David Binetti: May 2008 Archives

The JavaOne Conference is over, and we at Sentilla are proud about what we accomplished, and excited for the future.

The last day of the conference is mostly about James Gosling's keynote, sometimes referred to as the "Gosling Toyshow". He uses this session to highlight the latest Java innovations in a cool, fun way. Our demo held true to this vision, and even added some audience participation to the mix. We instrumented beach balls with accelerometers and threw them into the crowd. The balls proceeded to take a beating (as you might expect!) and every push, punch and punt was measured for intensity. What's more, the relative location of the balls was tracked through the crowd and displayed on massive video screens in real-time in addition to the acceleration data. We gave beach balls a voice -- which they used to scream out in pain... Here's the video. Skip to 48:30 to see the presentation in full. It was a great end to a great conference, and all that was left for us was a final furry of Perk kit sales, and then the clean-up!

To recap, Sentilla was truly pervasive at JavaOne. The conference started with the introduction of Sentilla at the first general session. We were named a 2008 Duke's Award winner that same day. We had three booths at the conference. We released our Perk kit to the JavaOne audience. And we were showcased in the final keynote.

All in all, a fantastic JavaOne. We can't wait for next year!

Day Three at JavaOne brought more application ideas, and a video interview with Joe.

Here were the three coolest apps of the day:

• An equestrian was planning on monitoring the muscle temperature and stride of race horses galloping around a track, which can be used to determine the optimal time to race.
• Dishwashers in restaurants need to be calibrated so that they sterilize effectively; a customer was going to use the pervasive computers to determine when the washer is running at the proper temperature to ensure the dishes are completely clean before serving food on them.
• Underwater archaeologists were going to use the computer to tag the location and condition of submerged artifacts and communicate with the surface in real-time.

In addition, our co-founder and CTO Joe Polastre was interviewed by Chris Melissinos, Sun's Chief Gaming Officer, talking about the Duke's Choice award. The video was replayed on giant screens as people waited to get into the exhibit hall -- next stop Charlie Rose?

Another great day at the conference!

Day two was really about cool ideas from customers at our booths. One of the great things about introducing pervasive computing to the Java Community is listening to the myriad new ideas that developers come up with. Some of my favorites so far:

• A person with an exotic fish collection wants to measure water temperature, salinity, pH, etc., and turn on devices that will maintain optimal conditions of his aquarium.
• A bicyclist wants to use the built-in accelerometer in our Perk kit devices to monitor his pedaling so that he can train at maximum efficiency.
• Giving "You've Got Mail" new meaning, a customer is going to put a light sensor in his mailbox so he can track when the postman delivers.
• John Gage (at right,) the MC of the JavaOne conference, bought a kit and spent nearly an hour at our booth churning out idea after idea. He's on a mission to help reduce needless energy waste and came up with about a dozen cool apps while just standing there (the guy is scary-smart...)
• Someone has a tandem car garage and wants to use a sensor to indicate when his car is perfectly spaced so that he can fit two vehicles at the same time and yet be able to walk between them.

I just have been working the upstairs booth where we're selling our Perk kit (only at the conference.) I'll add to the list when I get a chance to go downstairs and find out the cool ideas coming from the show floor itself!

The first day of JavaOne is over, and what a day it was!

The tone was set fairly immediately, when the opening Session of the entire conference highlighted Sentilla right out the gate. That's right: among the more than 200 exhibitors in the conference -- including major heavyweights like Oracle, Intel, Motorola -- Sentilla was the first company mentioned by Sun. That was really exciting. See for yourself from Sun's webcast replay (we're mentioned starting at 3:52.)

We were recognized for a demo that we created for the JavaOne conference itself. Specifically, we built an application that tracks the number of people that enter and leave any given technical or general session along with the temperature and humidity of each room. I'm sure a member of our crack engineering team will eventually share a blog post on exactly how it was done (because it is very cool and they worked really hard on it), but for me it was simply thrilling to realize that for thousands upon thousands of people this was their first real-world taste of real-world computing.

The ones conducting the session were John Gage, Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, and James Gosling, Sun Fellow and Vice President -- and huge Sentilla fan. Just getting either one of those guys to know your name is an accomplishment in and of itself; having them both start the conference holding up our pervasive computers was flat-out amazing and a testament to how we're changing the world.

This was a sign of things to come. We have three specific booths at JavaOne: our main booth in "Startup Alley" (booth 1224-2), a booth in the Java Playground, and a booth at the Show Device counter. All of our booths were pretty much swamped all day and evening. At one point in the morning there were about sixty people crowding around our one little area were I was (Show Device.) So busy, but so cool! It was just wonderful to share everything we've worked on this past year to an audience that was clearly excited to hear about it.

The day was pretty much non-stop in terms of traffic. However, we did take a moment to gather as a team as Joe was given a Duke's Choice Award by James Gosling in the early evening. The Duke's Choice reflects true innovations in Java technology and are determined by Gosling personally along with a special team of experts. Given how effusive Gosling has been about our technology, we weren't altogether surprised to learn that we had won. Still, it's always great to be recognized for hard work, and that's certainly how we see it.

The day was even more exciting than I've been able to properly convey in this post. But if you consider that it started with a shout-out from John Gage and James Gosling in front of the entire conference, and ended with a presitigious Duke's Choice Award, you get the idea. We can barely wait until Day Two.