Paul Hartzog is a political scientist and futurist at the Future Forward Institute and the University of Michigan. His most recent project is Flows, a “meta-API” that aims to turn the Web and the Internet of Things into a real ecosystem by enabling interoperability. I talked to him at the Contact event last week in New York City about what Flows is, why it’s important and how it can route around common problems such as the time it takes for standards to emerge.

Services Angle

Interoperability and integration remain hot topics as software and services migrate to the cloud. Single sign-on services and out-of-the-box integrations between software-as-a-service providers are leading the way. But Flows offers something new and interesting: a better way for programmable systems to communicate. This goes beyond RESTful APIs and Web oriented architecture. Keep an eye on this and similar projects.