In the early '80s the home entertainment industry rivalled over the Laserdisc and the VHS. For those in the industry the answer was easy, the Laserdisc was far superior over the VHS tapes. Looking back on history however, it is clear that the VHS served customers so much better simply because it fitted what people needed at the time.

Today, at the dawn of a ubiquitous world, we can see a similar rivalry in the field of connected devices. Both collectives and organisations are trying to figure out how they can get a piece of the pie. Should it be a custom proprietary communications platform, a custom cloud solution? Or should it be an open source alternative that one could adopt and contribute too?

The Weave protocol is a solution following the latter form. Originated in the NEST labs and now adopted by Google, Weave, on top of Brillo or stand alone, is a completely open communications protocol that one can use to connect devices in a smart and handy way. Because of choices such as XMPP and mDNS, which clearly point out well thought through User Experience Design, Google offers a full end-to-end answer to this question. Because of these clever decisions it also opens the door for new business models for individuals, collectives and enterprises.

In this talk I want to share my thoughts on why I think that Weave might be the solution to this major question everybody in the business of ubiquitous faces. I want to show how it works, why it works and how Google seems to follow their own model of supporting a platform so well, that people want to sign up for their free cloud based solution and share their data without introducing any proprietary obstacles.

Setup

During this event we will have:

• Introduction on Brillo and Weave
• Lightning talks

Join us for our session at a special location: Skylounge Amsterdam!