of students do as well

Nice! What was the "One more thing?"

Which year did you go as?
lol
well done.

Quote
John Willoughby
Nice! What was the "One more thing?"

The assignment for Wednesday. Remember, some of Steve's "one more things" were a bit of a letdown.

Hey all - if you could make any object tweet (or if you're old-school, email/hit a URL), what would it be and why? Bonus points if it actually fills a need. I ask because I might have a solution.

My personal thoughts are simple on the connected world. Everyone/anyone's vital signs hooked up to some monitoring/reporting tech.
I thought something like Siri asking "Are you okay?" periodically of my mom for instance. She has fallen/passed out twice in the past 45 days. LifeAlert bracelets/pendants are NO GOOD if you/one passes out. So, a question that requires a response, coupled with a reasonable threshold of allowance for potty/shower/sleep, etc that then triggers a tweet might be good.

By the way, look at ifttt.com

That's a very good use, Bill. I remember my favorite great aunt once fell and was there for hours before someone came home, but at least she had the luck to fall next to the liquor cabinet. I wonder if there are any practical passive ways to monitor without requiring a deliberate action from her. A motion sensor in a central place could cover at least part of the need. Does your mom have WiFi?

Do you use ifttt? it's nice but messy in my opinion. And of course it doesn't extend to the real world.

You know, the whole connected world thing could be viewed as analogous to the transition from state-based, polled interfaces to event-driven interfaces.

Things like car oil levels/conditions and error codes, battery-operated safety devices (or certain batteries themselves) such as fire alarms, sprinkler systems (for exceptional conditions like changes in water volume usage, for example). Things that humans poll for status right now but we really only care about the exceptional conditions, or at least conditions that require a response. The rest of the time, we don't care.

johnny, do you know anyone at the Center for Bits and Atoms (http://cba.mit.edu/about/index.html)? They used to have a project called "Internet 0", though looks like all the links I had (from CBA, Sci Am, Boing Boing) on that have 404'd. The idea was "bringing IP to the leaf node" -- every lightbulb, for example, would be able to report and interact. Maybe you can get some suggestions from there.

I like the idea of an accelerometer and location combined to passively signal a fall and immobility. That happened to my grandmother, too; someone found her two days later. She could have reached the phone, but didn't want to be a bother (broken hip, but she's still going to this day).

In large apartment buildings, it could let you know when the washing machine is free. Or sound sensors could identify leaky faucets remotely. Or when there's mail in your box, so you don't have to keep going to check (high-tech version of those mailbox flags no one uses).

What have you wanted to be aware of remotely? Did I leave the top down on my car as a storm is coming in? Are the kids I'm driving carpool for all there and ready at the curb?

ddt

This reminds me of a project that Robert X. Cringely wanted to start after his infant son died of SIDS. He wanted to develop an inexpensive sensor system that could be embedded in infant clothing to monitor them at all times.

since posting, and while away pretending to work...
The accelerometer or whatever the iThings have in them, if they could reasonably detect a fall by means of a sudden impact, etc. that might be good to trigger a Siri-type Question/response. Or even snap a photo, or record a video clip, or audio boo and tweet the shortened URLs to wherever the iThing might subsequently post them.

Plenty of options for stuff like this. Perhaps rouse via louder and louder sounds, vibrations. Or, send an X-10 signal to a louder chime/Robo-Dog, etc. Then perhaps summon others, via SMS, tweets, blah blah..... the list is endless.

Thanks for the thoughts so far.

Good observation, Porruka. I agree with you. Now, would you want your car to tweet you when it needs maintenance, or is it enough that it does it via dashboard lights?

ddt, yep, I know CBA - they're in the same building. My partner worked there, in fact. Internet 0 is an awesome feat of low-level engineering that doesn't address human or market needs. The reality is that this sort of ubiquity requires infrastructure and prices that aren't workable yet. So it's trickier to find applications that can support the case for a more expensive sensor device.

How much would you pay for a device in these scenarios? For many of them, the answer is probably too low to support a product right now. Something that warns you when an elderly relative falls, or when your basement floods, is more valuable. The part of design I'm learning right now is the price/feature mix.

Johnny, for the medical potential products, you might want to think about targeting insurance companies like Kaiser rather than individual end users as far as pricing and development. It took a long time before glucose meters for diabetics were over-the-counter consumer items. I can ping a few people I know who are doing some things for (well...) Kaiser.

ddt

DPBD: speak of the devil: http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/mobile-wireless/231902320

ddt

jk,

If all the tweet/email is is a functional equivalent to an idiot light (when there is more info available), I'd say it isn't all that useful. Also, the person(s) receiving the notification may not be the same person seeing the dashboard lights (kind of like the fall detector). (Think: parent, spouse of an absent-minded driver). In the case of resources (like the leak in the sprinkler system, not every system failure is visible.

Since in many cases these would be real-world needs, you could subsidize part of the cost through advertising. No, not mailing lists/promo tweets, but "Time for an oil change: go to Bob's!" or whatever. GM already does this with certain OnStar vehicles, but if it could be more generalized...

And what about things like utility meters? Imagine something like that both monitoring for exceptional cases *and* notifying resident + company of readings periodically? (I'm sure IBM is working on things like this for the SmartGrid, but still...)

And have you thought about what would be discoverable not just with an individual user, but when the user can see great gobs of aggregated data (either themselves over time, or in comparison to other users)? That couldn't be the primary selling point for a new item, of course, but something to think about.

Unless... you had a social (gah, hate how VC that sounds) system already in place. Say, a town or school district wanted to get on a fitness program (I think there are "Let's Lose Ten Pounds!" or the like) where strong motivators would be how your peers are or aren't participating, and the town or district could rent hundreds of scales that reported back on a daily basis wirelessly. Of course, this is probably a poor example, as it'd be too easy for user to fake readings, or have privacy issues, but you get the idea.

ddt