The Physical Web

Both require relative proximity -- in the case of the pet sensor, physical propinquity is a constraint imposed by the technology, while a QR code, that constraint is imposed by the camera attempting to read it. Either way, you have to be close.

Both technologies act as a bridge for data. In the case of the pet sensor, it basically encodes a unique ID, which is then used to query against a database housed elsewhere, which holds the real information. In the case of the QR code, the same is basically true -- the real payload is after the redirect.

Either way, the mechanics aren't too different -- get close to something, read (or scan) it, and be taken to wherever the magic really happens.

In that it's a thing that's hidden in an object that you can scan for that identifies it and gives information about it.

there's no built-in call to action.

It's trivially and plainly better than a QR code on a physical object. Even if you did have to have a sticker on everything saying "I support Physical Web", the fact that I don't have to scan the sticker -- instead I can just click it in my phone -- makes it better. But I don't think you're using your imagination if you think you'd have to have a sticker on every single thing that broadcast itself. Let me use my imagination for a second.

When I enter a garage it would be nice to not have to look around for a QR sticker, reach my hand out of the car with my phone, and scan it. I would just know that when I enter a garage my top hit when I bring up the Physical Web (for lack of a better name) will almost certainly be the garage's interface to allow me to pay.

When I'm walking around a city it might be nice if I, casually browsing the Physical Web, could notice that someone near me is willing to sell bitcoins for cash-in-hand in a virtually untraceable transaction, without having to see and scan a QR code on that person's forehead.

It would be nice if I could set my phone to automatically tell me over headphones that the next bus is expected in N minutes whenever I walked up to a bus stop, all without requiring me to pull my phone out or take my gloves off in the middle of a Chicago winter.

You're just not thinking outside the box.

At least here in germany, the Snowden relevations have done a good deal to make people realize just much much data about them is on their net and how hard it is to control access to it.

Revelations like Apple using iPhones for large scale profiling of location histories and (much later) Samsung having its TVs report home with a history of viewed programs didn't put smart devices in a good light either.

In parallel, numerous hacker and data leak scandals taught the public that maybe data entrusted to the cloud isn't as secure as everyone promised.

Finally, many people only now start to realize just how much a paradigm shift the internet really caused and what some of the psychological and sociological implications might be: There is the (still vaguely defined) "internet" or "mobile addiction", there is the growing trend of viewing phone usage (or usage of other devices, i.e. Google Glass) during social gatherings as impolite, there is the whole discussion about what role privacy should play in the future, etc, etc.

All of this doesn't stop people from buying new phones, TVs, fitness bands, etc. But depending on who you ask, they do it with a growing bad conscience. If you try to introduce new technologies that have a higher cost and less obvious benefits (like smart homes), it might have an effect.

A store clerk recently invited me to download their app, and when I showed her that it requested every single permission, she was still baffled as to why I would want to cancel the download.

> Why can I find a shelf stocker in Target and he can use his li'l belt computer to tell me where anything is in the store, down to the shelf, and how many they have, but I can't have access to that information before I enter the store?

Home Depot's mobile app will tell you exactly where an item is on the shelf, including aisle, section, and level. They even have a map so you can find items that aren't on numbered aisles. It's fantastic.

"""

REST provides a set of architectural constraints that, when applied as a whole, emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems. I describe the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles, contrasting them to the constraints of other architectural styles.

"""

Amazon is one of the few companies that has actually committed to this. There's no reason the Internet of Things can't follow this pattern too.

[0] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm