If you are looking for brilliant inventions, skip the university labs and Silicon Valley engineering departments and head on over to Kickstarter. It’s a community where anyone can post an idea, and if people like it, they will fund with whatever they can give. (It’s not just for gadgets, but also for art, nonprofit ventures and other projects).
Recently two of Kickstater’s most beloved gadgets — the Pebble smart watch and Twine sensor (both covered in our roundup of top products ) hooked up.
Twine is a small, inexpensive box holding several sensors (such as for motion) and a Wi-Fi connection. The Pebble smart watch connects wirelessly over Bluetooth to an iPhone or Android smartphone to beam data to your wrist.
This current setup funnels data from Twine — in this case, the vibration sensed by the device’s accelerometer from someone knocking on the front door — to send a message over the Internet to Pebble.
It’s a simple experiment and not in itself a terribly useful implementation. But it points to the possibilities of networking our world, and giving us virtual omniscience, with cheap gear we already have.