my name is mwd

I’m a big believer of the “Internet of Things” concept – that is, having everything (you and all the stuff you own) on the network talking to each other. The product I work on, CODA, is part of that – it’s an output for network data sources; AlertMe puts our house on the network so I can query it; our Nabaztag acts as both a networked output (telling us the time, weather, and just what’s on its mind) and an input (I use it to control what’s on my CODA screen).

However, when people think of the Internet of Things, they tend to just think of the things themselves, but that’s only part of the story. What makes the things interesting and useful is the data they can exchange. CODA is useful because it fetched data I wanted to see and put it in front of me; the Nabaztag is useful because it can sing data to me from the network. But to make these things really useful, I need someone on the network to keep my data. Often services like CODA and so on have their own data repositories, but what if they don’t? Where can I start to put data so that it’s in the network ready to be used in lots of interesting ways?

Timetric are filling part of that gap. Timetric provides a place to store time series data streams on the network, where you can access it via their website, as an embedded player in your own website, or via their API to allow the things to view the data. Below is our home broadband usage for the last two years:

You can see their nice little embedded player lets you query the data in real time – as they describe it it’s like “Excel meets YouTube” :)

I’ve also used it at home to let me view my home energy data in the way I want to view it. We have a CurrentCost home energy monitor, but I want to see more information that its simple display will allow. So I’ve used Timetric as the glue between my network attached home energy monitoring device (the CurrentCost is plugged into a Mac Mini) and our CODA display in the kitchen, so at a glance in the morning I can see how our last 24 hour’s energy usage has been:

Sure, I could have knocked something up without using Timetric for that, but it’d have taken me a lot longer and a lot more effort and been less good. The smart folk at Timetric (Dan, Toby, and Andrew) have done the hard work so people like me can just plug things together to do cool stuff!

So, if you’re looking to put together a project that needs to put data somewhere on the network and have that data used, give them a go.