International courier giant Fedex has just released a new tracking device and web service for packages. Called SenseAware , it keeps tabs on the temperature, location and other vital signs of a package - including when it's opened and whether it was tampered with along the way. Fedex is running a trial period of about a year with 50 health care and life science companies, for tracking delivery of surgery kits, medical equipment - and even live organs. We spoke with FedEx head of innovation, Mark Hamm, about SenseAware and how Fedex is tapping into the emerging trend called Internet of Things . Sponsor We've covered Internet of Things extensively on ReadWriteWeb over the past year. It's when everyday objects become connected to the Internet, usually via RFID tags and/or sensors. In the case of Fedex's SenseAware, it is powered by multiple sensors including light, motion, temperature. Fedex's Mark Hamm described the SenseAware device as a "quad-band world phone." As well as the device, there is a browser-based collaboration platform allowing businesses to actively track the progress of a package. Users can set up triggers, alerts and notices - for example using geo sensors to alert others when a package arrives at a destination. Users can set these triggers and decide who they go to. Essentially, the SenseAware events trigger business processes for the users. For the web service, businesses pay a single monthly fee of $120 - for that they get the devices and the browser-based web service. Hamm noted that Fedex worked with the FAA to get permission to use the product on their freight planes; the only such device to have permission from the FAA, he told us. Fedex assembled components for SenseAware from a collection of partners, using Fedex's design specifications. Real-Time Decisions Based on Sensor Data Hamm said that SenseAware will enable companies to make real-time decisions much more easily. For example is a perishable goods package sets off on a 2 day journey, but the sensor data shows that the shelf life suddenly decreases - then the package can be instantly diverted to another location, where the product can still be used rather than becoming useless if it sticks to original delivery schedule. The initial trial period targets life science and medical companies (for example biotech firms), where things like security and knowing the vital signs of a package are very important. Also Hamm highlighted that these companies can collaborate on the sensor data, with precise data and records of delivery. The trial with the life sciences companies is designed to help Fedex make the "last 20%" of the product more efficient. After about a year of this trial, Fedex will then launch the product globally, as a generally available platform. Hamm expects it will be used by any company or organization dealing with perishable goods, high value goods - such as jewelery, dangerous goods, expensive equipment, and goods that are high value because they're unique (art work, music tapes, etc.). Hamm told us that he expects this type of sensor product to be "mainstreaming over time as people become used to interacting with shipments." Discuss

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FedEx Joins the Internet of Things With SenseAware

Cliqset is a Florida-based technology startup that end-users have had a hard time understanding. The company just released a new product that developers should have no trouble with at all and that could send waves of innovation across the social web. Called Cliqset FeedProxy , the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that's compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format. Sponsor That means activities from all those services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works. The most common analogy for explaining the impact of data standards is the history of the railroads in the US. When all the railroad networks adopted a standard size of track, then transport companies could carry goods cross-country over multiple rail networks. That opened up a new world of commerce. ActivityStreams is an Atom feed standard under development by many social web companies large and small. It aims to normalize the language that user activities are expressed in across multiple social networks. It's intended to facilitate interoperability and cross-network delivery of user activity payloads. It's important, exciting and inspiring work. Non-standardized activity feed publishing is like creating a high-way that only one brand of car can drive on, with one proscribed type of journey in mind. Standardized feed publishing provides a platform for a world of open innovation. This API enables user data to pass freely from one network to another or through multiple applications, unhindered by network-specific markup and namespaces. Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don't. As we explained in the ReadWriteWeb research report The Real-Time Web and its Future : An extension of the Atom feed format, the spec explains it like this: "An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities." In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation. Stream aggregator Cliqset publishes Activity Streams feeds that don't require API authentication to view. You can see a sample one at: http://cliqset.com/feed/atom?uid=dbounds. The aim of Activity Streams is to have multiple social networks use a common language and have a common understanding of what all those things mean, so that messages can be read across different networking sites. Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used - but it's an important step none the less. What does this mean? It means that applications developers could build interfaces to display books read, music listened to, reviews written and more across multiple different services with as much ease as they can display standard RSS or Atom feeds today. It's a powerful new level of granularity. Social media center Boxee and a Sun Microsystems community product currently consume activity feeds. Cliqset says many more projects are in development now. As the ActivityStreams community builds out more sophistication in the standard, there may be things like cross-site reputation included in such feeds. Cliqset has done a valuable service creating these normalized feeds for developers, but the obvious downside is the reliance on a middleman. Cliqset says it is talking to Superfeedr about creating some real-time feeds as well. That would be great, but would be another layer on top of existing publisher feeds. Perhaps if the developer community builds the kind of market-moving applications and features ActivityStreams advocates expect from the Cliqset feets, more publishers will begin publishing standardized feeds natively. While Cliqset has put a lot of work into normalizing numerous network feeds, the idea behind standards is that they can facilitate technical integration between parties with no prior knowledge of each other. Either way, Cliqset is putting the ActivityStreams agenda to the test. The company's release could have some very significant consequences. Discuss

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The Day The Highway Went Coast-to-Coast: 70+ SocNet Feeds Normalized by New API

TweetDeck , the most popular third-party Twitter client on the market today, just got a major update . TweetDeck now features support for Twitter lists and Twitter's new geolocation feature, as well as a LinkedIn column and optional support for Twitter's new retweet function. Users who prefer to use old-style retweets can still use these as well. For now, TweetDeck geolocation feature doesn't allow you to update your location from the desktop. This feature will soon be part of TweetDeck's iPhone app, which will be updated in the next few weeks. Sponsor Interface Tweaks All of this added functionality could have cluttered up TweetDeck's interface, but the team decided to redesign parts of the interface. A single '+' button at the top of the app now opens up a new dialog that allows you to add lists and Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn columns to your view. From there, you can also start new Twitter lists. TweetDeck's Ian Dodsworth also told us that TweetDeck will soon be able to show its users composite profiles of TweetDeck users based on the social network profiles they have added to TweetDeck. Auto-Updated Lists As Twitter still restricts the number of calls a user can make to the Twitter API, TweetDeck's competitor Seesmic decided to have users update lists manually. In TweetDeck, lists will update automatically and you can set the frequency of these updates in the app's settings dialog. TweetDeck also makes it easy to start new lists from existing lists, which is great if you want to extend somebody else's list with your own picks, for example. TweetDeck will also suggest users for a list. We are not quite sure how TweetDeck makes these suggestions, but they seem to be based on the title of your group. You can find a full lists of all the tweaks and new features in TweetDeck 0.32 here . Battle of the Twitter Clients The auto-updating lists currently give TweetDeck a slight lead over Seesmic , which introduced lists as a core feature of its desktop client a few weeks ago. Seesmic's new Seesmic for Windows , however, can now be extended with Firefox-like plugins. Because of this, Seesmic can now farm out a lot of development to third-party developers and anybody can create a column for LinkedIn or any other social network. According to social media monitoring service Sysomos , TweetDeck is currently the single most popular Twitter client after Twitter's own website. It took TweetDeck a while to release today's updates and the company surely lost some users to Seesmic in the meantime. This new update brings TweetDeck back on par with the competition and even adds a number of new features - like the ability to clone list - that it's competitors don't offer (yet). Discuss

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Worth the Wait: New Version of TweetDeck Features Lists, Geolocation and LinkedIn Support

Twitter turned on its long-awaited Geolocation API today, meaning that users can opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. The significance of this is made clear by comparing it with last week's release of 500 million time-stamped Twitter messages for analysis. "You take this data, mash it up with any other very large corpus of data with timestamps," Flip Kroner of data marketplace Infochimps told us, "and you've got a web app." Today's announcement of the availability of location data means the same thing: you take this data, mash it up with any other data with location information and you've got an app. From Digg or StumbleUpon for your favorite coffee shop to political and disease tracking - there's a whole lot that's possible. Sponsor Exposing location data is an opt-in feature for users, but 3rd party app developers are being told to "encourage your users to enable it by sending them to their settings page." Users will have to be both prompted and incentivized. Fortunately, a location-aware Twitter experience is something that will enable developers to deliver value to individual users immediately and in isolation - it doesn't have to be one of those situations where "this will be cool once other people I know are using it." With the announcement today of Twitter search results being added to Yahoo News searches, Twitter data is now being used by all three of the major search engines. (Google's implementation is still forthcoming, but the deal is done.) It might be one of the big players, but it's more likely to be small innovators that make creative use of the new location data. These are possible Twitter use cases, but the standardized Activity Streams spec that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others now support also includes a geolocation field - so if the walls around Twitter ever fall to interoperability then we could be seeing innovations like these across all kinds of networks. Here are some of the kinds of things we expect, or would like, to see. "Party Over Here" Bot: Automated Geo-Replies Want to know when you're near a certain type of public event, great wine shops or deals at Macy's? How about when friends, close friends or friends-of-friends are near? It's not hard to imagine a bot that you subscribe to on Twitter, that then auto-subscribes to you, notices when you "check in" at a new location and automatically sends you a reply when whatever or whomever you're interested in is near that location. How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! How about a bot you can Tweet "@whereami" to and that @'s you back with a link or stats about the location you're in: nearby restaurant reviews, notable landmarks, crime rates, apartments for rent. Talk about augmented reality! There are all kinds of bots built on Twitter already, but one that can mash-up your physical location with its data store is going to be a lot more useful than a bot that tells you when a sensor noticed your plants need to be watered. These are the kinds of services that will incentivize Twitter users to expose their location data. Assuming a substantial number of people make that choice, here are a few other examples that come to mind. Articles Being Shared From This Coffee Shop Today Include... Imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Most Twitter search engines index not just the 140 characters in a message, but the text in links being shared as well. If you think people like being the Foursquare mayor of a popular coffee shop, imagine being the location-equivalent of Digg-submitter of your favorite coffee shop's hottest online articles each day. Think people just stare at their computers in public these days? A service like this could shake that up. How about a StumbleUpon implementation that lets you stumble and read articles from people who've Tweeted from the same place you're in. Imagine walking down the street and considering two competing coffee shops; what's been on the reading list of each today? News at 11: Local Interest Survey Tool Think local TV news and newspaper companies would be interested in a stream of hot topics in their local area? They'd be foolish not to; what a great way to discover breaking local news to report on. Does your local newspaper print a selection of letters mailed in each week, but list the number of total letters received on the hottest topics of the week? Imagine capturing that local chatter from a much larger sampling of people. Local tweets plus an entity extraction algorithm. Cop Watcher Imagine taking a map of tweets discussing criminal activity, or police misconduct, in a city and comparing it with a map of the same from local police agencies. Some places that warrant more official attention could be exposed. Inventory Forecast If people in a certain city are twittering like fiends about a new product hitting the market, store orders, marketing and other parts of the supply chain could benefit from an earlier warning about it. Politics & Marketing People in Oregon are sharing a Huffington Post article about today's health care reform announcement a lot? In Seattle, Washington perhaps not so much? Political organizers of a certain persuasion could find that information actionable. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. Want to know what news outlets are on the ascent with people of a certain political persuasion? Cross reference your shared links from users in a location and a map of political contributions for the last election. How about unearthing Twitter users posting about environmental issues who also live in areas with environmental issues that an organization is working on. Want to measure local effectiveness of marketing campaigns? Imagine Radian6 or ScoutLabs using the location API. That's only a mater of time. Flu Trends+ Think Google's use of search data to map out global disease trends is cool ? Why stop there? How about pro-active messages (via Twitter) when there's an increase in messages about being sick in your area? Of course all of this will work better if more people are using Twitter and if people expose their location data, but that may very well happen. Prompting and individual incentives could be big drivers. The degree to which Twitter data is open for analysis by outside parties is a huge asset. What would you like to see cross-referenced with Twitter location data? Thanks for visiting ReadWriteWeb - we want to thank P2P-powered real-time search engine Faroo for making it possible for us to bring this site to you. Faroo is an innovative way to find out the hottest, freshest content on the web. Like SETI-at-home, Faroo's distributed architecture is indexing the real-time web while ensuring user privacy by avoiding centralized storage of data. The company says it can do things with Chinese-language content that no other real-time search engine can, too. Check it out at Faroo.com. Discuss

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What Twitter's New Geolocation Makes Possible