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You think your smartphone is cool now? Wait till it gets RFID chips, then it'll truly be 'smart.' That's the promise of two emerging RFID-based mobile technologies called NFC and DASH7. We've already looked at NFC (Near Field Communication), which holds great promise as an enabler of mobile payments. Today we look at DASH7 , a wireless sensor networking standard that complements NFC. Both NFC and DASH7 may soon be a part of the mobile phone that you carry around everywhere - they'll enable mobile payments, building access, advanced location-based services, ticketing, and more. We spoke to Pat Burns, co-founder and president of the DASH7 Alliance , to find out what DASH7 can do. Sponsor DASH7 was originally created for military use - and it's still being used for those purposes. In January 2009 the U.S. Department of Defense announced a $429 million contract for DASH7 devices, to four vendors: Savi Technology, SPEC, Northrop Grumman, and Unisys. Pat Burns works for one of those vendors, Savi Technology. He also writes the DASH7 blog , which is an excellent daily read. According to an upcoming report by the DASH7 Alliance, which ReadWriteWeb got an early peak at, DASH7 is typically used for applications requiring low power, "bursty" wireless communication. The report states that DASH7 is "ideal for large area sensor networking or supporting reliable communication with things on the move." That means that DASH7 is going to be an integral part of the Internet of Things , as it can acquire sensor data and help run social networking applications that use sensor data. Both DASH7 and NFC are technologies that enable your phone to communicate with other devices. So for example, these technologies allow your phone to read a 'smart poster' (a poster with a barcode or chip in it). The major difference between the two is that NFC is a short-range communications technology, with a range of about 10 centimeters. DASH7 however has a much longer range, of hundreds of meters. DASH7 is also a low power wireless technology, meaning batteries can last for many years. The main disadvantage of DASH7 is that it can't handle high bandwidth data transfers. DASH7 competes directly with a wireless data protocol called ZigBee . However DASH7 and NFC complement each other, according to the upcoming DASH7 report. Both technologies can potentially be hosted on the same phone. The report states: "NFC is a short-range passive RFID technology whose "killer" application is the enormous-but-elusive mobile payments opportunity. in the future we will probably just ditch our credit cards and instead wave our smartphones next to a cash register or vending machine in order to complete a purchase. Enhancing NFC silicon to include DASH7 functionality will accelerate the adoption of NFC for non-payment applications and ultimately for NFC generally." The reason why DASH7 is hitching its wagon to NFC is that NFC has received the most interest so far by mobile handset manufacturers. Nokia is an early adopter of NFC, while both Apple and Google are rumored to be close to adopting it in 2010. Pat Burns told ReadWriteWeb that DASH7 could play at the intersection of location-based services, Internet of Things, social networking, and other mobile services. Examples include enhanced location-based apps, building automation smart energy, tire pressure monitoring, and in-transit temperature monitoring of perishable goods. We will look into these and other DASH7 use cases in Part 2 of this post tomorrow. Discuss
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DASH7: Bringing Sensor Networking to Smartphones
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Excitement is building for our upcoming Mobile Summit - May 7th at the Computer History Museum. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of Mobile! As in our last event, The Real-Time Web Summit , it will be you - the attendees - who ultimately set the agenda. We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks. Sponsor Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform ? Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel? Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices. Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices. Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data. Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR. Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. We already have some amazing attendees including: Deb Schultz of Altimeter group Patrick Chanezon , Don Dodge & Bob Meese of Google Matt Galligan of Simplegeo Ted Morgan of Skyhook Wireless Scott Raney & Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures If you haven't already registered, please register now ! Supporting the conversation are an amazing set of sponsors who are not only committed to releasing products that are shaping the future of mobile but also supporting that conversation. Below we're announcing the first 3 sponsors of the summit. If you'd like information on joining these sponsors and supporting the upcoming mobile summit please email me . Platinum Sponsor: CallFire CallFire allows SMBs and developers to easily & cost-effectively build rich interactive phone systems. In minutes, users can create useful toll free hot-lines, send notification & emergency response phone calls, and even setup cloud call centers with agents located anywhere in the world. CallFire's text-to-speech engine lets you create database-driven appointment reminders, toll-free information hotlines & outbound power-dialing campaigns for pennies a call. Call 877.897.FIRE to learn more, or check out a video: IVR , Cloud Call Center , T oll Free Numbers . CallFire will be introducing our very own Richard MacManus for the keynote and has a surprise giveaway for all attendees of the morning keynote - so make sure you arrive early! Travel Sponsor: World Mate WorldMate, the world's leading mobile travel assistant with over 5 million members worldwide, is the official travel sponsor of the upcoming 2010 ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit. Add WorldMate to your Blackberry or iPhone today and use its powerful features to deliver an unparalleled travel experience as you make your way to the Summit on May 7th in Mountain View. WorldMate can recommend flights, hotels and ground transportation to suit your individual needs - you can even book your travel through the mobile application. Visit www.worldmate.com for more information. Lunch Sponsor: Alcatel-Lucent Application Enablement Finally, Alcatel-Lucent Application Enablement will be sponsoring the lunch at the Mobile Summit. By the way, this isn't a boxed lunch, we know that shaping the future of mobile takes energy and therefore you need good food - so we're pleased to announce the lunch will be fresh grilled made to order tacos, burritos & quesadillas. Also, while ordering your lunch make sure to drop your business card in for a chance to win one of the six iPads Alcatel-Lucent's Applicantion Enablement team will be giving away! Discuss
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Announcing First 3 Mobile Summit Sponsors
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One of the first web design books I bought was Creating Killer Web Sites , a 90s classic by David Siegel. That book was known for pushing visual style over HTML standards. It also encouraged the use of HTML hacks , for example using tables to create layouts. Siegel's techniques were basically workarounds, but they just worked in an era when building web pages was painful due to browser incompatibilities. In Siegel's latest book, Pull , he tackles the Semantic Web. Once again, Siegel plays loosely with existing web standards. Sponsor Siegel's definition of 'Semantic Web' is much broader than that of many technologists. So, just as many Web standards advocates derided Siegel's version of web design back in the 90s, will they also cry foul of his version of the Semantic Web? Pull is being positioned as a business guide to the emerging Semantic Web. It has similarities to Creating Killer Web Sites , which caught the wave of an emerging big trend of the mid-90s (web site design) and became a bestseller. Siegel is attempting to catch a second big online wave, with the Semantic Web in 2010. Siegel explains the title in the introduction: "This book describes the pull era , where customers pull everything to them on demand - products, services, information, knowledge, and advice. Much of the foundation for pulling is called the semantic web , a new way of packaging information to make it much more useful and reusable. Over the next ten to twenty years, it will change business from a lead-push model to a pull-follow model of interacting with customers." It's hard to argue against the vision that the book outlines. However for many Semantic Web proponents, the foundational technologies are Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). These standards allow web publishers to encode meaning - semantics - into their sites. David Siegel's definition of Semantic Web is far broader. On the book's accompanying website, The Power of Pull , there is a " Semantic Web Acid Test ." It defines a semantic web business as one that has an "unambiguous" structure for its data. The book states that "some technologists feel that semantic web data must be expressed using a language called RDF," but Siegel disagrees. Instead, he believes that "simple, unambiguous formats are part of the semantic web." The book is ultimately about how structured data will change how we do business. Frankly, the use of the term 'Semantic Web' in this book feels forced. Even so, I think it's a very useful book and offers detailed scenarios of how structured data will improve business. For example, chapter 4 is about retailers and outlines the benefits of RFID tags in retail - including describing a visit Siegel made to forward-thinking German retailer Metro Group. Overall Pull is a solid and well-researched book. It's a good introduction for business people to structured data and the Semantic Web. My one issue with the book is that Siegel's appropriation of the term 'Semantic Web' leaves me feeling a little uneasy. On the home page of his personal website is a blog post (entitled 'Why I Should be Apple's Next CEO'), in which Siegel claims that he "started talking about the Semantic Web in 1998, before Tim Berners-Lee coined the term." Whether that's true or not, it does beg the question: is Siegel's definition of the Semantic Web the same as Tim Berners-Lee's? Discuss
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David Siegel: From Killer Web Sites to Semantic Web
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Early bird registration for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 is almost over. You only have a few more days to get your tickets for just $295. Click here to get your ticket at this special price. The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will take place May 7, 2010 , in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Sponsor As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the 'unconference' format. We discovered in October that the unconference is a perfect complement to our brand, because it encourages a high quality two-way dialog. Not only that, but the knowledge and ideas that came out of our Real-Time Web Summit were practical and useful - we got a lot of great feedback about that. As with our previous event, the Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin , who in my opinion is the best in the business at this style of event. We're using the same venue too, the beautiful Computer History Museum. Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth , so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you - the attendees - who ultimately set the agenda. You can begin adding your suggestions now. We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business . Here's a sample of some of the topics we'll explore in both of these tracks: Geo-location services - what can you do using location as a platform ? Commerce & Marketing - as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel? Content, Publishing & Recommendations - the technologies and best practices. Mobile Social Networking - how to tap into communities on mobile devices. Internet of Things - the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data. Augmented Reality - the technology and business applications of AR. Native App vs. Browser Based - Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian. If you're a company in the Mobile Internet market, you may be interested in helping sponsor this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information on the sponsor options. The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our second event and we can't wait to discuss the opportunities in Mobile with you on May 7. You can find banners and logos to link to our event here , if you're so inclined. We hope to see you on May 7! Discuss
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Mobile Summit Early Bird Pricing - Only One Week Left!
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The world's second Internet of Things Conference is scheduled to take place at the end of November in Tokyo. The deadline for papers was just extended to June 1 - which gave us an idea. Conference planners have put together a list of suggested topics for papers . We took that list and then rounded up our ongoing reporting and analysis for each of the eight topics as a way to help you understand how vast and far reaching IoT will end up being. Sponsor 'Green by Internet of Things / Green of Internet of Things Technology' Our recent list of 6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home , looked at the IoT from a domestic standpoint. From handling toxic waste, to watershed management, to building design, to transportation, to the smart energy grid, a whole new green way of thinking is going to be made possible by IoT. 'Future sustainable technologies linking the physical and virtual world' Different industries have have already been able to increase the efficiency of freight shipping by using sensors to tell them the location and condition of their product in real-time. This includes FedEx's SenseAware , which is designed to constantly keep track of the vital signs of all its packages. In future posts we'll be covering IoT-driven growth in the fields of virtual factories, digital cities, agriculture and forest management. 'Novel services and applications to facilitate environmental responsibility' Did you hear about the guy who wired his house up to a Twitter account so that it alerted him whenever an appliance was used? Following that experiment, Matt Morey figured out a way to use iobridge to turn that one-way Twitter alert system into a two-way system that makes it possible to turn appliances on and off via Twitter. These ideas, which may seem novel at first, signal the direction towards the development of whole new industries. 'Emerging Internet of Things business models and process changes' Companies as large as IBM have invested heavily in IoT. It has a website called Smarter Planet , which is dedicated to "smarter solutions," of which they say they've already developed 12,00 hundred. We've also written about ThingD, which is creating a registry of things, as well as REZZ.IT, which is building a business based on the idea that "things have a network and their own audience." 'Communication systems and network architectures for the IoT' Pachube is the IotT business that has earned the most coverage and analysis from us. Pachube is a service that stores and shares real-time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments. MQTT , which stands for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport, is also noteworthy. It is "a platform-agnostic system which can connect almost any networked object to the wider world." More recently, Google launched an API for PowerMeter , which allows device manufacturers to create PowerMeter-compatible devices. Also worth mention is our article on Arrayent that aims to be the "Cisco of small things" - which is basically middleware for companies wanting to connect their products to the Internet. In particular it's targeting smartphones. 'Experience reports from the introduction and operation of networked things in areas such as healthcare, logistics & transport' IoT is still so new that we have only just begun to see the results of research. But with RFID, for example (which is one of the more mature IoT technologies), we've reported on how there have been challenges that limit predicted growth. There's also still impediment to to the viable use of IofT-like location-based services . 'Emerging applications and interaction paradigms for everyday citizens' From preventing lost luggage , to the latest IoT gadgets , telling the story of what a person's everyday daily life is an integral part of IoT. Most notable is the presentation by Carnegie Mellon professor and ex-imagineer Jesse Schell, who describes how sensors in everything may one day mean the sensor in your toothbrush gives you online gaming points if you brush for the full three minutes. He also envisions sensors that track if you are watching TV commercials and again rewards you with online gaming points. Core to Schell's ideas is the belief that these incentives may seem a bit creepy, but they have potential to help us create a less corrupted, more accountable and ethical world. 'Social impacts and consequences: security, privacy, opportunities and risks' In our What The Internet of Things Means For You series we covered privacy issues related to the use of RFID and barcode readers. The latest reports show how advertisement, RFID and geolocation have combined to raise serious privacy concerns. Additionally, location-based data can be a threat to personal privacy in the context of how the U.S. congress has started to draft location-based privacy protection laws. Are you going to the Tokyo for Internet of Things Conference? What do you hope to learn there? Let us know in the comments, or by emailing tips@readwriteweb.com , what we should be discussing in the months leading up to the event. Discuss
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8 Ways to Better Understand the Internet of Things
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