Browser Based Apps for Google Tablet

Google seemed to try to toss a bit of cold water on Apple's iPad announcement with a me too announcement of a Google Tablet.

One thing that caught my attention though was:

Google is taking a different approach with Chrome OS. Instead of programs running straight on the computer's hardware and its underlying Linux operating system, Chrome OS applications run directly in the browser. What's similar to the iPad, though, is that both have somewhat of an applications head start compared with a computing platform that's starting from scratch: the iPad can run existing iPhone apps, and Chrome OS can run existing Web applications such as Google Docs

This reminds me of the Native Client project. It would be interesting to see Google take a web app approach to the tablet. Of course Apple launched the iPhone without an app store and initially pitched the idea that all apps could just be web apps. Of course today no one thinks of web apps as real iPhone apps. (Except maybe the Google Voice folks.)

Maybe the Google tablet could just leverage NaCl apps as a way to jump start a gPad device instead of the more complicated and heavy handed process that is involved in running an app store. After all, this is similar to the way the iPhone got started. Of course NaCl apps could do a lot more than the Javascript web apps of the iPhone 1.0 days.

New Axis Thermal Cameras

Today Axis announced new thermal imaging camera model Q1910. Apparently you can get one for only $3,138 from your favorite reseller. The videos are kind of creepy, I have to admit.

ioBridge Sensors

I've been playing around with the ioBridge IO-204. This is a fun little gadget that allows you to hook up and control various devices in your home or office. The cool thing about ioBridge is that they have a web site for controlling and accessing the device. You plug it in and it connects up to the ioBridge website. You can then log into the website and configure the device. Since the IO-204 connects to their site, you don't have to muck with firewall issues or do any port forwarding on your router.

Since the servers at ioBridge provide the interface to the device at your home, you can easily create widgets that you can embed in your blog or web page. Here's one that shows the temperature in my basement.



I must say that it took me way too long to get this graph to work. The site is still pretty confusing. I had to poke around on the forums before I was able to get everything configured properly. For instance, I kept trying to create the temperature sensor as a digital input. It sure looks digital to me. But in ioBridge terms, digital really means binary and analog means a range of digital values. Go figure.

Anyway, I think they have the right approach and it was relatively simple to setup. For months I've had a similar device from Mi Casa Verde called the Vera and I have yet to be able to get a graph of temperatures out of it. The Vera will do a lot more, but the web integration for the IO-204 is much simpler.

Wreath Thief Caught on sensr.net

We've been alpha testing sensr.net for a few months now. I got an email from one of our early users that his camera caught a thief in action. See the shots below.



Unfortunately they haven't caught the guy, yet. At least the neighbors have been warned and they know what the guy looks like so they can keep an eye out for him in the future.

Love is all you need

A touching video from Starbucks.

My favorites are the wacky folks from Japan and Denmark.



Click here to view on YouTube.

Tesla and Lotus

They are so cute together.

sensr.net live

About a year ago I started playing around with the idea of monitoring various things around the house. We travel a lot and I wanted to be able to check on the house while I was out of town. I started playing with network cameras and found that it was cool to have remote access to a camera back home, but setting it up and monitoring it was a pain. I tried Linux, PC, and Mac software but I didn't like the idea of having a dedicated computer inside my house to do the monitoring. My PhD is in distributed computing, so it's only fitting that my home to be monitored in the cloud.

I started building a website for monitoring my cameras and realized that this could be a useful service for others and might even be a nice business. In the course of the last year I've been lucky enough to hook up with some incredibly talented folks who have joined me in this effort. We're now ready to start opening up the site for others to try. It's not perfect and it's not for everyone, but sensr.net is at least ready for the hacker class to try.

How does it work?

Basically we'll provision an FTP account for each of your cameras and process all the images it sends to us. We keep images where we've detected motion and organize them by time and date. Want to know what time the plumber left? Check the front door camera, archived on sensr.net.

We'll also send you alerts (email or text) if you want. This works great on indoor cameras when you're away from home. Of course you may get notified about motion that you don't care about. Here's one alert I got a while back that would have been annoying had it come at 3 am.


Moth caught mid-flight.

Why the cloud?

Nobody runs their own email server anymore, why should you run a home server?

1. Infinite disk space: You don't have to worry that the PC in your basement is going to run out of disk just before your house gets robbed.
   
2. Elastic compute infrastructure: We can build all kinds of interesting computer vision algorithms to process your images. Right now we're starting with simple motion detection, but once the pipeline is setup, we can add other kinds of processing. Face detection should be easy. Face recognition is doable. Tagging your images with text could be next. Having our infrastructure in the cloud allows us to be creative and try new kinds of processing without requiring you to install anything.
3. Nothing to manage: Our users don't have to worry about the care and feeding of a PC. We'll deal with all those hassles for them.
4. Disaster recovery: If your house is robbed, we'll still have pictures of the thieves, even if they steal the camera. If your house burns down, all the images we've stored for you will still be there.
   

Sure, there are drawbacks. If your network goes down, we can't monitor your cameras. In most cases broadband connections are very reliable these days. Especially if you compare them with something like Windows Vista. Eventually we may support multiple tiers, so you can have an agent inside the home for caching until your network comes back. Some network cameras will do that already.

Why FTP?

FTP may seem like an anachronism, but in this case I think it makes a lot of sense. The issue is the home firewall. These days everyone has a firewall, so our servers can't reach into your network and pull images from your cameras. With FTP your camera will push images to our servers. Users don't need to configure confusing port forwarding options on their firewall.

Why Facebook Connect?

Do your really want another user name and password to remember? I didn't think so. That's one reason we use Facebook Connect for authentication. Besides, this makes it easy for you to share access to your cameras with your friends. BTW, you don't have to share whole cameras. You can mark a camera as private, then only share interesting images by uploading them to Facebook in a single click.

Not on Facebook yet? (Really?) Well, you can still peruse the public cameras. If you want to add your own camera or see cameras that your friends have added, you'll have to sign up for a Facebook account. Facebook accounts are free you know.

Give it a try!

So if you have a network camera that supports FTP, head over to sensr.net and give it a try. If you want to use the camera built into your PC or a USB camera you can make that work too. See the sensr.net FAQ for details.