Announcing Dakworks, and doing today’s "idea warmup"

Dakworks is an information technology, software development, editing, and management consultancy. As the principal consultant, I believe that systems and software must be built to make great things possible, to generate new possibilities, and to liberate people from onerous and repetitive tasks.

At present, the purpose of this blog will be occasional commentary, opinion, and links to “things that I found interesting” in the spirit of the new, trendspotting, and nifty uses of leading and trailing edge technologies.

Today’s cool toy spotting (Thanks to Malcolm Stanley at Strategic Thinking and Execution for pointing it out):

This uses the Arduino controller and an add-on sensor package to monitor plant status and post the results on Twitter.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/how_to_make_plants_talk_t.html

The application itself is silly, but think about the implications: Twitter can serve as a personal mash-up dashboard for your home, your car, your pets, your pre-writing kids, and not just your blogosphere and mobile device friends.

For example, imagine an outdoor motion sensor and camera *as a Twitter feed*. Outdoor motion sensor goes off, not worth an alarm…but if you get a call from your alarm company, AND the outdoor motion sensor went off, you’d check your camera and confirm that it’s likely NOT a false alarm. Twitter’s ongoing ‘low quality’ information stream is a great way to moderate and present this data, since it’s redundant, and truly a ‘value add’ rather than a primary source of data.

The key here is to put people in the loop when interpretation is required. This is exactly what Dakworks is all about.

Thanks for reading,
Dak