[my comments in brackets]
spimes as theory objects - five years on
a post-industrial system based on things
"a better way to put our toys away, a cleaner more rational system"
unifying 6 big trends
"this is like trying to nail 6 big ice cubes together."
"a spime is a thing which is designed to fit into the Internet of Things"
"been spimed"; it's "spimey"
"when I wrote my book ubicomp was a laboratory idea, now there are some serious real world iniatives"
lists Sun, Microsoft, General Electric, and then smaller companies like Pachube, Nabaztag, ThingM
"make all the plans digital"
" the RFID industry is in trouble."
- American driven
- the "magic word problem" - you have to associate the bars and symbols with an object, a semantic problem - "it's almost artificial intelligence hard"
- "tag clouds were a very sexy idea five years ago, because it seemed like there might be a statistical way to defeat this particular problem"
-- the problem was that sometimes the magic tags go away or vanish. industrial designers are trained to make coherent things: branded, distinct, in a nicely formed shell
-- but what about the components of the thing? then they need words and tags and ids too -- tags and subtags and subsubsubtags. and then there's a serious organizational problem
- example: a physical object designed like a contemporary website "it did not occur to me that in an Internet of Things, things would be become more like Internet structures."
- Internet fabrication: coming on "pretty strong"
- tracking! of people and things...it has a dark side, and it's not dependable
- searching! most search technology is beyond your comprehension, with a smooth interface on top. it's an infrastructure, like sewers, that you won't directly have. Can you Google my underwear?
- recycling: "it's very hard to make people care about trash or look after trash....but if we don't manage our trash better, our civilization is going to collapse"
- the Internet of Things as a series of pipes, in which the physical pipes are contained in the virtual pipes [or was it the other way?]
- [he calls his list of spime characteristics a "stack"]
- "it's not spread all over the world all at once, like a cloud or paint]
- "the victory condition": an Internet of Things that is a "phantom for visionaries," that "we do not see or hear, or talk about" but that lies in the background
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