March 16, 2011 – Remember The Jetsons on Saturday morning? It was cool to watch Jane order dinner from the push-button space age conveniences and see their leisurely daily life assisted by numerous labor-saving devices. Has semantic technology brought us to the point that our smallest desires can be anticipated by inanimate objects?

This interesting, amusing, and somewhat unnerving topic was found on Technically Philly in their article/interview titled, “Friday Q&A: ThingWorx promises not to make SkyNet.”

ThingWorx COO John Richardson was interviewed about their latest project, “Internet of Things”, a smartphone application that might enable real-life objects to communicate with one another and users. According to Richardson, the Internet was really about searching documents and then evolved into a more social environment. He sees the next evolution as devices being users on the Internet by creating a platform that allows you to build applications faster that brings the social and semantic web components to devices.

Before you go there, he assures us they aren’t building the real-life SkyNet – though he ended that with a chuckle?

Melody K. Smith