Top 10 Internet of Things Developments of 2010

Nike + shoes

Nike+ running shoes are possibly the most well-known example of sensors in a non computing device. The shoes come with a sensor that tracks your run and sends the data to your iPod. It even has its own social network and can automatically tweet and post a status report on Facebook. Later in the year, we also discovered that Nike + can be set up to automatically post to Foursquare.

Nike + showed that the Internet of Things is already part of our everyday life, at least for those people who are motivated to track their running!

AutoBot

While the Nike + shoes have already arrived, a product that is still in private beta impressed us enough this year to also be included in our annual top 10.The winner of the Consumer Electronics Association’s i-Stage competition (where I was a judge) was AutoBot. Developed by Louisville, Kentucky company Mavizon Technologies, AutoBot is a car appliance that allows you to control aspects of your car with your smart phone. It also connects to the Web and offers integration with services like online mapping and instant messaging.

The AutoBot device plugs into the OBD-II connector in your car. It then syncs to a web service, accessible via a smart phone app or a web browser. Features include locking and unlocking doors, controlling window settings, locating your car if you forget where you parked or it gets stolen, doing diagnostic checks on your car, and messaging friends and family when the driver has been in an accident.

The appliance will become available next year, but already it’s a great example of smartly connecting an object millions of people use every day (a car) to the Internet.

Pachube

Pachube (pronounced "PATCH-bay") was on our Top 10 list last year and this open IoT platform continued to progress in 2010. Pachube lets you tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments both physical and virtual. The goal is for it to become a platform that is responsive to and influences your environment – for example your home.

A glimpse of what products may look like built on an Internet of Things platform is the partnership Pachube announced in June this year. It’s with Current Cost, a producer of real-time energy monitors. Current Cost is using Pachube’s Internet of Things platform for the Bridge, an ethernet device that connects Current Cost electricity monitors to the Internet. Pachube is being used for data management on the Bridge, enabling the device to deliver tracking, notifications, comparison tools and more.

Arduino

In 2010 the clear leader in capturing the IoT hobbyist’s imagination was Arduino. In recent months the company’s blog feed has seen a steady increase in posts about interesting things people are doing with their Arduinos.

Not only is it the first company to have a popular documentary with a trailer that earned 75,000 views in one day, but they are also designing with an eye to the future by educating the next generation of programmers. ReadWriteWeb’s Audrey Waters explained what Arduino is in a recent post:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform with both a hardware and software component. Arduino’s hardware is programmed with a language similar to C++, and although it may not be the easiest of entry points for learning programming, there’s something about building things that actually move that can be pretty compelling. Projects that use Arduino to introduce children to programming include a modification of Scratch to support simple programming on the Arduino hardware

Arrayent

Arrayent is a new Internet of Things company that came across our radar early this year. It bills itself as the “Cisco of small things.” It is basically middleware for companies wanting to connect their products to the Internet. In particular it’s targeting smartphones. Arrayent made its first public appearance in January at CES.

Arrayent offers a "turnkey communication system" called the Internet-Connect System, which enables product companies to connect their products to smartphones and computers via the Internet. It counts toy company Mattel and audio/video components supplier Monster Cable among its early customers.

We think Arrayent is a great example of a startup seeing a commercial opportunity in the type of Internet of Things experimentation that Arduino exemplifies. As more and more objects become connected to the Internet, it will need the likes of Arrayent to be enablers.

There you have it, our pick of the top 10 Internet of Things developments or products in 2010. Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Green Home photo by Svilen Milev.

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