Open Source User Experience for the IoT

Today, Felix Rieseberg, Ville Rantala, and I present this talk and demos in the AllSeen Alliance track at Mobile World Congress. Our talk, like much of our work, is focusing on advocating for the development of open source software. In particular, the AllSeen Alliance is a sponsor of the AllJoyn project which is developing an application layer protocol for human to machine and machine to machine interactions to advance the state of the Internet of Things.

I feel this is a strategic effort because the internet of things is going to grow fast and big. If we don't encourage "cooperative competition" the solutions that emerge will have biases towards companies, industries, and problems, rather than being good general solutions that can be adapted to companies, industries and problems. We're seeing this happen already with device companies building clouds, service companies trying to manage data (and PII data at that), and consulting companies finding many places to add value because there are so many cracks in the picture to fill.

We (Microsoft) can help.

We have built big things.

We have built large things around data and devices.

With news of our support for the AllJoyn router in the technical preview of Windows 10, it should come as no surprise that we're investing in AllJoyn fairly deeply.

We have also invested in Cordova deeply, supporting development of cordova applications in visual studio as early as Visual Studio 2013. There have been regular updates about our ongoing support for Cordova. I expect that might continue.

These Microsoft influences have led me to advocate for a greater involvement in the AllJoyn project, hence our creation of our AllJoyn Cordova work which includes a Cordova Plugin for AllJoyn, plus a few examples: a chat program, a tv controller and a lighting app.

Our talk will encourage device manufacturers to focus on enabling alljoyn on their devices and leverage our open source tools to build basic applications for their devices and let professional (large scale) software developers integrate their devices into systems.

We'll be demoing our work during the event -- so if everything crossed the various international boundaries safely we'll have something to give to those want to build AllJoyn enabled devices and applications.

Felix encouraged me to consider "Open Sourcing" our talk (I think he said, "let's put our money where our mouth is") -- so we're trying something new with this talk. We're using Reveal.js to give a talk that is living in github, we fork, merge, and iterate over the talk as we're working on it -- in public view.

This has been a wonderful process, I'll write on it in the near future, but in the meantime, here's a link to our talk -- if you're at Mobile World Congress, please come see us @ 2pm in Hall 8, Theater B.