A Platform for the Internet of Things

A picture is worth a thousand words… so here we go.  Torilink is coming…

Low Cost Smart Grid Now!

We have been heavily focusing our efforts on ‘Green’ and the ‘Smart Grid’ hype.  You have to admit even your grandmother has heard of both and there is funding to be had from both State and the Federal goverment.  We are partnering with Current Cost a company in the UK (www.currentcost.com) to provide users of their real time power display units with a fun web based tool to help them save energy and of course save money!

Current Cost have supplied over half a million of their units installed into households mostly through the UK power utilities and their energy saving incentive programs. They have partnered with EON, Scottish and Southern Energy and also British Gas.

Go Green with Envi

makeHistori is a fully web based data historian which allows you to collect, store and analyze your own Envi watts and temperature data into it’s power toris (as in stories).
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Your secure power tori mimics your Envi display on the web, and automatically calculates and trends day, week and monthly power consumption and costs.
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Access you power web pages from anywhere and compare time lines of your power toris with your friends or with other public toris such as News, Stocks, Weather, Blogs and Twitter feeds.

The Envi outputs an xml message of real time watts and also temperature every 6 seconds. We have written an interface to the Envi and are collecting real time data every 6 seconds, buffering it locally and then uploading it via the web to our historian every 5 mins. We are then calculating statistics such as kwh per day, last 7 days, last 30 days and associated costs.

For several months now – our makeHistori toris have been happily storing watts and temperature data from a number of Envis in the UK and the US.

Page showing the new Power Tori

Click through on the screen shot above to check out the makeHistori page of the Envi running in the Current Cost offices. NOTE on the 1st visit it will ask you to install Microsoft SilverLight (which is like Flash for MSoft), you then need to close your browser and restart it. Click on the small red clock icon at the top of the page and then the page will refresh every 30 seconds.

Current Cost are also working on individial appliance monitors called (IAMS) and will be releasing them very soon. http://www.ceesquared.com/?p=11#comment-15
We will then be able to show individual device data and costs in real time through the same method. IAMS prduct map will include remote switching via makeHistori in the future.

This is working now, inexpensive and ready to go.  Your comments and feedback please

So what is it Tony?   A meta google?

Can I find out about stuff in the here and now? (Not just history — or is everything history in your system?)

Sure I’d like to check it out. How to do it?

I got some requests to clarify.  What is makeHistori?

It’s a way to mashup anything which has a time element to it.  But commercially it will be a disruptive technology to industrial historians and local server based sensor data loggers .  We hope to threaten the traditional  business model of locally installed database servers.  To this point we just won a sale to monitor an environmental lab in Houston via the web.  No need to have a local server and nothing to maintain. All we install locally is an interface on a cheap PC to gather data from a wireless sensor network to collect temperature, humidity etc.

Check out this mH test page

http://www.makehistori.net/makehistori.aspx?toripage=2362

The wireless sensors are  from Newport  USA, known as Omega in the UK.  http://www.newportus.com/i/zSeries.htm

This is where we will make some revenue.  Hopefully enough to really focus on growing this business.

The real goal is to be a part of the read/write web…  and we are getting close to something worth launching as a general collaboration app. Hopefully it will go viral with the masses.  mH is not 100% tuned yet, that’s why I’m  asking our friends out there to stress our  alpha. You can absolutely use it now for mashing up current events like news, stocks, etc. in fact anything that has an RSS feed.  Right now though you are limited to feeds we have put in.  Give us a week or so and we will allow you to direct your own feeds to makeHistori

If you would like an invite to the alpha and will spend 30 minutes and check it out and give me some feedback through our forum; then email us at info@makehistori.com You will be asked to install Microsoft Silverlight which is like been asked to install Flash.

We especially want to find any bugs we may have missed. If you find any bugs then please try and document how it happened via the forum.  The forum can be reached via a button on the site or at http://forum.makehistori.net/

To get you started there is a simple User Guide on the forum for you to refer to. Hopefully you won’t really need it as the site is pretty intuitive.

There is not a huge amount of content yet, but you will find some pages to play with.  You can find them by selecting  ‘Pages’  on the drop down button, next to the search entry box, then type in names like:

News

Twitter

Newport

Current Cost

Diabetes

Weather

History

The general functionality to try is to play with the Link All button and then click on the trends and lists to see them synch.  Note that trends can be zoomed into using the magnifying glass button on the trend.

You can also hit the Clear Page button to clear a working area, and then the Tori drop down button to search for Toris (like tags) to add to the page.

Search for some of the Toris we have added with the following names:

Google

Apple

Dow

Current

Sinusoid

News

Techcrunch

Noel

You can move also move toris around the page by clicking on their titles and dragging them.

If you want to create your own toris and enter your own data then go ahead.  The User Guide describes how to add data manually or by importing from a csv file.  I’ll talk about the API in an upcoming post.  This is exciting as you can create your own applications to input data to mH and get data out.  There is an example of using VB Script and Excel on the forum.

Please check us out and have fun!

Any ideas on any improvements are welcomed.

Who is trying to answer the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything?

Using a new Web Standard, you are.

My daughter asked me for help with her school project. What was happening in the European countries such as France, Germany and Spain when the American Revolution started? So what did I do? I went straight to Google and started clicking through the many urls thrown up and tried to answer what appeared to me to be a simple question posed by her teacher. 

I managed to pull some answer together after clicking through to many, many web sites but I was drowning in information overload.  As well as trying to answer my kid’s question, I realized that I spend a crazy amount of my time on this same type of task, trolling through the thousands of news sites and blog posts, trying to compare one thing to another and attempting to make some sense out of all this disparate data.   

Why can’t my browser just use the whole Web to answer these simple questions? School projects are one thing, but I want to treat the Web as my own giant universal database to use anytime that I want to cross reference lists, draw graphs and look at trends or create reports. However we all live in an age of information scavenging, using keyword searches, blog surfing, and news feeds. To do even the simplest analysis requires inordinate amount of labor. This is compounded as there is no easy way to bring time line data together and align it.

We have hit a critical point where the Web is so ‘crowded and noisy’ that it is hampering our ability to make any sense out of it. God knows we all need the help. Which is why Andy, Paul and I  have spent the last year putting together our product called makeHistori.com. We call it ‘the historian for everything on the web’.  The idea is to create a time based database in the cloud with tools to easily put time line data in and a browser based set of analysis tools to get it back out in a way it can be synchronized.

The serious ideas behind makeHistori came out of our joint experiences of many years in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing where the data is as important to them as are the drugs they make. Pharmaceutical companies need to prove to the FDA that they successfully meet the high quality standards that the public expect in their medicines. They do it by collecting and storing masses of data about the production of a drug in a time based manner. They literally store everything that touches the making of a drug, each step of the way, in industrial sized historian databases. They then use common analysis tools like Excel to cross check, analyze and correlate to ensure we can all trust what they ship to our local pharmacies.