As of the time writing this, my Twitter stream is full of mentions of the IoT London Meet Up. Undoubtedly, a lot is happening in London, but it should be possible to bring the people working on IoT in Berlin together for at least a one-off meet up.

So please, if you’re working on the Internet of Things, or know of anyone working on it in Berlin, please email or tweet and let me know!

Chris Heathcote, writing on the Dentsu London Blog about hacking the world with Arduino:

The ability to connect a £20 computer to the Internet and let it go about its business is novel, and it’s easy to connect up to other bits of the Internet as you require. The nanode is an Arduino clone that forgoes some of the ease-of-use in return for a an easy connection to the Internet and being incredibly cheap, Pachube acts as a switchboard and storage for your data, ifttt turns data from one form into another (if you want your board to Twitter or text you). These building blocks can be glued together in almost infinite ways.

Just coming out of two days of the Internet of Things Forum in which those matters were discussed on a rather formal and bureaucratic level (and about which I ranted here already,) this presents a completely different vision of what to do about this Internet of Things. And it incorporates one very important principle of the internet, which surprisingly often gets overlooked.

Here’s what Dave Winer says about it:

Loose-coupledness is a very key idea. For example, the roads I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge.

This is one of the core design principles of the Internet. In order to make it more resilient, applications are abstracted from the underlying connection methods. And it’s one of the core design principles that powers a lot of what we call Social Media / Web 2.0 — the ability to pipe data from one source to another by means of API/Data translation services like IFTTT or Yahoo Pipes.

We have seen this trend over and over in recent years. A webservice starts and the calls for a public API start almost immediately. And for good reason. The internet is a network of networks after all. It is a truth held to be self-evident at the current state of web innovation that API’s are a beneficial thing to have, ad there’s a drive to standardize the ways of how API’s are designed and behave to lower the barriers to entry even further, and thus increase the potential for experimentation.

We need this abstraction in IoT to make sure it really becomes an Internet of Things, not just mere Machine-2-Machine communication. And that’s why heralding the obvious logistics and warehouse management solutions as pioneering IoT apps is just wrong: this isn’t the internet. These are deeply integrated insular solutions. Stuff almost nobody can re-use.

Dave’s big reason for loosely coupled systems is this:

The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure. You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place.

This is equally true in the world of connected physical objects.

Do you know the internet-connected fridge? That poster child of past visions of the future, the zombie of Design Fiction that wanted to mark the “everything’s connected” scenario but somehow survived the inevitable purge and now refuses to die, the thing to ridicule the moment you see it (and the company that put money into it, for that matter.)

Well, it seems the thinking that went into the Internet Fridge is still alive and kicking in the world that claims ground in discussing the Internet of Things. Because the discussions are being had by players so entrenched in the status quo that they hardly can see beyond the next quarterly earnings statement or election cycle.

Take for instance this comment, whose source shall go unnamed:

Do I want to base my business model on a network of sensors of which I cannot tell how reliable they are or whether they are going to be there tomorrow at all?

Nevermind the fact that Pachube, the company you couldn’t not talk about here, built a business around exactly this premise, this is exactly the kind of thinking that discounts Social Media on the basis of it not being a verified and ‘credible’ news source.

Or take the constant insistence that we better come up with a definition of what this fabled and miraculous land of the Internet of Things is going to look like.

“Tell me, I want to know, what will this machinery do?”

You can’t define an ongoing technical shift of this magnitude, without either going into a such broad definition as to catch basically everything there is with it, or too small and exclusive as to shut important and emergent developments out of the wall you create.

Today marked the first meeting of the “Internet of Things – International Forum.” And it seems like an old-boys club discussing the roll-out of just another technical upgrade. What they’re missing is the profound implications of the simple statement which is: “Everything’ll be connected.”