Adam Dunkels On the Internet of Things

An anonymous reader writes "Techworld is running an interview with Adam Dunkels, author of the open source Contiki operating system for the Internet of Things. The interview touches on the Internet of Things, the future of Contiki, and his newly founded startup Thingsquare." If the whole "Internet of Things" concept still seems amorphous, FedEx CIO Rob Carter provides some concrete examples in which FedEx is using real-time tracking based on IP-enabled sensors.

Comments

Interesting

[busyqth]

Interestingly enough (to me, at least), I happen to be reading a Korean paper on the ubiquitous computing / wireless networks right now.

What I find interesting is that the concept has received government support and direction as part of a push to develop the "U-Society" (which I suppose is mean to be an abbreviation for "ubiquitous computing society"). In Korea, this is governmental industrial policy with the goal of making Korean industry a leader in producing "ubiquitously networked" products of all kinds. On the other hand, here in the United States, it seems like more of an matter of academic study and, perhaps, seen as a possible cost-saving (as opposed to profit-producing) technology.

Oh well, I guess FedEx and UPS don't mind buying all of their IP-enabled supplies from LG & Samsung if it saves them a few pennies.

Re:Interesting

[busyqth]

If all you do is dump public funds into the piggy trough then you won't get much back out. But that's not the only way to do it. Studying the economic history of South Korea is quite interesting. In the early 60s, Korea was porer than most sub-Saharan African countries with a GDP per capita of under $100. But then the government began to implement an industrial policy aimed at developing certain chosen key industries such as steel production, shipbuilding and automobile manufacturing.
Some of the companies directed by the government to initiate these industrial projects financed through government grants, externally sourced financial aid, and foreign loans were little businesses named Hyundai and Samsung. Perhaps you've heard of them. Other companies were created out of nothing to pursue this industrial strategy, such as Posco, producer of about 35 million tons of high quality steel annually.
South Korea went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest, in about 30 years. I know educated, well off Koreans who are less than 40 years old, who, as children, lived in straw-roofed huts and whose parents and grandparents slung poo in a rice paddy to survive. I'd call that concrete, valuable results.

Another Thing

[busyqth]

Second post... is that the same Contiki OS that started out as a hobby project to develop a multitasking OS for the Commodore 64?

Re:Another Thing

[busyqth]

Yeah, that's it... Here's the announcement from 2003: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!search/contiki$20c64/fm.announce/xycfZZjevKc/zaH9-dHNJbgJ

From the FedEx article:

[Daniel Dvorkin]

According to FedEx CIO Rob Carter, that need to analyze events in real time has resulted in an effort to âoeradicallyâ decompose monolithic vertical applications into sets of core granular services, which the company will then mash into any number of analytics applications. The ultimate goal: a matrix of IT services that functions with the speed and flexibility of a brain, freeing FedEx from a system dependent on files strewn across any number of databases kept on disk storage systems too slow to support advanced, real-time analytic applications.

Dear God, I think this man just achieved the Buzzword Singularity. If we can harness this power ...

Re:From the FedEx article:

[bonehead]

Ah... The art of using as many words as possible to say absolutely nothing.

It would actually be funny if it wasn't a skill that, for some mysterious reason, raises people to positions of wealth and power.