Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other / In-depth look at contextual SDK from Qualcomm

Image via CrunchBase

By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN
Published: July 29, 2012

BERLIN — Ocado, an online grocery store in England, prides itself on its delivery of refrigerated foods: When the company says the goods will arrive at a certain temperature, they mean it.

The promise is more than a marketing boast. Aided by microchip transmitters, heat sensors and a fast-growing form of wireless communication, the boast is a measurable fact.

Inside each Ocado delivery van is a SIM-card module the size of a postage stamp that monitors the air temperature. The sensor sends data to a computer used by fleet managers back at headquarters near London every few minutes.

Ocado says incidents of spoilage of goods have declined since the transmitters were installed last year.

“It has saved us time and given us more confidence in our real-time monitoring, as well as being a safety check for the driver,” said Paul Clarke, Ocado’s director of technology, who...... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/technology/talk-to-me-one-machine-said-to-the-other.html

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Published on Jul 30, 2012 by Scobleizer
Context. It's the next frontier. Your mobile phone will know a lot more about you. Not just where you are, but what you are doing. What you are looking at, and more. Why does this matter? Here Ian Heidt, who runs the Gimbal team, talks to me about Qualcomm's new SDK. Learn more at http://www.gimbal.com