Widenoise just released by WideTag

Even the longest journey starts with the first step… As WideTag releases WideNoise I feel this is the best way to describe the event because WideTag’s stated destination is to be a leading player when the Internet of Things becomes reality.

As WideTag’s CTO often says, there is a still a hell of a lot of stuff missing from the real world for the Internet of Things to happen, but one ought to start with what we’ve got, include new stuff that is coming up and build whatever is missing.

WideNoise, designed by a beautiful team released yesterday as an iPhone application that allows you to socially share data about the noise level at a specific location, is very much the result of this very pragmatic approach: use an existing networked device that has at least one sensor embedded to offer a first application of a “spime”. What’s a spime? It’s a device capable of recording and transmitting location coordinates as well as information about its immediate surrounding, e.g. temperature, carbon dioxide concentration… Now, spimes are likely to play a prominent role in the Internet of Things. Although it’s quite geeky as a concept (if you’re interested read this), there are three reasons why it’s noteworthy:

1. spimes will be (already are) all over the place in a matter of a few years using technologies (RFID, GSM, GPRS, GPS, GoogleMaps…) that only need assembling


2. with the environmental crisis we need to measure our “physical” world in order to make smarter (micro-)decisions from whether to use a car to how to manage the powergrid dynamically


3. the flow of data that will be captured will in part BELONG TO YOU so you don’t want it taken from you without your consent or in a way that is so proprietary you can’t control it, which is one of the reasons why WideTag seeks to make things open, something it started doing with OpenSpime, an initiative aimed at offering open protocols and technologies to the world for building and operating the spimes of the future

In fact, Widenoise is also a bridge between the “pure vision” of the Internet of Things (where objects are supposed to exchange information and form self-configuring networks for relaying the data) and today’s reality of applied technology becoming increasingly “social” and hybrid in that it mixes hardware, software and people to create value for participants. So has WideTag managed to make noise social as a very nice post of this morning claims?