Posts tagged actually
Xively Actually Connects Things In The Internet Of Things
May 14th
The Internet of Things isn’t really an Internet of anything, at least not yet. Sure, devices are connected to the Internet, but they don’t communicate with other devices — just with their own home servers. But that may be about to change.
A new common cloud platform dubbed Xively Cloud Services aims to provide a common ground through which any device connected to the Internet could actually communicate with any other device. Xively is an old fixture within the Internet of Things ecosystem, as it’s actually a new commercial version of the older non-commercial Cosm platform, which in turn used to be known as Pachube until Xively’s current owner LogMeIn purchased Pachube in 2011.
Like Cosm before it, Xively will offer a way for disparate devices to connect with each other, though now with commercial terms of service for commercial users and freely available services for projects in development. Whatever you call it, the availability of a platform like Xively is a key component in building a true Internet of Things instead of what we actually have now.
The Intranets of Things
To understand the difference, think back a decade or so to when the term “intranets” was all the rage. While the Internet was the grand, connected network of networks, intranets were the smaller, private networks used by corporations who were on the cutting edge of cool in the early days of the 21st century.
Today, the concept is still the same, even if the mystique of the term has worn off somewhat. Devices that are connected to the Internet at large behave in much the same way as servers on an intranet: they communicate only with their corporate systems, reporting data only to the commercial manufacturer.
Instead of the Internet of Things, then, what we have now is a whole bunch of intranets of things.
This may work for individual products, such as the car sensors that report back to the factory with critical maintenance data that, ideally, leads to faster diagnosis and repair of problems. But it doesn’t leave much room for connecting devices and objects that really were never designed to communicate with each other.
What The Internet Of Things Might Look Like
Imagine, says Xively VP Chad Jones, a collection of tiny accelerometers and heat sensors woven into the fabric of an infant’s onesie, designed to communicate with monitoring software in the cloud with the intent to watch the baby’s breathing and body heat for the onset of sudden infant death syndrome or any other form of respiratory distress. The special clothing probably has its own alarm, but what if parents wanted the option to set off every fire alarm in the house?
(Hey, when it’s your kid, you might want it to call the fire department and the National Guard, too.)
Right now, both the clothing and the alarms might be connected to the Internet, but not to each other. To make such an option work in our current circumstances, the manufacturers of the devices would have to meet, figure out common signal specifications and work out a commercial agreement. And that’s for every fire alarm manufacturer.
Xively enables device makers to set the privacy settings for device data in the Xively network to share all, share some or share none, Jones explained. If device makers were on the Xively platform, they would have a common ground to connect and effectively communicate, using data sharing combined with directory services that provide the ability to selectively share device data and control.
Connecting the medical onesie and the alarms in this scenario would be a far easier and more frictionless experience.
This sort of common platform is exactly what the Internet of Things really needs. Xively and similar platforms like Open.Sen.se will make it much easier and faster for unrelated devices to connect with each other and start delivering on the promise of smart homes, intelligent devices services and similar long-promised notions.
Besides ushering in a boon of new connected devices, common cloud platforms for devices will ultimately help the consumer by ushering in competition and more choices. Right now, to build a smart or connected home requires you to choose from a relatively small array of compatible devices — which, unsurprisingly, aren’t cheap.
Introduce more compatible devices through a common network, then suddenly the market will naturally drive prices down. More device vendors should jump into the game, too, knowing they will have a fair shot in this new market.
Image courtesy of Xively
View full post on ReadWrite
How Connected Cars Might Actually Make Driving Better
Mar 14th
Connected cars are hotter than turbo-charged V6 running at 8,000 RPM. The hype about how they’re going to change the driving and passenger experience is accelerating faster than Danica Patrick coming out of a turn at a NASCAR race.
But most of the promises I’ve heard so far center around relatively prosaic things like better entertainment systems and integrated navigation. I like a great car stereo as much as anyone, but that just doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary to me.
(See also Cars & The Internet Get Together At SXSW)
So I was looking forward to the connected car presentation at the Cisco Editors Conference in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday. Much of it turned out to be pretty technical, all about how Cisco plans to support the back end of the process. That’s important, but I was more interested in the some of the passing comments on the actual benefits connected cars are likely to deliver.
Why Driving Stinks
Maciej Kranz, VP and GM of Cisco’s Connected Industries Group, laid out some of the grim statistics plaguing the world yet-to-be-connected cars:
Between 11% and 13% of commuting time is wasted in urban traffic congestion, for a total of 90 billion hours. (It just seems like of half of that is on the 101 Freeway between San Francisco and San Jose.) Some 7% to 12% of urban congestion is caused by people looking for parking. (It just seems like all of that comes in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.) Between 10% and 17% of of urban fuel is wasted at stoplights when there is no crosstraffic. Eighty percent of accidents (6.3 million) are caused by driver distraction.
“The good news,” Kans said, “is that we can actually lower all of these numbers quite dramatically.”
How Connected Cars Make Driving Better
For congestion, that means traffic management and optimization of road networks. For parking issues, connected cars can link apps identifying the closest, most affordable available parking spaces to the vehicle’s navigation. And the vehicles can intelligently adjust driving speeds to boost fuel efficiency.
Intelligent stoplights, for example, would know if there were 10 cars waiting in one direction but only 1 in the other, and adjust light timing to keep traffic moving. Along straight routes, Kanz said, they can build “green waves” of traffic signals to keep lanes flowing efficiently.
There’s also the idea that if one car knows what other vehicles. traffic lights and other road infrastructure are doing, they can all adjust more efficiently. For examply, if your car knows that the car in front is about to make a turn or start braking, it can begin reacting even before it actually senses the action.
Cisco estimates this could lead to 7.5% less time wasted in traffic congestion and 4% lower costs for vehicle fuel, repairs and insurance. The benefits are particularly obvious in fleet settings, Kanz said. For example, a company with 10,000 delivery trucks would find it very valuable to be able to use connected technology to schedule preventive maintenance.
As for preventing accidents, vehicle-to-vehicle communications could enable a connected car to alert you if you get too close to the vehicle in front of you. If you don’t respond, Kanz said, “at some point the car will make a decision to hit the brakes and avoid the accident.”
Cisco estimatd 8% fewer accidents, 10% lower road costs and a 3% drop in carbon dioxide emissions.
Not Just Connecting The Car, But Also All Its Parts
The key to making all this happen, Kanz said, is not just connecting the car to the Internet, but also connecting together all of the various siloed subsystems in the car. When you connect a car to the Net, he said, “good things happen. More good things happen when you connect all of the systems,” including telematics, diagnostics and driver assistance systems. Looked at this way, a self-driving car is just an advanced application of a connected car, taking over a higher-than usual proportion of the required tasks.
Cisco is pushing DSRC (Dedicated Short-Range Communications) technology to tie together the vehicle’s various systems with the wider Internet.
Heck, if you ask me, though, even if connected cars just help me find a parking space on a Saturday night, all the development effort is totally worth it.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWrite
ReadWrite Survey Results: Most Folks Are Actually Happy With Their Mobile Carrier
Feb 27th
Depending on where you live, using the wrong mobile carrier can be an expensive, frustrating nightmare. And if you listen to the anecdotal evidence, it seems like a whole lot of mobile users live in crappy-service hell.
But there’s more to the story than all those complaints. To find out what’s really going on, ReadWrite recently ran a survey of our readers to see how they really felt about their mobile carriers, and how open they were to change.
(See ReadWrite Mobile Carrier Survey: What Would It Take For You To Switch?)
The 179 responses we got do not represent a scientific sampling, but they painted a clear picture of a world where most people are surprisingly okay with their mobile carriers, and not inclined to jump ship without a good reason.
Undeserved Bad Reputations?
Despite the sketchy reputation enjoyed by many mobile carriers, the vast majority of respondents were either Very Satisfied (23%) or Somewhat Satisfied with their service. Only 13% were Somewhat Unsatisfied, and a paltry 4% were Very Unsatisfied.
And they had lots of reasons for staying put – ironically, the very same reasons that mobile users seem to complain about the most.
Just over half 50.3% actually cited Network Coverage as a reason not to switch carriers, followed by Service Rates and Plans (45%). Some 27% were convinced to stay by their carrier’s device selection, and 21% cited the benefits of sharing a carrier with family, friends and co-workers. A significant minority (37%), though, said they weren’t switching because of the hassles involved.
Money Talks
So, what would make you switch? Money, mostly.
65% said they’d dump their carrier for a better deal, and 24% were looking for more inclusive Network Coverage. Note that those are also the top two factors helping to keep people from switching as well. Obviously, those two factors trump everything else when choosing a mobile carrier.
Perhaps because the iPhone 5 and most of the top Android models are now avialable at a variety of carriers, only 4.5% said they’d consider moving for a better selection of mobile devices.
Finally, fewer than 1% were interested in sharing a carrier with others – I guess those family plans and free calling to other users of the same carrier don’t carry much weight.
Ultimately, it seems, only network coverage and cost really make a difference. And a surprisingly high percentage of survey respondents are relatively happy with what they’ve already got in both areas.
(For more surveys, see ReadWrite Survey Results: What A Typical BYOD Program Really Looks Like)
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
View full post on ReadWrite
Why Do Big Data & Programmatic Marketing Actually Matter?
Feb 20th
Did you know 2.5 quintillion bytes (25,000,000,000,000,000,000) of digital data is created every single day, the majority being centered around you? Every day, we send 145bn emails, 340m tweets and 2 million searches queries to Google. But, there is also the more invisible footprints you leave as…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Not So Fast: 40% of BlackBerry Apps Are Actually Android
Jan 30th
As part of it’s splashy launch of BlackBerry 10, the company announced Wednesday that it has 70,000 apps in its BlackBerry World app store today, along with 1,000 premium apps from top publishers.
Many BlackBerry Apps Not Native
Not so fast. These apps are not all hat they seem. In fact, a great portion of them are actually ported Android apps.
“40% are wrapped Android applications,” Martyn Mallick, VP of global alliances and business development at BlackBerry said to reporters.
For instance, the Skype app on BlackBerry 10 is actually a port from the Skype app for Android. Skype has built native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone (Skype is owned by Microsoft) but it was easier for Skype to port its existing Android app before building specifically for BlackBerry.
Android To BlackBerry 10 Port-o-Thons
BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) is relying on the port strategy in the short term to help developers get their apps onto the BlackBerry 10 platform fast. It encourages developers to build straight for BlackBerry 10 and the features that the operating system holds, but for now at least, it will basically take an app any way it can get it.
“The only way I can compare it is that it is a soft quality strategy,” said BlackBerry VP of developer relations Alec Saunders to ReadWrite. “If you compare what we do to what Apple does,” they make developers conform to all of these iOS guidelines or theywill boot you out of the store. “We are like, ‘You know what? If you have a code base, we want if to run on the platform.’ ‘”
Saunders said that BlackBerry will offer developers who build specifically for BlackBerry “tangible marketing benefits,” which will be announced at a BlackBerry Jam Europe conference in Amsterdam next week. The suggestion seems to be that ported apps will not receive the same type of visibility or marketing from BlackBerry in its app store.
“When I say tangible marketing benefits, you are going to do better in our store [with a native BlackBerry app] than if you built for Android,” Saunders said. “The porting strategy is there but increasingly we are going to be pushing people to build for BlackBerry to have the native parts of the BlackBerry experience because we think that experience is better.”
Saunders and the developer outreach team started doing “port-o-thons” in January to get developers “over the hump” in pushing out BlackBerry 10 apps ahead of today’s launch. One such port-a-thon brought nearly 15,000 apps to BlackBerry 10, while another added several thousand more. About 38,000 of the 70,000 apps in the new BlackBerry World app store are ports. As part of the port-a-thons, BlackBerry built a utility that can easily turn Android Apps into BlackBerry apps.
A Sound Short-Term Strategy
In the short term, the port strategy should work for BlackBerry. Developers maynotice that an app is actually an Android app and not a BlackBerry app, but most consumers won’t know the difference. As long as it works, right?
As the presence of the ported Skype app shows, this strategy is a decent way for BlackBerry to quickly get top-tier apps to its nascent platform. And if BlackBerry 10 sales start taking off, developers who built directly for the platform could benefit better than they would on iOS or Android – which is a reasonable incentive to follow up quick ports with true, native BlackBerry 10 apps.
Image of BlackBerry z10 by Dan Rowinski.
View full post on ReadWrite
6 Signs Yahoo May Actually Get It (Finally)
Jan 25th
Disclosure: I used to work with Yahoo in my two years as an editor for the website Tecca. While I was never on Yahoo’s payroll, our companies had a close content partnership and some leadership overlap. (It’s complicated.)
Yahoo is a strange, many-headed beast. Not often commended for its corporate vision, cohesive net of products… or anything else, really, maybe it’s time to give the Web’s most excited (!) megalith a break.
When the company ousted compromised CEO Scott Thompson and poached Google’s Marissa Mayer last year, the Web was heartened – maybe Yahoo gets it, after all these years!
By 2012, it seems, the Web’s wary denizens were busy mistrusting Google and Facebook. Yahoo, still a giant by any other gauge, was starting to look like an underdog.
As the legend goes, Yahoo was founded in the 1994, a relative dark age of the Web. The company was originally a hierarchical Web directory, not even a search engine, though it quickly added that and other functions to become a full-featured Web portal
But over time, scrappier, savvier upstarts like Google and Facebook became the new online titans. By that time, Yahoo, having already enjoyed its era at the top, could only lumber on toward a social/mobile future it didn’t seem to quite understand.
Add a remarkable run of executive-level churn and an ensuing identity crisis to the mix, and you’ve got a snapshot of the challenge Marissa Mayer signed up to tackle. But less than a year after her sparkling indoctrination into the folds of the world’s biggest corporation with a punctuation mark, Yahoo looks more alive than it has since… well, let’s just say it’s been a while.
Here are 6 reasons we think that Yahoo could finally be poised for a comeback.
1. Mayer Understands What’s Broken
Mayer gets Yahoo’s history – and, as she tells Bloomberg Television, she understands the long game.
“You know the first wave really was Yahoo itself, you know the directory, there are these pages out there, how do you organize them? And then the Web got so large that the directory model broke down and gave to search. And then the next wave that came was social, and now I think we’re on the mobile wave. And so if you think about that, that’s all happened in about 15 years. We’ve gone through four major technology shifts in terms of who the main players really are. And so I think there is always opportunity for new disruption.”
2. Yahoo’s Product Draft Is Well Underway
Yahoo just bought Snip.it, a Pinterest-esque Web clipper. Last year it launched Axis, an experimental mobile browser that most people actually liked. And it revamped Yahoo Mail, with apps to boot.
Just like Mayer planned, Yahoo is on the prowl to bolster its product roster with companies that fit into Yahoo’s (newly) mobile vision. Look for Yahoo to make more small, interesting acquisitions this year as it continues to quietly build itself back up.
3. Mobile And Social: The Missing Puzzle Pieces
Mobile and social are music to the ears of anyone waiting for Yahoo’s second coming. Mayer put it this way:
“I definitely think with the Web becoming so vast – there is a much content and social context and now with mobile, there is so much location and activity context. How do you pull all that together? …It brings Yahoo back to its roots. It used to be that that’s what Yahoo was. It took the Internet and ordered it up.
Now it’s so vast that you can’t just categorize it anymore. But could we provide a feed information that is ordered, a Web ordered for you, and is also available on your mobile phone.”
4. The Flickr Case Study
When the great Instagram Terms of Service freak out went down late in 2012, Yahoo got lucky. Flickr, still one of its best-loved products, had just released an app update to rave reviews. Defectors wary of Facebook’s hand in the future of their filtered photos were poised to leap into Yahoo’s arms. Suddenly Yahoo had a golden opportunity to prove that it could be agile, mobile and social at once.
Call it good timing, but Yahoo didn’t altogether fumble the aftermath, even running a promo for Flickr Pro accounts. Building back a beloved, long-neglected product is a welcome sign that the big Y! is getting back int he game.
5. Yahoo Throws Its Doors Wide Open
Facebook and Twitter are throwing punches. Samsung and Apple’s holy war over patents will go down in history. Everyone wants to take down Google, with good reason. But Yahoo? Yahoo just wants to make friends.
“Our focus, in addition to technology, but also on media, it means there is an opportunity for strong partnerships. That is what we will be focused on. We work with Apple and Google in terms of the operating system. In terms of social network, we have a strong partnership with Facebook. We’re able to work with some of these players that have a lot of strength in order to bolster our user experience that we offer on the Yahoo site.”
6. In Yahoo We Trust (For Some Reason)
The most underrated thing that bodes well for Yahoo is that we’re rooting for it. Tired of Apple, Google and Facebook duking it out, many people want to see Yahoo make a comeback. It’s an era of deep distrust of big companies commanding big data for big money, but Yahoo has been down for so long there’s an undercurrent of Web users who inexplicably want to see it get back up.
There are plenty of other things to consider. Yahoo pulled in more than $7 billion from selling off a chunk of its stake in Chinese online marketplace Alibaba, and its stock enjoyed a nice run up toward the end of 2012.
But Yahoo still faces many challenges – it’s long term success is far from assured. We’ll have more information when Yahoo announces its fourth quarter earnings on January 28. You can find the full interview with Mayer embedded below.
Image via Flickr user Adam Tinworth, interview via Bloomberg Television
View full post on ReadWrite
6 Signs Yahoo Actually Gets It (Finally)
Jan 25th
Disclosure: I used to work with Yahoo in my two years as an editor for the website Tecca. While I was never on Yahoo’s payroll, our companies had a close content partnership and some leadership overlap. (It’s complicated.)
Yahoo is a strange, many-headed beast. Not often commended for its corporate vision, cohesive net of products… or anything else, really, maybe it’s time to give the web’s most excited (!) megalith a break.
When the company ousted shady CEO Scott Thompson and poached Google’s Marissa Mayer last year, the web was heartened – maybe Yahoo gets it, after all these years!
By 2012, the web’s wary denizens were busy mistrusting Google and Facebook. Yahoo, still a giant by any other gauge, began to actually look like an underdog.
As the legend goes, Yahoo was founded in the 1994, a relative dark age of the web. Scrappier, savvier upstarts like Google and Facebook threw their weight behind mobile and social and went on to become the new titans of the web. But by that time, Yahoo, having already enjoyed an era at the top, could only lumber on toward a future it didn’t seem to quite understand.
Add executive-level churn and an identity crisis to the mix, and you’ve got a snapshot of what Marissa Mayer signed up for. But less than a year after her sparkling indoctrination into the folds of the world’s biggest corporation with a punctuation mark, Yahoo looks more alive than it has since… well, let’s just say it’s been a while.
In her first one-on-one interview since taking the big purple reins, Mayer spoke to Bloomberg Television about the company’s relevance in a web wholly different from the one it once presided over. Here’s why we think that Yahoo could finally be poised for a comeback.
1. Mayer Understands What’s Broken
Mayer gets Yahoo’s history – and, as she tells Bloomberg, she understands the long game.
“You know the first wave really was Yahoo itself, you know the directory, there are these pages out there, how do you organize them. And then the web got so large that the directory model broke down and gave to search. And then the next wave that came was social, and now I think we’re on the mobile wave. And so if you think about that, that’s all happened in about 15 years. We’ve gone through 4 major technology shifts in terms of who the main players really are. And so I think there is always opportunity for new disruption.”
2. Yahoo’s Product Draft Is Well Underway
Yahoo just bought Snip.it, a Pinterest-esque web clipper. Last year it launched Axis, an experimental mobile browser that most people actually really liked. And it revamped Yahoo Mail, with apps to boot.
Just like Mayer planned, Yahoo is on the prowl to bolster its product roster with companies that fit into Yahoo’s (newly) mobile vision. Look for Yahoo to make more small, interesting acquisitions this year as it continues to quietly build itself back up.
3. Mobile And Social: The Missing Puzzle Pieces
Mobile and social are music to the ears of anyone waiting for Yahoo’s second coming.
“I definitely think with the web becoming so vast–there is a much content and social context and now with mobile, there is so much location and activity context. How do you pull all that together? …It brings Yahoo back to its roots. It used to be that that’s what Yahoo was. It took the internet and ordered it up.
Now it’s so vast that you can’t just categorize it anymore. But could we provide a feed information that is ordered, a web ordered for you, and is also available on your mobile phone.”
4. The Flickr Case Study
When the great Instagram terms of service freak out went down late in 2012, Yahoo got lucky. Flickr, its best-loved product, had just released an app update to rave reviews. Defectors wary of Facebook’s hand in the future of their filtered photos were poised to leap into Yahoo’s arms. Suddenly Yahoo had a golden opportunity to prove that it could be agile, mobile and social at once.
Call it good timing, but Yahoo didn’t altogether fumble the aftermath, even running a promo for Flickr Pro accounts. Building back a beloved, long-neglected product is a huge sign that the big Y! gets it.
5. Yahoo Throws Its Doors Wide Open
Facebook and Twitter are throwing punches. Samsung and Apple’s holy war over patents will go down in history. Everyone wants to take Google down, with good reason. But Yahoo? Yahoo just wants to make friends.
“Our focus, in addition to technology, but also on media, it means there is an opportunity for strong partnerships. That is what we will be focused on. We work with Apple and Google in terms of the operating system. In terms of social network, we have a strong partnership with Facebook. We’re able to work with some of these players that have a lot of strength in order to bolster our user experience that we offer on the Yahoo site.”
6. In Yahoo We Trust (For Some Reason)
The most underrated thing that bodes well for Yahoo is that we’re rooting for it. Tired of Apple, Google and Facebook duking it out, people want to see Yahoo make a comeback. It’s an era of deep distrust of big companies commanding big data for big money, but Yahoo has been down for so long we inexplicably want to see it get back up.
But can it?
Image via Flickr user Adam Tinworth
View full post on ReadWrite
Why Outsourcing SEO Actually Works – Business 2 Community
Jan 25th
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Why Outsourcing SEO Actually Works
Business 2 Community SEO Outsourcing is a great option because of the innate nature of SEO itself. In this blog, I will try and explain why SEO and outsourcing really go hand in hand. In the end, we understand that outsourcing keeps your SEO running long-term for you due … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Here’s Something At CES That I Actually Want To See [Video]
Jan 7th
A Russian company called Displair is pitching a 3D display that’s made up of air. No glass, no screen, no keyboard. They claim it is coming to the United States later this year, initially in some kind of business-to-business application. Is this another step toward the world of Minority Report? Or just a cool idea that will come to nothing?
Check out the video below, plus a bunch of others in Displair’s YouTube channel.
Video and image courtesy of Displair.
View full post on ReadWrite
How to Optimize Your Site for Search Without Actually Doing SEO – Terra.com
Nov 10th
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How to Optimize Your Site for Search Without Actually Doing SEO
Terra.com Businesses, and even consultants, often do more damage than good when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Google's search algorithm is constantly evolving and getting better at what I call "SEO detection" — the ability to detect artificial … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
