Tag Archives: M2M

Bericht von der Embedded World: Hardware und User Experience wachsen zusammen

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Please visit Developer Garden for an English recap.

Vom 26. bis zum 28. Februar fand in Nürnberg die weltgrößte “Embedded” Messe statt. Ich war gemeinsam mit Deutsche Telekom M2M vor Ort, um mit den Besuchern über Ideen und Szenarien zu sprechen und unsere Dienste und Schnittstellen für M2M- Lösungen (Machine to Machine) vorzustellen – zwei mal täglich dürfte ich am Stand der Deutschen Telekom einen Vortrag zu M2M Visionen und eine Einführung in das Prototyping (auch für Nicht-Entwickler) zum Besten geben. Das es dabei nicht nur um Technik ging und User Experience immer wichtiger wird, zeigten auch viele der vor Ort vertretenen Unternehmen. Nicht nur Chips und Platinen prägten die Messe, sondern auch innovative Lösungen mit innovativen Benutzungsoberflächen. Microsoft war beispielsweise mit einer verbesserten Version von KITT, dem Pontiac aus Night Rider vertreten. Auch User Interface Experten wie z. B. UID waren mit eigenen Lösungen aus dem Consumer- und Industriebereich vor Ort.

Aber natürlich ging es in erster Linie um Hardware. Neben industriellen Lösungen fanden sich auch viele Produkte für den ambitionierten Entwickler, egal ob “Maker”, Hobbyist oder Inventor: Arduinos und Raspberry Pis waren zahlreich vertreten und es ergaben sich viele spannende Gespräche rund um die aufstrebende M2M-Welt…

Recap jQuery Europ 2013 – More than jQuery

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According to Richard D. Worth (Director of the jQuery foundation) over 50 percentage of websites in general use the de-facto standard jQuery for JavaScript-development. So it’s no wonder that Europe’s first ever jQuery conference completely sold out. Host Haymo Meran of Gentics did more than just meeting the expectations of the attendees. The location itself – the historic Palais Liechtenstein in Vienna – proved to be worth the trip, even for longer journeys, and set an impressive stage – also thanks to the intensive snowfall.

But despite Vienna being a wonderful place to be, jQuery is the focus, as the event’s name tells – but not alone. The schedule showed a lot of variation, as well as featuring highly acclaimed speakers on an international level, reaching form accessibility to security, from code to inspiration. I had the honor to talk abut jQuery in terms of Machine to Machine communication (M2M) in a hopefully inspiring way (thanks to Daniel Koch for the nice German summery of my talk). The conference was accompanied by a barcamp, featuring even more sessions in a “meet the experts lounge”, where attendees could contribute, and enter the stage as speakers.

It was an outstanding event and incase you missed it, we can tell that chances are great to have a jQuery Europe again next year. I definitely hope so! Visit Developer Garden for the full recap, photos and further details (English and German).

Talk to your vending machine in the cloud

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It seems that one of my new year´s intentions comes true: I want to build a ubiquitous computing sample each month (in average). And last Friday we managed to connect a vending machine to our voice control system Tropo to get it´s state via phone and to buy something via voice or DTMF.

Thanks to our M2M partner Cumulocity that was all in all damn easy: They have a sensor cloud including real time administration tools which you can access through the Developer Garden for free. Furthermore Cumulocity, a Nokia Siemens Networks spin off, has a cloud based vending machine telemetry solution (aka VendMe) in its portfolio. So we only had to plug the bricks together.


In this rough video Frank Zimmer and I try out our proof of concept to make sure it will work at the Embedded World fair: Feel free to meet us and the phone controlled vending machine at booth 5-307.

In detail: For our proof of concept we created a PHP application which connects to the API of the Vending Machine via REST with JSON and uses Tropo´s capabilities handling voice calls to tell the user via text-to-speech what´s going on. Once the user has selected a slot (either via phone or keypad) the machine gets the information through the air, the payment is transferred and a confirmation is send back to the user – in this case we again use Tropo to send a text message. As usual the best thing comes at the end: Grab the gummy bears and enjoy!