The rise of the machines has begun: Steve Sande's household fan is now self-aware. Sande, a Colorado-based tech writer, had noticed that his cat, Ruby, was suffering on hot summer days. His house doesn't have air-conditioning, and he wasn't always around to turn on the fan.
So Sande bought a new gizmo called the WeMo Switch, which connects to the Internet so you can turn on an outlet remotely. It's also programmable. Using the free web service If This Then That, Sande created a script that monitors information from Yahoo Weather. If the temperature in his neighborhood hits 85 degrees, the fan turns itself on and cools the house. "This entire thing," he says, "revolves around a 17-year-old cat."
I love this story, because it illustrates something fascinating: The Internet of Things is finally arriving—and it's bubbling up from the grassroots.
The Internet of Things is the long-prophesied phenomenon of everyday devices talking to one another—and us—online, creating odd new behaviors and efficiencies. Fridges that order food when you're almost out of butter! Houses that sense when you're gone and power down!
Back in the '90s, big companies built systems to do tricks like this, but they were expensive, hard to use, and vendor-specific. The hype eventually boiled away. The Internet of Things turned out to be vaporware.
Until the past few years, that is, when the landscape shifted from below.
Hackers began using increasingly inexpensive sensors and open source hardware—like the Arduino controller—to add intelligence to ordinary objects. There are now kits that let your plants tweet when they need to be watered and teensy printers that scour the web and print out stuff you might be interested in. And there are oodles of "quantified-self" projects: "I know a guy who put a tilt sensor in his beer mug. It lets him know precisely how much he drank during Oktoberfest," Arduino hacker Charalampos Doukas says with a laugh. "Sensor prices are going down; sizes are going down. The only limit is your imagination."
Meanwhile, new cloud services have emerged—like If This Then That or Cosm—that let devices interact in unexpected ways. One Salesforce.com employee uses If This Then That to sound an alarm if his company's stock price drops below $100.
Indeed, the garage-born Internet of Things isn't all whimsy and cats. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, many Japanese worried that the government wasn't providing adequate data on areas outside the evacuation zone. So some hackers designed customized Geiger counters that automatically updated radioactivity levels on an online map. Soon there were more than 300 jury-rigged all over the country, so the public could see real-time radiation levels. "It was the largest nongovernmental radiation-monitoring network in Japan," says Chris "Akiba" Wang, one of the hackers. A similar example recently emerged in earthquake-prone Chile, where a student modded a seismometer to tweet its readings. It quickly amassed more than 300,000 followers, who were grateful for the early alerts.
In essence, the Internet of Things is happening because it has reached the "Apple II stage." This is the moment when a new technology finally becomes easy enough to use that thousands of people start doing experiments to scratch a personal itch—like Sande with his fan. And the pace of experimentation is going to accelerate, as new gear arrives that makes it even cheaper and easier.
In the next few years, more and more of our stuff will start talking. I can't wait to see what it says.
Email: clive@clivethompson.net.
