Category: bloggyActive
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Self-reflection: rethinking ownership
Can you imagine a near future where social media and the online experience are seamlessly integrated in your daily, physical life? Can you imagine your tweets and public Instagram posts appearing as ephemeral “graffiti” on the growing number of digital displays you encounter on your commute, while shopping, even in public restrooms? Can you imagine…
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Micro-transactions with macro-implications
At McRock Capital’s annual IIoT Symposium, which took place this week, a panel of experts was asked: Does the ideal architecture for Smart Cities look more like the Internet or more like an operating system (ex: AOL)? Panelists Kurtis McBride of Miovision and Dan Riegel of Sidewalk Labs both argued for the former. —But…
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Beyond People-as-a-Product?
Often these days I find myself wondering if, when Sergey and Larry were pitching Google in ’98-’99, their investor deck included a prescient slide about AdWords? While PageRank is well known as their disruptive technical innovation, AdWords, which alone likely accounts for two-thirds of Google’s revenues, is the type of disruptive business innovation that is…
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The IoT finally runs away from home
Last week, in her Stacey on IoT newsletter, the one and only tech journalist who has shared our passion and optimism for the IoT since the earliest days of the hype wave of 2012 finally changed her tune, declaring that “the state of the smart home in 2018 is pretty disappointing.” We’re going to have…
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RFID Journal Live 2018
Five years ago, reelyActive attended its first RFID Journal Live conference. Back then, we had pioneered simple, accessible cloud-connected active RFID. It’s easy to forget that in 2013 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) had not yet established itself as the de facto standard for active RFID, nor had the RAIN RFID alliance been formalised. This past…
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Digital avatars in meatspace, and the absence thereof
Your mobile phone prompts you with an alert. You excuse yourself from your physical context to enter the digital realm. Is it a relief to escape to cyberspace or rather a nuisance to leave “meatspace”? If you were born in the 20th century, you almost certainly recall the absence of a digital realm. At best…
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Hears Presence
We are becoming cyborgs. We carry smartphones and we wear wearables to enhance our human abilities. It’s not difficult to argue that these have become extensions of ourselves figuratively, if not yet literally. Nor is it difficult to argue that today we still adapt ourselves to interact through our technology rather than the other way…
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Real-time location finds some promising predictions for 2018
The Local Search Association‘s tradition of publishing expert predictions for the New Year is something we look forward to at the start of the year, and we’re excited about what the experts have to say about real-time location in 2018. Beginning with user data, Foursquare‘s Steven Rosenblatt predicts: marketers will turn their focus towards data…
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$500 rectangle meet $5 rectangle
We started 2017 by (optimistically) predicting that a major social network would empower their users to “advertise” their profile to specific physical places they visit. In other words: We expected 2017 to be the dawn of seamless PHYSICAL social networking. We had high hopes for Snap when this year we observed their Spectacles transmitting uniquely-identifiable…
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Light hears ahead of its time
Back in 2013 when the Internet of Things was peaking on the hype-cycle — and all too often described using contrived smart home examples — this was perhaps our favourite way to explain the IoT: You find yourself having to relocate from Montréal to San Francisco, but no sweat. Computers have already identified the things…
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