Want to Help Build the Internet of Things? Start Here

The Internet of Things is upon us. Devices are becoming much more interconnected — businesses and consumers have access to usable information, anywhere and everywhere. The change is here, and we’re adapting.

There’s lots of excitement around what the IoT can do for consumers. Wearables, health gadgets, smart homes and smart cities are getting all the media attention. They’re bright, flashy, and the public immediately relates to it.

There are certainly lots of opportunities there, but for developers, designers and forward thinkers, there’s another equally fascinating part of the IoT: the ideas, technologies, information and infrastructure behind the whole thing. It’s those innovations that helps us to develop better interconnected systems and empower all of the bright and beautiful consumer-focused IoT applications.

We’re going to dive into the key parts of the IoT infrastructure, getting the opinion of experts, providing a brief overview and then sharing some business ideas and inspiration as a starting point for building an exciting startup.

Big Data and IoT

”Many IT, business intelligence and analytics managers have stopped asking, ‘What is the Internet of Things?’ Instead, they’ve started asking, ‘What is the business value of the data generated by the IoT? And what do we need to do to realize that value?’" - TechTarget

IoT devices are sending and receiving information constantly. This data can be extremely helpful for businesses. Datamining and analyzing all this information can provide very useful insights and allow them to become more efficient. Businesses that can take advantage of this information and make it accessible and relevant will be in high demand.

Ideas and inspiration

• Creating portals, dashboards and interactive reporting for other businesses to track IoT data historically and in real-time.
• Developing smart analytics technology that transforms data into usable, insightful information to drive business decisions.
• Combining IoT data with customer behavior to predict how customers will act in future.
• Individual IoT - personalizing customer experiences according to how they’ve interacted with IoT devices in the past.

IoT Security and Protection

”Security technologies will be required to protect IoT devices and platforms from both information attacks and physical tampering, to encrypt their communications, and to address new challenges.”- Nick Jones, Gartner.

One of the main areas where we’ll need to see lots of improvement is in securing IoT devices. There are many different systems, protocols and techniques controlling how data flows between IoT devices. This invariably means there are cracks in security, and we need to protect ourselves from malware, hackers and other issues. Security businesses specializing in IoT technology should see rapid growth as more devices come online.

Ideas and inspiration

• A specialist consulting firm providing advice on securing IoT devices.
• Creating new algorithms, encryption and standards to protect IoT data.
• Building devices that alarm consumers and businesses if their IoT devices are being hacked.
• Identifying bugs in IoT systems that could be compromised by hackers.
• Creating updatable hardware and software that easily patches IoT devices to deal with vulnerabilities.

Deploying and Managing IoT Devices

”The impact that Internet of Things devices will have on networks is just starting to be felt because although the number of devices has been growing rapidly, they don’t yet stress existing capacity.” - Eric Hanselman, 451 Research

The capacity of our networks and processes will be tested as the IoT grows exponentially. With billions of devices being added every year, capacity and networks need to be carefully managed. At the moment our networks are designed for fewer connections exchanging large amounts of data. Our networks will need to be transformed as the IoT demands many more connections with low data volumes. IoT deployment and network management startups can significantly influence the future direction of the IoT.

Ideas and inspiration

• Smart deployment systems to see where IoT devices are needed (based on measurement/analytics) and deploying IoT devices to the right locations.
• Integrated capacity management consulting to help businesses understand the changes their networks will need to go through.
• Specialist engineers who can provide an end-to-end upgrade of an IoT network to enable better performance.
• Creating more efficient ways to utilize data in IoT devices, lowering bandwidth load.

Powering and Repairing IoT Devices

”IoT devices are supposed to be deployed ‘everywhere’ and to be accessed ‘any time’ from ‘anywhere’… …[This] implies strict requirements for the energy storage and power management of IoT devices to ensure their ‘perpetual’ operation.” - IEEE Internet of Things

Part of the appeal of IoT devices is their size and the ability to install them in any location. Because they’re normally designed to be cable and maintenance free, making sure they have enough power and can keep working is a challenge. Businesses will be looking to specialists to help them keep the lights on and ensure their IoT devices work at maximum efficiency.

Ideas and inspiration

• Providing an operational overview of the “fitness” and “reliability” of IoT devices in real-time.
• Building reliability sensors into IoT devices so they can self-report if they are running low on power or are experiencing an issue.
• Creating technology allowing IoT devices to harvest energy from the environment (e.g. solar power, wireless charging, radiant charging and thermoelectric charging).
• Designing modular IoT technology allowing parts to be swapped in or out easily.

Continue reading %Want to Help Build the Internet of Things? Start Here%

by Paul Maplesden via SitePoint

Securing ASP.NET Web API

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A simple vanilla JS script to animate scrolling to anchor links.

The post Smooth Scroll : Animate Scrolling to Anchor Links appeared first on jQuery Rain.

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Colorpanel : jQuery CSS File Switcher

Simple jQuery plugin to switch css stylesheet skin theme on your template demo.

The post Colorpanel : jQuery CSS File Switcher appeared first on jQuery Rain.

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Implementing file uploads with Ajax can be very challenging, especially if you want features like drag and drop support, image previews or progress bars. The following 10 jQuery file upload plugins come with many options, and great user interfaces that will quickly allow you to implement a beautiful file uploader. 1. FineUploader FineUploader is a […]

Continue reading %10 jQuery File Upload Plugins%

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Quick Tip: What Is a Metaclass in Python?

This quick tip gives a brief overview of what we mean by a metaclass in Python and shows some examples of the concept.

Before delving into this article, I should point out an important point about classes in Python which makes it easier for us to grasp the concept of metaclasses.

Is a Class an Object in Python?!

If you've used a programming language other than Python, the concept you understood about classes is most likely that it is a way used to create new objects. This is also true in Python, but Python even takes it one more step further—classes are also considered objects!

So, if you created the following class in Python:

class myClass(object):
    pass

This simply means that an object with the name myClass has been created in memory. Since this object is able to create new objects, it is considered a class. This means we can apply object operations on classes in Python, as classes are objects themselves.

We can thus do operations on classes like assigning the class to a variable, as follows:

class_object = myClass()
print class_object

Which returns:

<__main__.myClass object at 0x102623610>

You can even pass the class myClass as a parameter to a method, as follows:

def class_object(object):
    print object
    
class_object(myClass)

Which returns the following output:

<class '__main__.myClass'>

In addition to other operations you can normally apply on objects.

Metaclasses

Maybe you have come across the type keyword in Python? You most likely used it to check the type of some object, as shown in the following examples:

print type('abder')
print type(100)
print type(100.0)
print type(int)

In which case you would get the following output:

<type 'str'>
<type 'int'>
<type 'float'>
<type 'type'>

Looking at the output, everything seems pretty clear until you come to the type type. To see what this might mean, let's go back to our class we defined at the beginning of this article:

class myClass(object):
    pass

Now, do the following:

print type(myClass)

What would be the output of this statement? It will surprisingly be:

<type 'type'>

So, we can conclude that the type of classes in Python is type!

What is the relation between a type and a metaclass? Well, a type is a metaclass, provided that the default metaclass is type. I know this might be confusing, especially that type can be used to return the class of some object as shown above, but this is due to the backward compatibility in Python. So, if you write:

print type(type)

You will get:

<type 'type'>

Meaning that a type is a type!

The term metaclass simply means something used to create classes. In other words, it is the class of a class, meaning that the instance of a class in this case is a class. Thus, type is considered a metaclass since the instance of a type is a class.

For instance, when we mentioned the following statement above:

class_object = myClass()

This simply builds an object/instance of the class myClass. In other words, we used a class to create an object. 

In the same way, when we did the following:

class myClass(object):
    pass

The metaclass was used to create the class myClass (which is considered a type). So, like the object being an instance of a class, a class is an instance of a metaclass.

Using Metaclass to Create a Class

In this section, we are going to see how we can use a metaclass to create a class, rather than using the class statement as we saw in the classes and objects tutorial. As we saw above, the default metaclass is type. Thus, we can use the following statement to create a new class:

new_class = type('myClass',(),{})

If you want to make things simpler, you can assign the same class name myClass to the variable name.

The dictionary { } here is used to define the attributes of the class. So, having the following statement:

myClass = type('myClass',(),{'a':True})

Is similar to:

class myClass(object):
    a = True

The __metaclass__ Attribute

Say that we created the class myClass as follows:

class myClass(object):
    __metaclass__ = myMetaClass
    pass

In this case, class creation will occur using myMetaClass instead of type, as follows:

myClass = myMetaClass(className, bases, dictionary)

Creation and Initialization of a Metaclass

If you want to have control on how you create and initialize a class after its creation, you can simply use the metaclass __new__ method and __init__ constructor, respectively. So, when myMetaClass above is called, this is what will be happening behind the scenes:

myClass = myMetaClass.__new__(myMetaClass, name, bases, dictionary)
myMetaClass.__init__(myClass, name, bases, dictionary)

I don't want to make this quick tip longer, but to summarize, we can conclude that a metaclass is used in Python to create a class. That is, the instance of a metaclass is a class. If you want to delve deeper into metaclasses, you can check out this tutorial.

by Abder-Rahman Ali via Envato Tuts+ Code