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Editor's Notes

1. First off, a brief bio so you know a bit about who I am, and how I got here. After graduating I moved down to Cambridge to join a small startup called STNC. You won¡¯t have heard of it, but we were doing interesting things with mobile phones and the web before most people had a mobile phone. We built the first ever web browser to run on a mobile phone. We were then bought by Microsoft when they started getting serious about phones, and after a few years working for the ¡°Evil Empire¡± I left to start my own company. Since then I¡¯ve been using my experience in writing software for very constrained platforms and knowledge of web technologies to work on projects that cut across web and mobile. More and more, I¡¯ve been interested in, and helping people with, the emerging ¡°Internet of Things¡± ¨C getting data out of the real world and into the Internet; or out of the Internet and into the real world
2. This isn¡¯t something that I¡¯ve made. It¡¯s a site collecting lots of data about ship positions from enthusiasts all round the coast, and then showing you live ship data on a fairly rudimentary map. If you hover over any of the ships then you get some more information about it. Despite living about quarter of an hours walk from the river, I can¡¯t actually see it from my flat ¨C someone built Britain¡¯s biggest cathedral right in the way. I thought it would be nice to be more connected to the traffic on the river, and so I used this data to build¡­
3. I have a little script that takes the data from ShipAIS.com and works out when a boat has entered, or left the Mersey. Whenever that happens it sends a message to the @merseyshipping twitter account. That means I get a background awareness of the comings and goings on the river, and find out just how busy the river still is!
4. http://mapme.at/api/export.html?usernames=royaldaffodil,royaliris,snowdrop,amcewen&mode=since&since=1%20hour%20ago Building upon that, I did some work with the Liverpool-based location history and sharing web startup mapme.at. Now you can add the famous ferries ¡®cross the Mersey to your friends on mapme.at, and see where they are in relation to you. On this screenshot you can see that I¡¯m at home; Snowdrop is moored over in Birkenhead; Royal Daffodil is plying the normal ferry route around the river; and I¡¯m not sure what Royal Iris is up to down there ¨C she¡¯s on the Manchester Ship Canal for some reason.
5. BakerTweet ¨C a simple and easy way for one bakery in London to send Twitter messages whenever they pull something fresh out of the oven. Then lets local followers know when it¡¯s a good time to head down to buy something.
6. Bubblino ¨C a twitter-watching, bubble-blowing Arduino bot.