Do I have acquired the super power to predict the future? Before the event Google I/O I was wondering what new products and features Google could announce. One of the products that I thought was a solution for home automation. After read the official announcement I realized that my prediction was right! Supernatural power? Off course not! In fact, it was quite obvious if you are involved in the smart environment area. It is a new market not very well explored yet, and believe me, with the new data that Google can potentially acquires it can creates new interesting services, and sure make money of it.

Google is going to get in our homes using the Android technology, in an initiative called Android@Home, which allows Android apps to discover, connect and communicate with appliances and devices in your home. These is a very powerful technology, I could speak for hours about cool services that we could create with it, but I’ll let those videos below speak for me:

Pretty cool, isn’t it? But for those people who are lost with so many standards for home automation as Z-Wave, Insteon, ZigBee, and so on, bad news! Google is introducing a new and proprietary one, at least it is suppose to be “open”.  Below it is a screenshot of the wireless LED bulbs (from Lighting Science) shown in the video, that works with this new technology.

Lighting Science Led

New partnerships with device manufactures soon will be announced, I am pretty sure. I am now curious to see the market reaction.

Yesterday I watched the movie The Social Network, the one about the founding of the social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits. I know that this movie is not new, but speaking about movies usually I watch them late. Anyway, I really liked this movie, maybe because I was expecting a boring documentary and instead I watched an exciting drama, or maybe just because I am a nerd and like all movies related to technology.

Facebook today is definitely one of the social networking website that I am using more, but it wasn’t like that three months ago. I have Facebook since 2005, and I kept this system basically to communicate with some friends in US and Europe, about 40 people in total. My main social networking website was Orkut, because in Brazil the most popular one was (or is) it (by the way, it is owned by Google). I can not affirm that it stills the most popular one, but among my friends is definitely not. Nowadays I rarely received one message in Orkut, and basically all my friends now have one account on Facebook. The curious thing is that it happened very fast, between the interval of three mounts. Yeah… the Web is always unpredictable. In this specifically situation there are some facts that could explain this phenomenon. Many people, taking me as an example, kept two accounts in similar systems (which is a waste of time), and in my opinion Facebook offers more interesting features. So many of my friends started to realize that creating a cascade phenomenon of migration to Facebook. I kind of miss using some features of Orkut, let’s wait for Google’s reaction.

Speaking about interesting features of Facebook, I really enjoy the “Like” button. I always thought that it was a brilliant idea. After reading one article about Social indexing (click here to access it), I start to think that this simple button is also very powerful.

“Many sites have tried to personalize what they offer by remembering your past behavior and showing information they presume will be relevant to you. But the social index could be much more powerful because it also mines your friends’ interests and collects information from multiple sites. As a result, the index can give websites a sense of what is likely to interest you even if you’ve never been there before.”

The code of the Like button is available to anyone add it in its website`s pages. If a user is logged in Facebook when it clicks in the Like button, of any page in Web, the link is shared with that person’s Facebook friends. This is a way to people express their interests on the Web. Many important websites use this feature, for instance Wall Street Journal.

Rely also in social networks information may be useful in web search. Google mathematically indexes the Web by scanning the hyperlinks between pages. This means that pages with many links from other sites appear on the top of search results, which is a great mechanism but it is not perfect for every needs. Using your friends’ opinions into account may be very interesting when you are searching for a restaurant, book, a place to stay or visit in a new city, and so on.

Since about 10,000 additional websites connect themselves to Facebook every day, I think soon we will see another interesting feature in Facebook, which will make me stick even more with this service.

Intra-body communication (IBC) is a wireless communications technology that uses a person’s body as the transmission medium for imperceptible electrical signals. Intra-body communication also allows data to be transferred when a person touches an IBC-enabled device. In order to know more details about this technology, take a look at the Zimmerman’s thesis.

The IBC study has started in the early 1990. Since then, numerous studies have been published, nevertheless this technology has not won mass adoption, maybe because it is not mature enough yet.

Most persons have behavioral patterns. For example, I usually wake up then take a shower, eat breakfast, brush my teeth, and then grab my stuff and leave to the office (of course, in this example I am being very brief). I can think of many services using IBC technology; one of them is behavior awareness, in other words, a service that tracks a user’s behavior to support him.

In order to track a user behavior at home it is necessary to have an IBC-enabled device in contact with the skin, for example his watch, and some key objects also IBC compliant. To track my morning behavioral pattern I should have in my house the fridge, the shower, my cell phone, my toothbrush, the stove, my room’s door, the house’s main door, and maybe some few more IBC compliant devices. When I touch those devices I would be enabling a communication channel between them and the watch. The watch could be designed to store data (what and when I touch) provided by my interaction with the objects. From time to time the watch could update the main computer in the home with the stored information (many other solutions also could be used). This computer would be responsible to work on the raw data and transform them into useful information, for example, identifying my morning behavioral pattern.

Adapting objects to be IBC compliant is not science fiction, actually here in Telecom Italia there are some trials going on. Those IBC compliant devices must have the technology (which could be embedded in some sort of tag), to transmit and receive information when in connection with other IBC compliant device. The idea is to use the human body as the connection link.

Once we have identified the user behavioral pattern it is possible to offer several services. Consider an elderly who lives by himself. Elderly may need some extra care, since they are more susceptible to fall, or have some health problems. If it is identified a very different behavioral pattern of the monitored person he might need help, in this case a computer in the house could call for help. The same idea could be applied to help any kind of people that need extra care.

I believe that intra-body communication is a technology with a great potential; I hope to see cool services becoming widespread soon.

Thoughts on a Smarter Planet is a special blogger series in partnership with leading IBM experts and Wired.com. In an article published some days ago, John Tolva (Director of Citizenship & Technology for IBM) poses an interesting question. What if we could take all the abstractions of a modern city (the movement of goods, the education, public safety, energy consumption…) and turn them into insights? If we think of a city as a set of systems that have some interactions, instead of just isolated systems we may understand better our city and be more prepared to contribute with smart solutions.

I realize that IBM is very active in helping cities to become smarter. There are several initiatives in that direction, like: The Smarter City, Smart Cities Challenge, and City Forward. Regarding to the latter take a look at this video:

City Forward is a new interactive tool from IBM that helps us reveal abstract data into insights. Citizens, government officials and academics can use City Forward to gather, compare, analyze, visualize, and discuss statistical trends that reflect the vibrancy of cities all over the world. Tools like City Forward help us ask better questions and produce better answers.

For the first time, more than 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities, and by 2050 70 percent of people will be living in cities, with at least 27 “megacities” of 10 million people, compared to 19 of today (see this link). As the city grows the resources not necessarily increase. One system that is very crucial for the cities is the electric system, and in many cases the present system is not well prepared to meet new demands. That is why initiatives as Smart Grids are very important.

Here at Future Centre most of our contributions to smart cities are focussing on energy systems. As other systems in the city, there are many abstractions in the energy system (and in its subsystems) that could provide better insight with the right analysis. We look forward to contributing in that direction.

According to IBM, by 2013, there will be  1.2 billion connected electronic devices (sensor, appliances, meters, transformers, wind turbines, rooftop solar panels and so on), in more than 800 million homes with broadband Internet access. This network is called Internet of Things, IoT. With that, we have an opportunity to make our homes smarter.

Taking into account energy consumption the IoT could unleash several new services to save energy. Imagine our refrigerator being automatically adjusted based on the weather, the lights turning off if we have enough light coming from outside, our washer and dryer determining water temperature and wash/rinse/dry time based on load volume, dirt level and time-of-day energy rates, etc.

Your smart home may looks like this, normal.

In order to have smart services like these and achieve optimum efficiency, which is after all the idea behind a smart grid, it is necessary to link many millions of devices across our entire electrical, and communication infrastructure.  With all devices communicating one another there will be a lot of data traveling back and forth in many directions. It is hard to estimate how much data, but I truly believe that it will be a “huuuuge” amount.  Being able to deal with a massive volume of data that need to be processed cheaply in order to monetize value is a key element for this area, but of course there are other challenges like the design of algorithms to offer smart services, and so on.

Cloud computing has been one of the biggest trends for computing and the web of the past decade. Bringing the management of that massive volume of data to cloud computing style services could be an interesting opportunity for the main players in the game of smarter services for energy consumption, as utility industry, and Telecom Operators. Sure new applications and services (previously unthinkable) will come to light, in all shapes and sizes. But I tend to believe that the Internet of thing and cloud computing are meant to each other.

This year at the Detroit Auto Show (Detroit’s North American International Auto Show – NAIAS), electric vehicles (EVs) representing both luxury and workaday segments of the auto market show that outlet-fueled cars are no longer a niche. It means that very soon electric vehicles will be gradually introduced to the market.

The introduction of electric vehicles (EV) in the market has to be well studied. The present grid has not been designed to support the extra load that will be induced by EVs. An overload on the transformer serving the neighborhood may blow the transformer and result in an outage. According to a prediction announced by IDC, this year 28,000 electrical vehicles will hit the road, and by 2015 the annual electric vehicles sales will reach 300,000, considering the European, Middle East and African markets. With the increasing popularity of electric cars utilities will have a better idea of the potential problem. Therefore, the impact of a large scale introduction of electrical vehicles in the market deserves deep investigation.

There are several initiatives focusing on this issue. Just to name a few, Grid for Vehicles (G4V) intends to analyze the impact of a mass introduction of electric vehicles on the electricity networks in Europe. Microsoft Hohm and Ford are partnering to make it easier to manage the energy use of electric vehicles; it may help car owners efficiently recharge their vehicles. Those are key initiatives, but besides that it is also very important to invest in consumer education.

It is possible to build systems that work without user intervention, for example a smart house that charges a car on the best period, let’s say, off peak times. However, in my opinion, users have to be always in control, in other words they should have the possibility to choose the use of this functionality or not. That is why for the success of this kind of tool, and to prevent a Grid failure, we need to invest also in consumer education. As long as consumers are taught to charge their cars, as well as other appliances, during off-peak demand periods, to smooth the load, we can avoid several problems.

Since private charging spots will be the most important “refuel” infrastructure (based also in one of the IDC’s predictions), soon we may need an extra plug in our homes to charge our cars!

All of this means control and may be this is where telecommunications may find its role. Coordinating different vehicles to ensure a load balance may be as important as consumer education and the redesign of the Grid.

Google Earth is a service, provided by Google, which allows the users the possibility of viewing satellite images.  This application also offers 3D visualization of some cities, for example New York.

We have cameras everywhere

Nowadays, Google Earth does not offer real time visualizations. This means that the users only have access to static images. In a near future, users will experience interesting extensions of this application. For instance, as we already have many cameras deployed around the world, it will soon be possible to mash some of those live video streams on Google Earth thus connecting the location where those videos are being recorded. One can also deploy new cameras specifically for this purpose.

With this new service, the users will have the possibility to visualize, in real time, many places of different parts of the Earth. Take a user interested in a safari: he could interact with the application, find a safari area, and then watch a live video stream of the safari. With the bandwidth speed offered by optical fiber, this user would have the possibility to receive a high definition video of the safari, making his experience more realistic.

This technology has some privacy issues. Real time videos may show people, buildings and cars in the location that it is being recorded. It is necessary to develop technologies to address those issues. For example, a mechanism to blur faces in live videos, something similar with the technology that Google Street View uses  for images. Dealing with both legal requirements and social norms is hard but it is  a must.

I believe that soon the users may have the sensation that they are in a real safari area, or several other places, from their couch in the living room.

Smart Grids are receiving a lot of attention, from the highest levels of global government to technology and utility players. Smart Grids integrate advanced sensing technologies, control methods and integrated communications into current electricity grid. One of its goals is safe energy (to learn more click here).

Recently, at CES 2011 (www.cesweb.org), LG announced its new LG THINQ Technology, which is composed by a new range of smart appliances, and a package of services for smart homes (to learn more click here). It is a complete smart solution that lets consumers manage their homes in a more centralized and convenient way (even by mobile devices). One of its benefits is the reduction of energy consumption.

LG smart appliances with THINQ Technology

Working together with a smart grid meter the LG’s system can, for example, schedule the washing machine to run at the most economical times. Four appliances were announced as compliant with this technology: a washer, a dryer, an oven, and a refrigerator. Besides the smart behavior of those appliances, this technology is composed by some other functionalities. One of them is called LG Smart Diagnosis, which has many features to help in troubleshooting. For example, the appliance alerts the owner, either on its display panel or for future models via Wi-Fi connection, that his washing machine is off-balance, and so on.

Certainly this is a great technology. With it we can save energy consumption, and have a smarter control of our appliances. But I was thinking to myself if I would buy that solution for my home. I am not complaining about the number of appliances announced, I am pretty sure that LG will announce many others soon, but about the fact of being tied to just one company. I want to have a smart home, but not necessarily have to buy every appliance from the same manufacturer. At least the official announcement does not mention the opposite. From a consumer point of view, an open protocol, enabling communication among appliances of different manufacturers is more interesting. I really believe that it is time for my refrigerator to talk to me. But maybe the lack of open standards can hamper the mass adoption of this LG’s new technology.