Among Read Write Web's "10 Internet of Things Blogs To Keep An Eye On"

I'm really glad that my public notepad of my brain dump has been mentioned in the "10 Internet of Things Blogs To Keep An Eye On" of ReadWriteWeb. That's very encouraging, thank you very much! (Thanks, Dominique, for letting me know!)

Visiting the Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL) of DFKI

I was glad to visit the IRL of DFKI in Saarbruecken. I gave a talk about how retail could face the challenge of emerging mobile internet in supermarket. Instead of banning phones which is currently happening in single places, a more mid-term strategy should be to find new business models and implementations to actually benefit from these developments [1]. I enjoyed the discussions with Antonio Krueger, his team, and quite many visitors from the local retailer Globus sponsoring the IRL. I liked the argument of “consumers don’t want to play with their mobile in supermarket, as they want to limit their stay there already” challenging our my2cents approach running on mobile phones. Whereas displays represent an interesting alternative especially for additional manufacturer information I would question the perception of “independent third party information” on this store-owned equipment…
The tour of IRL starts with the a shopping list generated at the fridge, continues with an RFID-navigated shopping-cart to an RFID-enabled shelf, displaying infos about products picked from the shelf, NFC check-out and inventory update back at the fridge including warnings about allergic items. Overall, a really nice playground for research.

[1] Kyoung Jun Lee, Young Hwan Seo: Design of a RFID-Based Ubiquitous Comparison Shopping System. KES (1) 2006: 1267-1283

Visiting a university completely surrounded by mountain

I had the opportunity to visit the free university of Bozen. First of all, it’s just amazing how close mountain to a university building can be…
I gave a talk about Tangible Information search in the Internet of Things and really enjoyed the opportunity to talk to Prof. Ricci. He introduced me to his on-going projects in the area of recommender systems. It was really refreshing to see how the data we are collecting with AppAware could be well exploited by the mechanisms being developed in Bolzano.