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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

What is the effect of the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems on cloud computing? Well, there have been quite a few if you look at where Sun’s best and brightest have moved on to in the past few months. Tim Bray is the latest Sun star to move on. You may know Bray as the co-founder of XML. Eve Maler is also a co-founder of XML. She had worked with Bray for many years until her departure from Sun last Spring to join PayPal. Eve as many of you many know, is one of the leaders in developing identity standards and initiatives. Sponsor Perhaps the clearest example is evident at Rackspace where five developers from Sun were recently hired to work on Drizzle, a heavy duty system for high scaling applications in the cloud: When it’s ready, Drizzle will be a modular system that’s aware of the infrastructure around it. It does, and will run well in hardware rich multi-core environments with design focused on maximum concurrency and performance. No attempt will be made to support 32-bit systems, obscure data types, language encodings or collations. The full power of C++ will be leveraged, and the system internals will be simple and easy to maintain. The system and its protocol are designed to be both scalable and high performance. According to Rackspace, the service will “keep the good and remove the bad,” from MySQL. And here is where we see the power of open-source. We interviewed Bray today. He pointed out that open-source is developed outside the walls of the company. So, in the midst of corporate upheaval, developers can move onto new places and not face any interruption in their work. That’s exactly what we see with the Drizzle team: It feels like Oracle has lost a huge opportunity in the open-source community. The lucky ones are the companies that are picking up these talented people with faith that the open-source way represents the future of cloud computing. Discuss

Although still at the concept stage the “Cube Chair” by Svilen Gamalov provides an interesting example of modern design. The chair, which combines futurist design elements of the 1950’s with modern sensibility, is designed to envelope the user, creating a comfortable and stylized space. I hope to see more creative pieces of modern furniture like these, and I can’t wait to see the Gamalov’s ‘Cube Chair’ fully realized.

From time to time as you might have noticed we like to post some things that are a little bit unusual. For example today I would like to present  Fjaril , a drawer system designed by Danish designer Jakob Jørgensen . Fjaril is one of his many projects which distinguishes itself with its beautiful sculptural nature and fine craftsmanship. As Jakob describes it, it goes from being a simple box into a functional sculpture. This drawer system expands rhythmically and go in this movement from being a simple box to be a functional sculpture.

Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context – that’s what we’re looking for in the journalism we read, isn’t it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use. NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews . The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app! Sponsor When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it’s easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined. The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust. The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It’s one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it’s another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality. The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It’s a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing. NewsTrust and MyNews aren’t for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.) Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content. Discuss