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The Physical Web

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Re: The Physical Web

#21

Post by CanSpice »

The company I work for (IoT Design Shop - http://iotdesignshop.com/) is actually releasing beacons and software that does exactly this. We have a BLE beacon called Signul that couples with an app that allows you to do all kinds of hyper-local interactions.

Right now you can support our Indiegogo campaign (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/signul-the-world-s-first-...) and get a Signul beacon. I have a prototype version and it's really quite good.

If the Indiegogo campaign hits $50k (it's currently sitting at $31k) we're going to release an SDK for Signul allowing anybody to write an app that interacts with the Signul beacon for either iOS or Android devices.

Re: The Physical Web

#22

Post by tetrep »

garethadams wrote: post #6
doctorfoo wrote: post #3

I kinda hoped the devices would actually serve the apps themselves. I guess a URL makes more sense though. But I wonder if it will lead to physical devices that give 404s when they are obsoleted. Anyway, this seems pretty exciting.

There's no reason it couldn't mean that anyway - if a device is open to the Internet then the URL it serves via Physical Web could easily be its own. But it allows for less-smart devices too. The biggest problem I can see, as with all proximity devices, is spoofing. How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?

>How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?

The same way you know that top search results are accurate for a given word/phrase. As stated multiple times throughout the introduction[1] the solution for filtering out spam will probably have an implementation similar to internet search engines.

[1]: https://github.com/google/physical-web/blob/master/documenta...

Re: The Physical Web

#23

Post by GeneralMayhem »

resiros wrote: post #7

I like the idea, but the first version seems quite limited. It is more of a GPS based webapp discovery tool. You click on the button, the app sends your GPS coordinate to the main server, which returns all useful webapps in the neighborhood. I think that using NFC chips, which are extremely cheap, is very appropriate here. Use case: You point your phone to the vending machine/renting car and the respective webapp is…

NFC is tough because you have to be within about an inch of it to get a reliable connection. For the use cases of a parking meter or vending machine it works, but for a bus stop or store it becomes yet another thing to stand in line for.

Re: The Physical Web

#24

Post by paulojreis »

nine_k wrote: post #15
paulojreis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure what you mean by "appropriating technology". People accepting, wanting, using and integrating said technology in everyday life. > The number of smart devices is going to explode because we want to automate all the things This is precisely what I'm questioning. "We want"? How can you know that? I believe you want that, I believe that maybe people in your circles do, too. Still, that is no evidence at al…

There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted. The smart devices, paradoxically, liberate you from thinking about dull details: you just put some clothes into a washing machine, press a button explaining approximately what type of clothes are ther…

> There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. > > Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted.

Do you have proper data to claim this? Good sales and wide adoption? And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts and early adopters?

I mean: it is rather "easy" to see a big increase in sales for a given technology, when it is "young". The big question is how sustained that growth will be, when the early adopters are served and the company needs to target "regular" people.

Re: The Physical Web

#25

Post by digikata »

cdnsteve wrote: post #14

Meh, we need AI to understand API interfaces automatically and can communicate together seamlessly, without any hard coding. That's when device to device integration gets REALLY interesting. Wait, isn't this just bluetooth + web?

It is, but I think the really interesting part is to making the connection seamless and as direct as feasible. e.g. how do you do it on one end of the spectrum if neither the embedded device or the users device has access to the internet, but they can see one another via bluetooth and wifi?

I think an app makes a lot sense to initially bridge embedded devices (that may only support simple web interfaces or even lower level network messages) to smartphone browsers (which are currently oriented to handling fairly rich web interfaces from full servers).

But where it should get really interesting is if you make the app support a generic enough protocol that you don't need an app-per-device type, but the app/protocol can handle a wide range of generic embedded device interfaces without requiring a full featured / high performance web server on every embedded device. After that you could basically get the protocol supported at the browser/os level and the app disappears.

Re: The Physical Web

#26

Post by sp332 »

cdnsteve wrote: post #14

Meh, we need AI to understand API interfaces automatically and can communicate together seamlessly, without any hard coding. That's when device to device integration gets REALLY interesting. Wait, isn't this just bluetooth + web?

The underlying tech is bluetooth + web, but the user interface for this does not currently exist.

Re: The Physical Web

#27

Post by donutz »

tetrep wrote: post #22
garethadams wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason it couldn't mean that anyway - if a device is open to the Internet then the URL it serves via Physical Web could easily be its own. But it allows for less-smart devices too. The biggest problem I can see, as with all proximity devices, is spoofing. How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it?

>How do I know the item listed as "Bus Stop" is actually the bus stop, and not someone's malicious Raspberry Pi hidden in the bush next to it? The same way you know that top search results are accurate for a given word/phrase. As stated multiple times throughout the introduction[1] the solution for filtering out spam will probably have an implementation similar to internet search engines. [1]: https://github.com/goog…

How do I know the top 100 items listed as "Bus Stop" aren't someone's malicious raspberry pi hidden in the bushes, spitting out hundreds of URLs and varying the signal strength so they appear to be coming from different locations and...wait a minute. I think my phone just got DOS'ed.

Re: The Physical Web

#28

Post by cell303 »

nine_k wrote: post #15
paulojreis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure what you mean by "appropriating technology". People accepting, wanting, using and integrating said technology in everyday life. > The number of smart devices is going to explode because we want to automate all the things This is precisely what I'm questioning. "We want"? How can you know that? I believe you want that, I believe that maybe people in your circles do, too. Still, that is no evidence at al…

There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted. The smart devices, paradoxically, liberate you from thinking about dull details: you just put some clothes into a washing machine, press a button explaining approximately what type of clothes are ther…

What sales figures won't tell you though is how well people are doing who choose not to buy or can't afford those things.

Also, your argument does not account for tomorrows sales figures, which might look very different, as executives from any industry that software has replaced can tell you. Of course that could never happen to us.

Re: The Physical Web

#29

Post by sp332 »

paulojreis wrote: post #24
nine_k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted. The smart devices, paradoxically, liberate you from thinking about dull details: you just put some clothes into a washing machine, press a button explaining approximately what type of clothes are ther…

> There's an easy way to check: let's see what sells. > > Last time I checked, mildly smart home "robots", like automatic cookers, dishwashers, washing machines, even vacuum cleaners sold rather well, and were widely adopted. Do you have proper data to claim this? Good sales and wide adoption? And how can you be sure that the buyers are "everyday people", not techno-enthusiasts and early adopters? I mean: it is rathe…

I thought it was pretty obvious, but here are some numbers for you. According to http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N... over 300,000 people had installed the Crock-Pot app for iOS by 2010. It costs $3.99 so that's $399,000 in app sales, plus whatever happened in the last 4 years.

Around 75% of homes in the US have a dishwasher. Nearly 20 million dishwashers are sold in the USA each year. http://qz.com/29147/death-of-a-dishwasher-families-around-th... For comparison, only 5 million homes are sold in the US each year, so it's not just that they come with houses and are never used.

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