UPDATED 10:02 EDT / AUGUST 16 2011

HP’s Talking Fridge Says Hello to the Future of webOS

If you are not part of the mobile revolution, you might be missing quite a lot.  So for those who are not engulfed by the radius of the billion dollar industry, they try to at least extend an arm for mobile market’s use: data collection and processing.  One of the very first organizations to grab the opportunity to monetize segments of their businesses to mobile industry is the computer manufacturing mogul, Hewlett Packard. Armed with its webOS, HP is now looking at licensing appliances and automobile solutions for this software. After slashing $100 from the original price of TouchPad, Leo Apotheker’s wishes to reel in car firms and appliance manufacturers to utilize webOS in their products.

The organization commenced brainstorming for the project in June. Currently, webOS supports HP’s tablets and pre-smartphones. The weak grasp of the TouchPad, compared to the iPad, HP’s looking to get a lead on an extended mobile OS market.  It’s an inevitable result of mobile technology, as connected devices are able to collect and transmit data for various needs, readily applying them to services that are already becoming established in the mobile ecosystem.  For health, home security, child or pet monitoring or even retail, connected devices will move beyond the smartphone before you know it.

Other businesses are also trying their luck in this field. The company that sees technology to innovate and promote wellness and safety, Wellcore launched a dynamic product called NewYu. The technology can distinguish a wide variety of physical movements in the human body.  In the fitness sector, this unique technology enables us to accurately track both fitness and everyday activities, accurately calculating how many calories are burned throughout the day.  This is actually a good move for Wellcore as the world now walks in the direction of healthcare IT. For this reason, medical infrastructure spending is expected to balloon to more than half a billion dollars in 2015.

Tapping another lucrative arm of the industry is Heartland, which has just introduced a mobile payment device for merchants called Mobuyle—it works with Android phones and tablets to manage its customers’ card payments.  To seamlessly integrate scanned data into iOS apps, Socket Mobile launched the Socket Bluetooth(R) Cordless Hand Scanner(TM) (CHS) Series 7 or CHS 7Xi.

Innovative providers of connected devices and solutions are operating in the peripheral of the mobile industry, but will need to link back to familiar internet programs and services to make this a feasible transition into the consumer world.  There’s a wealth of potential for connected devices, but this will all require a heavy reliance on the cloud and big data analysis, which will provide ready access to the data being collected, and finding new ways to discern patterns in that data.

This is where the consumer cloud and big data meet, as connected devices will enable more physical objects to become part of the “conversation.”  By that I mean more objects will be able to talk to each other, and relational data will be leveraged from there.  We’re already seeing systems preparing for the deluge of unstructured data that will come from the connected devices movement, with companies like Couchbase releasing new languages for processing text-based information on a large scale.

What happens when our refrigerators can talk directly with our calorie counters, and our garage lights can talk directly with our cars?  It will be a new and strange world, but one full of information that can hopefully help us all become healthier, smarter consumers.


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