In our everyday life we don’t need to look for a barcode on an apple in supermarket to tell us that is an apple. Still, when a computer at the cash register wants to know what that object is you need to have a barcode sticked on to it.

No more! Toshiba is moving object recognition a step further to let computer look at object and understand what they are through image recognition.

Take a look a t this supermarket:

This is a nice step forward. It gets us closer to the Internet WITH Things, since it is no longer needed to place an identifier on an object to let a computer recognize it. And the computer doing this trick, in a few years, will be the one in your cell phone. It is so natural to imagining using your cell phone as a magnifier lens, through its camera, picking up the object through the lens and connecting it (its identity) to a mirror object in the web. That digital object will be loaded with all kind of services, and information, you, and third parties, can dream about. And this will open up a completely new usage of the internet, a new perception of the ambient we live in and huge business opportunities.

First go and take a look at this article:

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26965/?nlid=3905

Million of packages are handled every single night at the Memphis hub

You’ll discover an amazing world, the hub of FedEx in Memphis where in just 5 hours land and take off 200 planes, one every 90 seconds, arriving and going to very corner in the world. In half an hour they are unloaded and reloaded with robots taking care of “packet switching” and those are real packets -;). The latest record was the switching of 16 million packets in 5 hours.

All of this thanks to an amazing tracking systems that knows where each packet is and where it should be in the next minute. The whole site covers 36 square km, a medium size city.

Well, having sad that, what could be bigger than FedEx super hub in Memphis? Today, nothing.

Tomorrow, everything.

Just imagine every single object having a tag and being precisely located from remote. Imagine RFID chips communicating one another in a mesh network that can be accessed from your phone to be able to retrieve your lost keys (that is the promise made by Serge Brin two years ago to be able to find your lost key googling for it on their search engine by 2018). The while word can, and my bet is, will become a super hub.

We are already seeing the first indication. With Apple Mobile me you are able to track where your laptop, iPhone, iPad is and act on it (like erasing data if it has been stolen). In a few years LTE will provide global and micro coverage (by interfacing with WiFI and PAN/BAN) and every object potentially can be on the web ready to be googled.

Imagine the number of services that will become available taking advantage of that. Personally, I can only say that whatever I can imagine now will be only a minuscule fraction of what will indeed be available.

It is a new world, and we are just starting now. Everything has to be invented!

If only that apple could talk!

Those of you who grew up in the past, as I did, surely remember the Snow White fairy tale: she ate the poisoned apple and fell to the spell of the wicked witch. Had she knew that the apple was poisoned she could have steered clear of the danger (but we would have lost a nice tale).

Now five universities have teamed to make it possible associating text, images and video clips to any object: the Tales of Thing project. http://www.physorg.com/news192270399.html

They have created a website, talesofthings.com,  where people can associate comments, text/images/clips, to an object. They will create a tag that can be placed on the object and read by a iPhone or Android cell phone to retrieve those comments. You may to try the apps on the iPhone, http://www.physorg.com/tags/iphone/.

This creation of a link between an object and information associated resonate with the ideas we put forward at the Future Centre last year on the Atoms and Bits project. What we envisaged was a world where any object (cluster of atoms) would be mirrored in the web and that mirror could be used to associate information and services. By using the link between the object and its mirroring counterpart one could access all what has been associated to it.

It is nice to see that our scenario is taking a concrete shape!