The Social side of the Internet of Things

With so much talk about social networks, E2.0, collaboration etc, it was a nice reminder from Kim Nash about the Internet of Things – sensors , robots, RFID tags etc. As many episodes from my book extracted below show, they are helping us with an amazing range of activities and they are chattering with each other and with us in far greater volume than even the most of social humans do with each other.

• ”On YouTube, you can see a video where the employees at a Zappos
  warehouse based in Kentucky actually had a derby for their robots. The winner, not too surprisingly, was a robot named Robotariat, as in Secretariat, the thoroughbred legend who won the Triple Crown in 1973…Instead of having people walking around and looking for ordered items, the robots (from Kiva) do the running around and bring the items to the workers, who check the orders and seal them in shipping boxes.”
• “… the wearIT@work project, financed by the European
  Union,  is piloting wearable technology for aircraft maintenance among other applications. A vest allows maintenance engineers on aircraft to have hands-free access (via a head-mounted display) to data from onboard systems, repair manuals, spare parts availability, and communication with other colleagues.”
• “Cities around the world have been enthusiastic sensor adopters. The
  city of San Francisco, for example, uses sensors to alert citizens about open parking spots via displays on street signs, or on screens of their smartphones. Stockholm uses sensors to monitor peak-hour traffic. York, Pennsylvania, has sensors that monitor for gunshot sounds to alert emergency services. Cambridge, Massachusetts, has sensors to monitor air quality. Under its BioWatch program, the U.S. Homeland Security Department has been deploying air sensors in several cities to detect the presence of potential biological weapons.”
• “(Tony McCormack’s) cows (in Ireland) have transponders that help him customize the quantity and composition of feed for each one. Try doing that manually, when cows eat on average eight times a day. On large farms, farmers use GPS to apply fertilizers more precisely. McCormack gets animated when he describes how he had heard GPS tracking had helped track down stolen tractors being shipped to Poland.”
• “In 1981, the band Styx famously sang “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto” that’s “thank you” in Japanese…