Two recent posts dealt with the activities of Samsung and Google in the area of the physical web, otherwise known as the Web of Things. Given the announcements of these two heavyweights within a few weeks of each other, it is worth exploring what it means for the rest of us. For starters, what is the Web of Things? Put succinctly, it is the allocation of URLs or web addresses to physical objects, allowing apps, web interfaces, and cloud services to interact and query physical objects. This opens up the opportunity for Internet players to extend their reach from beyond the virtual into the physical world, while also providing individual items with an online identity.
Google’s approach is quite simple, at least for the time-being. At its essence, Google aims to provide a URL to physical objects to any device within the vicinity that can receive it. A physical object could be a bus stop, an aisle in a shopping centre, an advertising poster, a rental car, a vending machine, a home appliance – the list is endless. All Google are proposing is a means by which a device such as a smartphone can discover and search for these objects. Any sophisticated interaction or service that’s built using this technology will then reside within an app on the user’s smartphone or tablet and/or a service residing in the cloud. All the object does is broadcast its existence to the world, or at least whoever is in the vicinity.
So what’s in it for Google? Well, this is p
retty straightforward. The physical web initiative should allow it to extend its lead in web search to the physical world. Google foresee a world where inundated with physical connected objects, to which it can bring its search ranking technology to bring order to the physical world, and with it associated advertising revenues. Also, to the delight of Internet marketers, is that it allows companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon to build an even more detailed profile of its users. Already the Google Now app provides contextual search based on location, previous searches, content previously searched, what’s in one’s calendar and email etc. For example, my phone (or more accurately, Google) already knows which supermarket I go to, where I work, and which football teams I support. Now, this will be extended to knowledge that I am known to hang around in the deli section of the supermarket, which stores I go to simply to do some window shopping, what items I shop around for, where do I stop to eat, thereby building a much more intimate knowledge of my likes and behaviour.
Samsung on the other hand, are participating in this activity indirectly, through their investment in Evrythng, who unlike Google are already offering a product, the EVRYTHNG Engine. Many of the concepts are similar to those described above, but EVRYTHNG provides a Software as a Service (i.e. cloud service) to allow third parties such as advertisers, logistics companies, retailers and FMCG companies to tagged objects and for users to interact with these objects. Unlike the current Google proposal, security is built into the system, meaning that a company can only track its own products, rather than the URL for an individual item being open for the whole world to see. Moreover, while Google (initially, at least) envisages a world where Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) beacons are used to allow a user’s device to soak up whatever objects are around, the EVRYTHNG model is built from the ground up to work with a wide range of tagging systems, including QR codes, NFC, RFID etc, many of which require the conscious action of a user to interact with it.
What is yet unclear is whether these two models will converge onto a single standards-based solution. The W3C, the web standardisation body, organised a workshop in June this year which was attended by participants across the industry. The key outcome was an action to form an Interest Group to drive requirements for standards, whose draft charter can be seen here. This means that it is still early days, and there remains loads of opportunity for a defacto standard to gain momentum and overtake this process, or for a suite of mutually-incompatible systems to emerge, as has occurred in the Social Networking space.