With a new service called Freeboard, Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a “thing” to its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this “dweeting”). To get a sense of this, visit Dweet.io with your computer or mobile phone, click “try it now,” and you’ll see raw data from your device itself: its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.
Freeboard, expected to be launched Tuesday, makes sense of such streams of data. A few more clicks create quick graphical displays of the shared information, such as location, temperature, motor speed, or simply whether a device is on or off. “We are trying to make the Internet of things far simpler, and far more accessible, to anybody,” says Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, a business that initially focused on the development of open-source modular hardware (see “Bug Labs Adds New Modules”), but which now develops software platforms.
Freeboard is not the most technically sophisticated Internet of things application platform. Many others are emerging, including Axeda, Etherios, and OpenRemote (see “Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together”), with different business models and levels of complexity. Big companies like General Electric are developing factory-monitoring software platforms.
Yet Freeboard stands out among the various platforms because “it’s the easiest to use,” says Venkatesh Prasad, group and technical leader for vehicle design and infotronics at Ford Motor.