A Collection of Good “Internet of Things” Readings (late 2008 edition)

One of the reasons we formed Kicker was to help design the Internet of Things, to put humans into the web of objects. Lately, there has been a tremendous outpouring of really interesting talks, articles, and discussion around the Internet of Things that I thought would be worth sharing:

Start with CNN’s overview, with comments from Vint Cerf and (of course) Bruce Sterling.

“We are still living in a world where information is trapped in a few of our objects,” says Haladjian. “We stare into our screens, which are like goldfish bowls full of information swimming around, but unable to escape.

“At Violet, we dream of a world where information would be a butterfly, flitting freely all over the place, and occasionally landing on any of the objects we touch to give them life and enrich them.”

Follow Bruce to his Wired article, Things Overheard at the Internet-of-Things Symposium. “It’s not about a new race of blessed objects, but about connecting mundane, already-existing objects.” In that article is the cryptic line “Shadows and Manifestations… an exciting, interesting and profound change” which refers to Mike Kuniavsky’s PICNIC talk Shadows and Manifestations (pdf) or watch the video. Mike expands on his thoughts in a post called PICNIC08, Directories, and Buffers, which is an examination of the glue that will hold together the IOT. Mike also has an article in the Nov/Dec Interactions Magazine on User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing.

Europe is (unsurprisingly) ahead of the US in these matters. Check out, for instance, the EU Communication on Future Networks and the Internet (pdf) which discusses some of the challenges ahead.

I just started reading Rob van Kranenburg’s The Internet of Things: A Critique of Ambient Technology and the All-Seeing Network of RFID (pdf).

One final presentation worth viewing is Timo Arnall’s The Web in the World: