TEDxBeaconStreet: Moving Past Internet of Things Novelty to Build Smart Urban Water Systems with Geosyntec and ioBridge

February 12, 2014 By

You have no doubt been hearing about the Internet of Things. Internet of Things. Internet of Things. The current issue is we are in the novelty phase with IoT. Walking the floors at CES, shows us consumer products that simply just added a remote control aspect to a product but not much thinking beyond that. If we stick with just adding some remote control functionality, we are missing the point of the Internet of Things. Geosyntec was the first partner at ioBridge back in 2009 — Geosyntec is an amazing environmental consulting company that is thinking outside of the box and pushing smart city initiates by leveraging Internet of Things concepts and technology created by ioBridge.

TEDx Talk Geosyntec ioBridge Wi-Fi IoT

Marcus Quigley, Principal Civil and Water Resources Engineer at Geosyntec, delivered a TEDx Talk at Beacon Street, called, “Designing Smart Urban Water Systems”. The stunning revelation comes when he shows the audience an ioBridge IO-201 Wi-Fi Gateway that is capable of connecting water systems to cloud services that optimize and analyze water utilization on a large scale. The shocker is that the whole thing could be interface for less than $100! And the awesome part, this is possible today, not speculation, not the future — Internet of Things is here. We are really proud of the accomplishments Geosyntec has made and love watching the disruption of old ideas and seeing the invention of a whole new solution.

“As a society, we are re-thinking these assumptions and looking more closely at the choices we make and how the actions we take affect the value of water,” said Marcus Quigley, Principal Civil and Water Resources Engineer at Geosyntec. “I feel we’re on the cusp of a fundamental revolution of re-inventing our cities, and it has to do with all of the things that you guys have sitting in your pockets: wireless devices connected to the Internet.”

The full TEDx Talk is available on the TEDx YouTube Channel.

[via Geosyntec]

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From Toasters to Smart Cities, See How ioBridge is Building the Internet of Things

March 7, 2013 By

What is the internet of things?

This might be a question that you have been asking lately as we all keep hearing more about smart things and connected devices. “Internet of Things” concepts were introduced to us over 10-15 years and have shifted from humble object tagging ideas to much more sophisticated concepts. We believe the Internet of Things is an ecosystem of devices and systems interacting with each other using the Internet on behalf of people. This interaction may produce automation systems, social entanglement with our objects, efficiency in systems, brand new product categories, and meaningful analytics.

Claudia Bracholdt of Quartz recently invited Robert Mawrey, CEO of ioBridge, to share our experience and view-point on the Internet of Things. In the following YouTube video, Robert discusses the Tweeting Toaster (@mytoaster) and demonstrates a smart plug that is able to be controlled by a smart phone and social interaction. The smart plug is powered by the ioBridge Iota Wi-Fi Module making anything smart and cloud-connected. Manufacturers use the Iota module or a reference design in many products when they are looking to build scalable, stable, and secure connected products and services.

Using the ioBridge platform, known as RealTime.io (real-time input and output), users are able to build all kinds of interactions among things, people, and apps. RealTime.io provides social context such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare and system context with Email, back-end systems, weather systems, analytic processing, and voice services such as Twilio. Robert mentioned a “tweeting toaster” which tweets when it is in use. This was created over 5 years ago and has stirred up many conversations about connected objects. The idea is not to stop at this humorous example. We ask ourselves, “What does this mean?” and “What else can we do?” Knowing if a toaster is in use can tell us the power consumption of the appliance. What if this was not a toaster but a washer and dryer? You could get notified at laundry mat that your laundry is ready. Instead of a public output to Twitter, how about to sending notifications to phones. This could have been a medical device that is out of spec and alerts you that you need calibration or service and possibly do that calibration remotely.

Social Appliances, Laundry Mats, Powered by ioBridge and the Internet of Things

What else could you do? How about building a smart city. This is exactly what Geosyntec did with the ioBridge platform and devices. Instead of reacting to Twitter, water systems in cities react to weather conditions read in from weather websites, remote locations, local sensors, and now have the ability to make real-time control decisions in determining how water is collected, routed, and used efficiently.

How The "Internet Of Things" Is Turning Cities Into Living Organisms

Again, the idea is to keep pushing the ideas further. With ioBridge, we make it possible to create all kinds of newly imagined ideas. Let’s keep the conversation going… Please contact us and see how we can work together and build amazing new things.

[via Quartz]

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Stormwater Management and Why it’s Big for the Internet of Things

December 16, 2011 By

ioBridge and one of our partners Geosyntec has had a lot of buzz lately.  Geosyntec has been using ioBridge’s “Internet of Things” platform of hardware and software to solve BIG problems in the area of stormwater and rain water management.

The article in Scientific American and Fast Company titled How the “Internet of Things” Is Turning Cities Into Living Organism talks about how this solution is a great example of using “Internet of Things” to immediately affect the environments we live in. I especially enjoyed the analogy of the sensors in the city being the “virtual nervous system”.

“By using the Internet to connect real-world sensors and control mechanisms to cloud-based control systems that can pull in streams from any other data source, including weather reports, these efforts enable conservation and money-saving measures that would have been impossible without this virtual nervous system.”

(Even Chris Anderson of Wired / The Long Tail gave this definition of the Internet of Things a ringing endorsement.)

Why this is BIG for the Internet of Things

I feel like this is all just the tip of the iceberg for the “Internet of Things”.  Solving problems like stormwater management are proving that the “Internet of Things” has a big part in solving real world problems, not just tweeting toasters.

Here’s a recipe:

1) Existing data / trends / models (i.e. weather, tides, sunlight)

2) Real time data (i.e. temperature, pressure, humidity, light)

3) “Things” that need to be controlled (i.e. fans, valves, motors)

4) Platforms for the “Internet of Things” (like what ioBridge makes)

Take a few parts real-time data analysis with existing data / trends / model, decide how and when the things that need to be controlled should function, then mix moderately with a platform for the “Internet of Things”.  What can it be used for?  This recipe goes well with agriculture, infrastructure, energy, water…   In the end you’ll have a way to solve many large real-time problems.

As you can see, most of the components 1-3 have already existed for years.  It is the recent emergence of platforms for the “Internet of Things” that provides that last mile to connect it all together and makes  automatically solving real problems in real-time a reality.

Yeah… It’s kind of a big deal.

[via Scientific American / Fast Company / Wall Street Journal ]

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