My day at the Verizon Wireless Connected Technology Tour

A few weeks ago, Verizon Wireless invited me to attend their Connected Technology Tour in Indianapolis. The tour mainly consisted of demonstrations of machine to machine (M2M) technology which, although not exactly in Noobie’s wheelhouse, was still fun to see and learn more about.

For example, I watched a simple router powered by Verizon’s 4G LTE network serve as a home or office automation hub. Using a simple browser, a user could power on or off a light, lock or unlock a door or even turn on a coffee pot.

I saw audio sensors from a company called Sonicu, placed in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) of a hospital to monitor and discourage loud sounds where little or no volume in the room is of extreme importance. Once again, a simple browser monitors the sound from each sensor and sends alerts when a specified threshold is exceeded. You can even use the browser app to reconfigure a sensor on the fly.

I got to play with the VGo

One of the more fun parts of my day was when I got to play with the VGo. You may know this device from the television commercial that shows a sick kid attending school remotely with the device. It’s basically a robot with audio and video that is remotely controlled from a distant location, again using Verizon’s 4G LTE network as the backbone.

Here’s the commercial if you haven’t seen it:

If you can not see the embedded video above please use the following link: Verizon Powerful Answers – “Attendance :30” Commercial

I got to drive the VGo and I gotta tell ya, it was pretty darn fun.

Smart security cameras

One of my highlights of the day though was a demonstration of security cameras from a company called Security Pros that could be monitored via a browser. I know, I know, big deal, right. Well, these were no ordinary cameras. These cameras can actually be taught to recognize people, cars and even boats. They can also be taught to pay attention to only a specific region on the video they are capturing.

If you can not see the embedded video above please use the following link: VideoIQ Adaptive Analytics Clips

Armed with this information, the cameras can then be instructed to send alerts when certain criteria are met. For example, you can tell the camera to issue an alert when more than 15 people have been standing on a street corner for more than 5 minutes. Or if a car in a public park has driven off the main road on to the grass where it shouldn’t be. Or even if the same car has driven by more than 2 times in the past hour. As you can imagine, the possibilities are endless.

Like I mentioned near the beginning of this blog post, most of this stuff is M2M technology for use by businesses. But don’t kid yourself. That’s where it all starts. Soon we’ll have this and a lot more technology just like it in our homes.