SmartSensors
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Microsoft unites with former exec in building a 'smart city' in Portugal
If you want better cities, goes the theory herein, you'll have to start at their very foundations. Steve Lewis, ex-Microsoftie and current CEO of Living PlanIT, has a vision for how to make our cities smarter and more sustainable, and it starts literally at ground level, with the installation of smart sensors into buildings as they're being built. The appeal of his company's ideas has already attracted some tech luminaries as partners, Cisco being among them, and now Microsoft has also been signed up -- to provide the cloud framework required to keep all those sensors talking with its Azure platform. Paredes, a Portuguese municipality, will play host to one of the first such projects, eventually providing homes for nearly a quarter of a million people and costing a staggering €10 billion ($14.1b) to complete. To understand the synergistic benefits of having your life monitored by an omniscient Urban Operating System sentinel, skip past the break for a press release and explanatory video.
Green Goose sensors monitor your life, you earn experience points (update)
We're pretty certain that once embedded wireless sensors catch on, they'll pervade every aspect of our lives, and Green Goose is building a microcosm of that eventuality in the form of a role-playing game. The five-person SF Bay Area startup has embedded custom 915MHz radios and MEMS accelerometers in a variety of tiny transmitters which you can mount to household objects -- like a water bottle, bicycle, or the toothbrush above -- which report back to the receiver with your actions and thereby increase your score. Brush your teeth on time, take your vitamins, or exercise repeatedly within a couple hundred feet of the receiver, and you'll eventually level up. (Or, optionally, muck with the sensor just right, and it'll register points anyhow.) Presently, that level isn't worth anything, but founder Brian Krejcarek says there are tentative plans to tie these points into a real game and an API to build the idea out, and he's presently looking for partner companies here at the Launch Conference in San Francisco to help roll out the sensors (which cost approximately $4 each) under branded marketing initiatives of some sort. If you don't want to wait, the company will sell starter kits starting February 28th for $24. Not bad for a head start on the future, right? Update: VentureBeat reports that Green Goose raised $100,000 in funding at the conference. Another interesting note: ReadWriteWeb reports that the sensors were originally pitched as a money-saving tool. Update 2: $100,000, not $100 million. Whoops. %Gallery-117463%
NC State gurus create harder, better, faster, stronger 'smart sensors'
The year is 1974. Skywalker lives, and a tradition is born. The year is 1983. The odds are ridiculous. The final score leads to an unpremeditated running around the court that'll live forever in history. Fast forward to 2010, and NC State is hanging onto advancements in science while the blued neighbors in Durham and Chapel-Hill are celebrating back-to-back titles. Regardless of all that, we're still pretty proud of Dr. Jay Narayan and company, who have just uncovered a new "smart sensor" that will allow for "faster response times from military applications." Essentially, the team has taken a sensor material called vanadium oxide and integrated it with a silicon chip, forcing the sensor to become a part of the computer chip itself. The new approach leads to intelligent sensors that can "sense, manipulate and respond to information" in a much faster manner than before, providing soldiers with weapons and analyzing tools that can react more hastily to incoming ammunition or other, um, pertinent information. It's no banner hanging ceremony, but we'll take what we can get.
