Christopher Mims of Quartz recently discussed a concept that may rise alongside the Internet of Things: the Internet of You. Mims explains, “We’ve been hearing about ‘wearable computing’ for years. But we’re finally at a tipping point. Better batteries, miniaturization, and radical new approaches to manufacturing electronic circuits have finally made screens, computers and sensors small enough to stick just about anywhere. It no longer seems strange to see someone wearing a bracelet that records their vital signs, a watch with as much power as a cell phone, or, soon to be available, glasses that augment our reality.” Read more

MaterialSource, an online platform focused on the sustainable materials lifecycle, will relaunch with a semantic web focus by year’s end. In development by ontoforce, the revamped site will initially cater to users in its native Belgium, but it expects to expand to include an international audience.

The goal, says ontoforce co-founder and CEO Hans Constandt, who also is MaterialSource’s co-founder and CIO, is to “apply the whole philosophy of the semantic web to doing the work of connecting small providers” in the space. It wants to lower thresholds for these purveyors of products and materials for sustainable construction to get their data to their markets in an efficient and integrated way. His partners include ontoforce co-founder and COO Stephane Roelandt and co-founder and sales/marketing head Tom Vankemmel, as well as key developer Jaroslav Martasek.

“We’re putting semantic metadata around information from those providers’ materials,” says Constandt.

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A new Financial Times article discusses the rise of the smartphone app and the data they collect: “Displaying up-to-the-minute information on everything from train times to cinema schedules, apps have in short order become a ubiquitous feature of smartphones. To most users, they are simply useful and entertaining tools. As well as providing users with information, however, these mobile software applications are also insatiable data-gatherers. Even the most mundane apps often collect a surprising amount from handsets just to do their jobs. This has put them at the forefront of a fast-evolving science based on the business use of consumer data. If there is commercial advantage to be gained, it seems, almost nothing is too insignificant to be collected and analysed.” Read more