The Connective

Adding the Internet to an appliance takes a lot more than scooting it closer to a router. Connectivity is only half the battle; today’s (useful) smart appliances also require a simplified way of sharing diagnostic and maintenance data with manufacturers and users alike.

Ayla Networks is one of a growing crop of companies focused on bridging this gap. By offering its WiFi modules, apps, and cloud-based services directly to appliance manufactures, the venture-backed startup hopes to become one of the premier platforms for the coming Internet of Things.

The Connective caught up with Ayla Networks CEO, David Friedman, to discuss the ins and outs of the platform and the reasons behind the delay of the connected home.

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A New Type of Car Share Service Uses Connected Vehicles To Link Drivers

Owning a car in a city sucks. Everything costs tons of money: fuel, oil changes, parking, parking tickets, registration, insurance premiums, speeding tickets. And god forbid anything goes wrong with the car. Blown head gaskets, electrical system failures, body repair. And do you have any idea how much it costs to rebuild a transmission? Add to that the time involved with looking for parking, waiting in endless lines at the DMV, and the fact that pothole filled city streets slowly destroy your suspension. Bro, have you ever even been booted?

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The rise of the connected door lock means more peace of mind at home.

Home security systems range in complexity from a baseball bat perched next to a nightstand to super complex multi camera/sensor alarm systems that can be monitored from anywhere in the world by a crack team of technicians.

But the baseball bat often proves to be a little too brute force (not to mention messy if you actually have to use it) while those super complex systems are also super expensive. That’s why most of us rely on deadbolt locks to secure our home and valuables while we’re away. And if you think this technology hasn’t changed recently think again.

A new breed of internet connected locks are hitting the market that can be opened with a wave of a finger, be monitored from a smartphone, and even sense if there’s a nefarious individual nearby. Here’s how to tell which lock is right for you.

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Good news research wonks: the Digital Public Library of America has finally opened to the public. As the U.S.’s first all-digital national public library, the DPLA facilitates access to a huge collection of reference materials from the digital vaults of museums, academia, archives, and regional libraries.

What’s the secret behind the DPLA’s massive pool of materials? Lots of data sharing. Instead of storing materials on its own servers, the DPLA aggregates metadata that points to digital objects—i.e., books, photos, maps, and newspapers—found in Internet-accessible archives and collections across the country. Here’s a look at how the DPLA funnels all that culturally-rich data into its e-stacks.

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Electric Imp is on a mission to make the world a more connected place. And all you need to do is grab one of its chips.

“This,” Tom Buttner says proudly, “is the fully automated camera we’ll have installed at Maker Faire.”

Buttner is a Systems Engineer at Electric Imp, a California based company that specializes in connecting everyday objects (read: anything that’s not your computer) to the Internet. I’m standing in a small but energetic test lab in the company’s Bay Area headquarters where Buttner and his teammates have used Electric Imp tech to hack a small VGA camera that can be manipulated remotely by users at Maker Faire, a week long event held in the Bay Area where everyone from garage hackers to large tech companies will be on hand to show off their work. When I ask him why he did this he merely flashes a grin. “Why not?”

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Google I/O wasn’t only about keynotes and product announcements. The search giant’s annual developer conference also doubled as a sprawling data collection experiment.

As attendees buzzed from event to event inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center, a custom-built network of sensors collected info on everything from foot traffic to ambient air quality. Meta-minded conference goers could even follow the flow of data with real-time graphs and visualizations displayed on-site.

For conference goers, the project was a slick illustration of data distribution via Google’s cloud-based muscle. For the small team of data scientists running things behind the scenes–incorporated as the O’Reilly Data Sensing Lab–the project was real-world info gathering at its finest: rich, complicated, informative, and messy.

The Connective caught up with Alasdair Allan, project lead and Data Sensing Lab fellow, to get an inside look at the I/O data experiment and discuss the inevitability of a sensor-filled society.

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Driving nine miles east from the ocean toward Los Angeles’s city center on the Santa Monica freeway brings drivers upon a cluster of swirling on and off ramp loops that, from above, roughly form a four-leaf clover. But passing over S. La Brea Avenue doesn’t often leave drivers feeling particularly lucky. The freeway was designed to provide rapid transport for Angelinos traveling to the ocean and back, but today the thoroughfare is clogged with regular traffic. Real time data reveals how weather, car density, and commute time play out for drivers often at a snail’s pace between Culver City and Mid City. The experience is no trip to the beach.

Check out the current road conditions here!

After spending 48 hours furiously writing, editing, and designing (and many, many more hours anxiously awaiting its final release), we’re so thrilled to announce that The Connective, a crowd-sourced magazine created in a single weekend, is finally live and available for download. You can find it in the Wired container. Now go get it!

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The very best NFC technology will be integrated into clothes, body, and beyond.

Near field communication, or NFC technology, is a wireless system that allows phones to swap data with other devices when they’re close together. NFC has been used to do everything from paying bills to swapping virtual business cards. But now the technology is popping up in places you might never expect: your clothes, your body, and yes even your pets.

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Here it is…your first glimpse at The Connective! The stories, photo essays, and infographics inside aren’t just tales of the web; they’re about the people, things, and systems all participating in a mass transmit.

Stay tuned: The Connective is available in the WIRED container beginning Wednesday, May 15.

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Every year over 30 million of people in the US go to the hospital. The reasons are various: broken bones, sudden onset seizures, pneumonia, heart attacks. About 100,000 of these people will die — not from the ailments they are admitted for — but from infections they contract while staying at the hospital. That’s more annual deaths than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.

It’s believed that seventy-five percent of these infections could be prevented if hospital workers washed their hands more often and more effectively. But doctors, nurses, and other health care pros are harried people who often work brutally long shifts. People get busy. People get tired. Hands don’t get washed. (Or don’t get washed long enough.) Infections are spread. People die.

“We wanted the ability to provide 24/7, 365 interventions for health care workers to show them if they were not sanitizing or washing their hands according to CDC guidelines,” says Seth Freedman CEO of IntelligentM, a health technology company that believes it has a solution to preventing hospital born infections.

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As you beamed us your stories from cafés on the other side of the world and photos from buses in our own neighborhood, as you brainstormed story ideas on Twitter and borrowed public Wi-Fi in Amsterdam and Scranton, we were working in Google Drive to co-write this letter and sensing each other’s minds meld in real time.

We witnessed a mass transmit of big and medium-size data, of traffic patterns, of mood swings and bustling metrics. We cheered your names as they flew across the wire.

There’s something weird, exciting, and fascinating about this massive transfer of information. You sent us stories about heavily networked cities and places beyond the reach of broadband.

Some of these ideas heightened our hope for the future and the embracing of our devices. Others raised complex questions that we’re still pondering. But the bottom line is, good or bad, the information is out there – and more available than ever before. We are just starting to mine it for answers.

This is our best shot at representing the zeitgeist of your amazing responses, a collection of thoughts from a 48-hour sprint in the year 2013. But this is just the starting block. There are so many more implications to discuss, more questions to dream up, more data to disseminate, more asteroids to explode. What happens from here is to be determined.

—The Connective Editors

Stay tuned for a behind the scenes look at the making of The Connective and additional content surrounding our theme, Mass Transmit.