We are seeing an enormous shift in what used to be called the Telecommunications Industry, which relied on the cash-cows of voice calls, and the huge, one-off surprise gift of SMS text messages sold at their weight in gold (yes, the messages weigh little, but there are billions of them, and they still add up, to billions!). There is no guarantee, and many realize this, that the economic value being destroyed by the changes in the traditional branches of telecoms is going to be replaced by an equivalent or greater line of revenue coming from elsewhere. The Economist dedicated a cover to this in 2005 already in its article entitled “How The Internet Killed The Phone Industry” (subs req).

What can be done? We don’t have a magic bullet, but we have a few leads that we think point towards a solution, and one of them is “people”. As we build smarter and smarter networks of machines, which become more and more autonomous, and self-reliant, the final value, and long term sustainability is going to be found in those software and hardware systems which create, develop, and manage people, and how social groups form, using new tools, in an open, interactive, and dynamic manner.

After thousands of mainframes, tens or hundreds of thousands of minicomputers, hundreds of millions of personal computers, now we are, with billions of mobile phones, at the last generation of objects that can pretend, and obtain the care of humans. When a mobile phone runs low on energy, we run to recharge it. When its memory fills up with too many text messages, we will try to free it up, as if it were a little baby, and we were changing its diapers… the mobile phone is the real Tamagochi!

With the next generations of smart sensor networks, comprised of tens, or hundreds of billion objects, we will have to make sure that the very nature of the objects, the spimes, changes, including their entire lifecycle: they way they get scattered in the environment, the way they organize themselves to fill the tasks they have been designed for, and what happens with them, and the networks they form, when they fail. All these functions will have to be performed without human intervention, and little human oversight.

However, just because these networks are born, and managed autonomously, it doesn’t mean that the reason they are there in the first place doesn’t concern us! On the contrary, the likelihood that we will delegate vital monitoring functions to these networks is very high. The granularity, frequency, and intensity of the chatter that the spimes in the network perform will be vital, and it will be a fundamental task to be able and reliably translate from their plane of communication to the one of aggregated, second-order knowledge, where we can understand it, where we can derive useful, valuable information which we can act upon!

These are the issues that we recently spoke about at the SHiFT presentation entitled “Why We Need To Listen To Our Things”

We are in Lisbon for the rest of the week, speaking at the SHiFT conference, and holding a workshop about the Social Energy Meter, and other applications that cross the Internet Of Things, with the Internet Of People.

Soon we will post more information about the applications, and the hardware pieces comprising the system.

More to come, for sure, but in the meantime the first impression confirms our expectations of Picnic being a great response in creativity, and energy to a more exclusive and elitist TED. Even if only in its third year, it will be seen as a must attend event in the years to come too.

You can also follow Picnic’s live streaming, and of course all the flow of information aggregated and tagged picnic08.

It is great to see how quickly OpenSpime is being adopted by leading technology companies, who perceive its advantages to their customers. We are very much looking forward to being able and use one of these phones soon!

That is why we hope that OpenSpime.org will be able and become, growing from a repository of code, and documentation which it is today, to a place where people, corporations, and organizations can discuss the future of a healthy and desirable development of an Open Internet Of Things. Come, and join the discussion about OpenSpime, and the future of our technologies, and policies!

It is only through the creativity and inventiveness of the community of developers that OpenSpime will succeed! This is why we are excited that so many have already subscribed to the OpenSpime Developer Network.

Together with the launch of the network we also are releasing a first implementation of the protocol in Python, which can be used to quickly prototype applications on a variety of platforms. You can also find explanatory videos that describe the OpenSpime protocol, and the way the PyOpenSpime implementation works.

In the continuous efforts done in order to ease mashups, please check out the the first ever OpenSpime Twitter authenticated message. More to come.

Interested? Follow us on the OpenSpime Developer Network!