The Urban Internet of Things workshop kicked off in the IBM Japan Hakozaki Headquarters “Solution Centre” with several presentations and demos including Arup’s Engin and Shane and Mayra presenting a well received “TenderVoice / TenderNoise: A two-faceted web-based community journalism and acoustic ecology project“.

IBM think - Tokyo RFID Service Centre

The discussion part of the event took place in the afternoon / evening at Tokyo Hackspace with prompts from several participants including the LIVE Singapore! project which has some interesting data which is going to be made public in the near future.

Tokyo backspace

The conference itself had keynotes by IBM and Cisco (IPSO) which probably reflects the general perception of where IoT work is taking place at the moment. Norishige Morimoto, Director, IBM Research – Tokyo spoke about “Advanced Technology for Smarter Cities” giving some great examples of the work IBM are doing as part of their Smarter Planet work and focused on stressing the collaborative nature of these projects.

Evolution of a Smarter Planet

Patrick Wetterwald, Smart Grid and IoT Product Marketing for CISCO (and IPSO Alliance President / European Community IoT expert group member) gave an excellent presentation exploring the CISCO view of end to end IP connectivity for smart objects and the current transition from “business and consumer” focus of the web to it’s “industrialisation”. He touched on many of the issues that are being addressed by projects such as SENSEI and the work that the IPSO Alliance are doing to communicate the work of the IETF on building the standards that will influence the basis of the future internet.

Industrialisation of IoT

Interesting discussions – what is the infrastructure to support and nurture connectivity? how to connect resources? how to discover resources available? lots of talk about RESTful architectures [several examples presented but this is a good summary] and interesting mentions for Pachube, sensor.network, dyser, MAGIC Broker 2

twitter feed from the event

photos on Flickr