Pachube  

Bruce Sterling's latest edition of "Spime Watch" (which observes the genesis of the "internet of things") has turned up this experimental web service called Pachube. That reminds me - I wonder what happened to that spime with antlers ?

Pachube (pronounced "patch bay") is a web service available at http://www.pachube.com that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world.

The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections between any two environments, it can also be used to facilitate many-to-many connections: just like a physical "patch bay" (or telephone switchboard) Pachube enables any participating project to "plug-in" to any other participating project in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive installations or blogs can "talk" and "respond" to each other.

Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators). Connections can be made between any two environments, facilitating even spontaneous or previously unplanned connections. Apart from being used in physical environments, it also enables people to embed this data in web-pages, in effect to "blog" sensor data....