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April 13, 2003
Gadget Freak — Soybo hub
As you know, I'm a big fan of gadgets and gadget/computer interaction. That is why I'm interested in things like Soybo, software that turns applications into web services.
The idea, if I'm understanding this correctly, if that instead of traditional remote access (which involves sending pictures of one computer's screen to another) you just publish what the application can do and what its current state is. Then other computers (or Internet connected device) can control the application over the Internet. Of course, we already have SOAP and XML-RPC, but apparently Soybo generalizes the solution and allows for discovery.
Obviously this would work better for something like DVD/MP3 player and not as well for word processor — but the company has screenshots of email applications, address books and other applications being controlled through a web browser and a variety of gadgets.
This makes me think, however. Some of these gadgets don't (yet) use WiFi, the current wireless networking standard. Can you make your own private WAP gateway for your cellphone? Can you make TCP/IP connections with Palm devices through Bluetooth?
If there is a way to easily create private wireless TCP/IP networks that include gadgets, this would be a really interesting technology. But I don't know that I'd want (or be able) to put my home computer on the public Internet just so I could switch to the next song using my cell phone.
I think we will see more stuff like Jonas Salling's Sony Ericsson Clicker before we see a lot of use for wireless TCP/IP services for gadgets.
You can create access rules for devices with a particular IP address (i.e. wi-fi's 10.0.1.x) and there is support (though not user-accessible at the moment) to limit access by device type (i.e. Safari browsers, cell phones, etc.).
I had been using Soybo on a recent 2.5 week tour with my AlBook, Palm Tungsten-T and a Sony Ericsson t68i phone. GPRS was slow, but it still worked reasonably well.
-adam
Posted by: Adam Tow | April 21, 2003 11:28 AM