cooltown

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cooltown

• Joe Cloyd
• ENGS 112, Dartmouth College

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Presentation Overview

• cooltowns goals
• cooltown (HPs 3 Proof of Concept Examples)
• cooltowns hardware and software
• What happened to cooltown?

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What is cooltown?

• Web presence for all entities.

People
cooltown
Things
Places
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Why is this being done?

• Nomadic users use primarily physical objects
  which dont typically relate dynamically to
  computers.
• Other attempts havent used the web.

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Why the web?

• Alternatives JINI or CORBA
• Benefits
• Webs wide deployment and familiarity
• Robust standards
• Few device system requirements
• Supports human and machine interactions

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What is HPs role?

• They are creating the infrastructure for
  cooltown.
• Other attempts didnt develop
• Nomadic support (PlaceManager)
• Sensing and discovery technologies
• Open source nature of project will encourage
  others to build the web enabled appliances.

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The Infrastructure Vision

• Services everywhere
• Scalability
• Simple model of configuration by users
• Layered infrastructure

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The Visions Proof of Concept

• the cooltown Museum
• cooltown Conference Room
• The WebBus

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cooltown Museum

• Paintings emit URLs that lead to pages offering
  prints, history, and other information.

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cooltown Museum

• Applications
• Curator could count all guests registered in the
  PlaceManager (for a certain painting) at a given
  time.
• Guest could research painting, purchase
  electronic print, etc.

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cooltown Conference Room

• Participants can
• control projector from PDA.
• Print documents on their PC to enabled printer
  via PDA.
• WebTunnel to their intranet.

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WebBus

• Updated with bus current location by bus GPS.
• Shows route maps and information.
• Notifies riders when bus is near.

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The Hardware Components

• Client
• PDAs
• Cell Phones
• Single function appliances
• Web Enabled Devices
• Beacons
• Tags

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The Hardware Components

• Web Servers
• Embedded
• PlaceManagers
• IP connections
• Wireless
• Wired

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Finding A Web Presence

• Discovery
• May have too broad or too narrow mutlicast
• Direct Sensing
• (Infrared) Beacons
• Indirect Sensing
• Bar Codes
• GPS lat/long coordinates
• iButtons

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Indirect Sensing
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ChaiServer and eSquirt

• ChaiServer is a 200 kB HTTP request server for
  small appliances.
• eSquirting is simply sending a URL from the PDA
  to a service such as the printer.

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The Software Components
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Dynamics of cooltown

• Location Aware
• Levels of location
• Semantic Location
• Context Aware
• Web relationships
• Intertwined people, places, and things

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Semantic Location

• Global position tells location only
• Position is unique but shouldnt be.
• Coded in XML
• Incorporates location and context.
• This is what is actually broadcast from beacons
  or encoded in indirect sensing.

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XML in cooltown

• Used to describe devices.
• Will contain universally known attributes.
• Eventually, XML will replace all HTML in cooltown.

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What problems did/does it face?

• Cooltowns uncertain present/future
• Consumer response
• Technological Obstacles
• Most recent updates June 2001

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Consumer Response

• Failure of similar appliances
• Palm/3Coms Audrey
• HP is relying on learning from other companies
  failures

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Technological Obstacles

• All Web Appliances
• Memory
• Processors
• User-Interface
• Network Technology Advances

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For More Information

• All information in this presentation was obtained
  from HPs websites
• White Papers
• http//cooltown.com/dev/wpapers/index.asp
• Marketing Campaign
• http//www.cooltown.hp.com