Christine Herron, blogging from O’Reilly’s ETech this week, posted about SF writer Bruce Sterling’s talk. I wish I’d been there. It sounds very intriguing. Sterling talked about a world where every physical object is tagged and has data associated with it as well. Sterling has coined a new term — spime – for objects trackable in space and time. People too? Reminds me of the original intent of the original intent of the Web Services Directory.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Ironically, this idea (Spime), in addition to what Iotum appears to be working on (based on what your DEMO reviews said) were all part of a project I worked on back in the early 90's at Mitel. The Mitel "CATA" architecture was designed to "connect anything to anything" and had intelligent "Agents" working to help prioritize what information/calls/emails/IM's people received based on context. It appears we were just too ahead of our time, a common problem in IT
Heck, XML wasn't even around when we were doing this, so we had to invent our own "markup language" that was extentible… 
Anyways, the point was that *everything* had what was basically an IP address and could become part of a global common network. So it was kind of a "convergence v5.0" where you could very easily configure any light switch to any light-socket in the world, any mobile device control to any device, etc. Very cool stuff, I'm glad wireless, security and the breadth of networks have finally caught up to enable some of these ideas.
– Don
I think the fact that this stuff is happening now, Don, is totally a product of the evolution of networks. Couldn't have done this even five years ago, but the tools are here and now to make this work.