Would you like any toast?

So I'll be the first to admit I was pretty impressed and extremely interested in yesterdays lecture. I had never known of the concept of 'The Internet of Things,' and although like many I had always thought that computers might one day take over the world....I never imagined it happening like this. Bleeker in his article Why Things Matter describes the internet of things as 'a nascent conceptual framework for understanding how physical objects, once networked and imbued with informatic capabilities, will occupy space and occupy themselves in a world in which things were once quite passive.' So does that mean that objects will be given a voice in the world and be able to communicate through the internet? Pretty much.

What interested me in particular was Rfid tags. In some cases they look like this:

Now I only just realised that I've seen these plenty of times inside DVD movie cases and on numerous other products, but I had no idea what they were. Now I understand what they are and how they work. For those who don't here is a little diagram.



Basically a radio signal is sent to the RFID Tag, of which specific data on the tag is returned via the signal and goes into a reader and is uploaded to the network and onto a computer. Pretty cool right?? Now imagine if every object was like a RFID Tag and could communicate to a network much like a social media network. Your car, house, fridge, TV, mobile phone etc could upload information and begin communicating on the internet. The Ericcson video showed in the lecture really opens your eyes to the possibilities and although they may be a long way off, it still illustrates what things make be like in the future. On the other hand the short clip from the minority report shows how organisations can use this to advertise and market to certain consumers, showing a rather negative impact on such an interesting concept.

I thought I'd leave you with a short clip from one of my favourite TV shows Red Dwarf. Just a bit of light British humour to finish off my blogs, but it still provides an idea of what objects might be like in the future. Thanks for reading and commenting on my blogs. All the best!!

Sources: Bleecker, J. (2006) 'Why Things Matter: A Manifesto for networked objects'

The Battle fought in the clouds....Who will win??

I always thought clouds were in the sky....but apparently these days they involve computers. The concept is known as cloud computing and according to infoworld.com is best 'described as "sky computing," with many isolated clouds of services which IT customers must plug into individually.' So what exactly does this mean? My good friend Wikipedia helped me out by explaining Cloud Computing as 'the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network.' In layman's terms this basically we means we can access data, content, apps etc without any fundamental knowledge or need of understanding how we get it. Pretty awesome right? 





Now the problem is which cloud do we choose? This is where Apple, Google and too a lesser extent Microsoft come to the party. Each one is trying to predict the future of the internet by tapping into the concept of cloud computing. What is interesting though is that each is doing it in a rather different way. Apple is continuing to utilise the closed system and walled apps, maintaining complete control over their systems and users. Google on the other hand continues to promote the open source and free platform, providing a huge amount of freely designed apps and with no control over users or content. So what does that mean for us as users? 


Basically it comes down to a choice of the user. According to Hiner Google's focus on the cloud is based heavily on the future and that the internet will be highly accessible and extremely fast, thus allowing access to Google's large cloud of apps, content and innovation. In contrast Apple sees the cloud as a train station, ensuring everything runs on efficiently and on time and everything operates as it should. In this way they are continuing their use of synching, so that data can be on all of the users devices. In my view Google's cloud is trying to be a massive toy shop, containing a huge range of cool stuff you can get, but it seems like it would be very chaotic. For some reason seeing images of shoppers rushing into Myers at 6am on the morning of a sale comes to mind. Apple's cloud on the other hand seems to keep the reliance on the device and that seems to be the main idea, not that of the cloud. Which do you think will win??





On a side note I've only just got a smartphone (A hand me down iPhone 3G...yep old school) and I quite like it. It's easy to use, does everything I need, though the battery life is a bit short. My friend who gave the phone recently got a Samsung Galaxy S2, which if you don't know runs Android, and that is it quite an amazing phone. He loves it due to the amount of weird and wonderful apps he can get, the lack of syncing needed especially when transferring music, and the actual quality of the phone. Again, it's all up to personal choice. I think what Apple has done in terms of complete control is a great thing, I also thing the chance for innovation and freedom is a great thing....which is better....you decide!


Sources: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/apple-cloud-vs-google-cloud-the-philosophical-differences/8492
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-cloud-computing-really-means-031?page=0,2

The Facebook Revolution...or is it just joining the party....

So although this weeks topic focused on the uprisings of the Middle East I couldn't help but draw my attention to the reasoning behind this....ultimately Social Media Networks. Social Media Networks such as Facebook and Twitter have provided a platform for individuals to construct and organise huge events (In extreme cases social revolutions) with relative ease, speed and connectivity. They spread like wild fire amongst the internet grabbing more and more followers and supporters as they move along, finally ending in mass demonstrations such as those in Tunisia and Egypt, amongst other Middle Eastern Countries. As Evgeny Morozov said in his article Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go 'I argue that these digital tools are simply, well, tools, and social change continues to involve many painstaking, longer-term efforts to engage with political institutions and reform movements' and this is a view I strongly support. The needs of individuals to continue to push for what they believe in to bring about change or revolution is something that has been going on for a large amount of time, and Social Media Networks simply provide a new platform for doing so. But this is not all they can be used for....

When I first started hearing about the influence of Facebook/Twitter/Youtube on these events I immediately thought of that infamous Facebook party. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about here's an article Teen's Facebook party cancelled as 200k threaten to show up . Basically a young girls 16th birthday party attracted thousands of Facebook attendees after she created the event which was 'open house' and 'open invite.' Now obviously this event is much less serious than those in the Middle East, but it still does show the potential of these networks for mass communication and organisation. In a matter of days thousands of people had knowledge of the party, said they were going to attend or began inviting their own friends. The speed of this mass communication is phenomenal, particularly in comparison to how information was spread before the internet or even the telephone. Would mass protests like those in the Middle East have been organised with the speed and efficiency that they were? Of course not. Months and Months of organisation would have gone in to not only plan but stage and manage that type of event. Although Morozov has argued that there probably was indeed much planning and organisation, there is no question that these Social Media Newtorks magnified the situation enormously and their influence on these revolutions is undeniable. 


What do you think? Have Social Media Networks made these revolutions possible...or have they simply provided a new faster and easier platform to organise?


References

Morozov, E. (2011) ' Facebook and Twitter are just places revolutionaries go' The Guardian, 7 March.
[URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/07/facebook-twitter-revolutionaries-cyberutopians]

Grubb, B. (2011) 'Teens Facebook party cancelled as 200k threaten to turn up' Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March. [URL:http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/teens-facebook-party-cancelled-as-200k-threaten-to-show-up-20110314-1btsl.html]