Here’s a scenario seemingly from the future. Imagine a world of connected things, lets call it the Internet of Things. There are lots of useful data around us in our environment. There are lots of useful things we may want to know about and may want to interactive with remotely (in a different space and time). If every thing had a voice, there would be a lot of data to collect and to make meaningful. If we can do it, we would be connected to our environments.

This is not as far off as it sounds. The ioBridge Platform was created to make it easy to connect anything to the web, store data from sensors, relay data to other networks, and present the data on websites. People are already creating very interesting projects, products, and services on top of the platform. And everyday we are surprised by the diversity of the projects.

The Internet Doorbell

Now joining the Internet of Things…The Doorbell. The Internet Doorbell project is by Jason Garland. He created a super easy project that connects his doorbell live to Twitter or really any social network via Ping.fm and ioBridge push services. The instant someone presses his doorbell, the doorbell updates the input status on the ioBridge IO-204 and pushes the message to ioBridge and Ping.fm which updates Twitter (@jgarland79). This is a first step, just think of where it could take you. One day your doorbell gets pressed, you get notified, and you start up a voice-over-IP session with your intercom system. You could interact with (or annoy) your visitor from anywhere in the world.

Check out Jason’s blog for more details on the Twittering Doorbell and other very interesting projects. We also noticed a web-enabled water meter updating water usage.

On a related project, one of our Maker Faire projects this year was the “transcontinental doorbell” – involving two IO-204s linked together. When the doorbell button at one site is pressed it rings a doorbell 2000 miles away in less than 300ms.