I can empathize with you Lawrence.

Any telco worth its name has a DMS - Device Management System. This system tracks every handset, its capability: (MMS, WAP, GPRS, GPS) & has
ability to send the handset customized configuration settings over the air. Interface of DMS is also available to customer support staff.

Your experience with support guys might be due to the fact that there is some lag between handset change by user & its reflection in DMS - which at times can take hours.

Have you ever called help and had them tell YOU what kind of phone you have?? 

Are you calling from the phone with the problem?  Where you are? What software rev?  What installed apps?  How much memory is used?  Stack size?  What you see on the screen?

Any realistic enterprise/industrial deployment has something like this:

http://www.odysseysoftware.com/

Curious that the carriers, with the most to gain, have lagged behind.

Lawrence Ricci
www.EmbeddedInsider.com

Good post Lawrence. However can you clarify following:

> We have a way tro go here- for example, cell phones do not currently
> identify their make, model and OS revsion to their own carrier!

Isn't that a GSM phone communicate its IMEI to its network. First 8 digits of IMEI are TAC that identify its make & model.

PND = Personal Navigation Device.  Garmin, Magellan, TomTom

Hottest consumer category for the last few years.  Lots of room to move.  PND killed in car navigation.  Some say Smart phone will kill PND- I think not.  It will upgrade it, force it to increase function, add dead reckoning from vehicle data and so forth.

Lawrence-

PND?

Yes-  There is a cost/performance trade off.  But now, just about everything is 'smart'.  Our phone, our Microwave, our thermostat.  Soon more of these will be connected.  I mean IP connected.

Then it is just a matter of being "Service Oriented"  For example, your PND send traffic data via cloud service to other PND's.   The GPS/Depth sounder on pleasure boats profiles the Chesapeake bay and updates the charts.  Much of the sensor cost can be eliminated by smart use of existing sensors- for example, a load cell in my chair could tell if I was there.  But image analysis from my webcam or home security camera could do it even better. 

I think the tipping point will be reached when DPWS for Wireless Plug and Play is in most stuff.  This means devices can identify themselves to their environment.  Functional networks will self configure, without a master plan.  We have a way tro go here- for example, cell phones do not currently identify their make, model and OS revsion to their own carrier!

I think this will happen in cars first.  In-vehicle systems, PNDs, entertainment and cell phone will start to self organize, driven by 3rd party apps.

The immediate problem: Security. Past that: Self Awareness. 

Lawrence Ricci
www.EmbeddedInsider.com

Very well stated, Lawrence -- amd I happen to agree with you 100 percent that this is where we're headed as a culture (and as a publication devoted to the future of the Internet). The notion that RFID and other wireless technologies will combine with GPS, cloud computing, and existing back-end systems to enable all this doesn't really require a stretch of the imagination. As Amy Rogers Nazarov points out in her report, how companies pick and choose where and when to add sensors, tags, and this sort of Web 3.0 oversight will require a bit of balancing between need and want -- requirements versus budget. Where will it be smartest to instrument/interconnect/add intelligence to the network first? The future is pretty damn fascinating. 

Yes!  The Internet of Things!  This is the substance of Web 3.0.  This is where Internet Evolution is going!

Making things connect is what I do, what I have done for a decade.  Now that 32 bit embedded CPU’s can cost as little as candy in a vending machine or be as powerful as a desktop (Intel Atom) we have the hardware we need.  The gating factor has been software- specifically middleware for embedded devices.  We are getting there.

Fortunately, the cloud is ready with Service Oriented Architecture.  The internet of things is huge.  You probably have two or three computers.  You have dozens of ‘things’ that could/should/will connect.  Each of these ‘things’ could have vital data, but the data is vital only at certain moments.  Devices need to ‘publish’ events and cloud services need to ‘subscribe’ as needed. 

Here are some quotes about the Internet of things

L.V.Gerstner – IBM"...a billion people interacting with a million e-businesses with a trillion intelligent devices interconnected ..."

Paul Otellini- CEO Intel “The pervasive internet will bring us the tools we need when we need them by proactively anticipating what we need”

Roberto Siagri-CEO Eurotech  “ An embedded computer system is typically any microprocessor-based device that encapsulates a basic process knowledge. Consequence: IT integration is at best an effort in hindsight and at worst  ignored altogether. Pervasive Computing provides technology and infrastructure to enable the process knowledge and associated parameters to be distributed within the enterprise. Consequence: IT integration becomes native capability of the system.”

Kevin Dallas, general manager of the Windows Embedded  “Smart, connected, service oriented devices”

In in the end, it was said in the beginning by the inventor of the concept-

Mark Weiser, chief scientist at Xerox PARC
Principles describing ubiquitous computing:

• The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else. 
• The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
• The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
• Technology should create calm- "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."

Lawrence Ricci
www.EmbeddedInsider.com