At play in the Internet of things

Here's something you can do to contribute to the future of mankind, and you don't have to be any more tech savvy than a pig farmer or a bartender.

ARM Holdings, the British chip designer, has created a program called mbed, the research effort puts a kit for a microcontroller – sort of a basic, low-power computer on a chip – in the hands of engineers and hobbyists for about $59. Then, ARM provides a set of software tools for bringing that microcontroller to life and linking it with other interesting items like accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, displays and thermometers.

The New York Times reports:

“I was intrigued by the fact that people in the microcontroller industry won’t actually be the people who invent what they’re used for,” Mr. Simon Ford, the ARM researcher leading mbed. “If there is a guy who knows about microcontrollers and a pig farmer who knows about pigs, it will be the pig farmer who will see how to automate feeding his animals so he can sleep more.

“I want to see how you get people to experiment. Maybe a washing machine repair man will figure out how to get the machines to report back to him and revolutionize the machines to get a competitive advantage. The point is that I don’t know what they’ll be used for.”

The mbed device can plug straight into a U.S.B. port on a computer, appearing as a flash drive to the PC. People can then create programs or download existing modules from the mbed Web site and get off and running in a matter of minutes.

The idea of a chip in everything isn't new. When I was at IBM in the late 90s we were exploring this concept. CEO Lou Gerstner decided on a name for it: ubiquitous computing. What is interesting about mbed is that ARM is enlisting the creative power of the masses. The big companies are doing this, because they realize that their scientists and engineers don't hold a monopoly on ideas.

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