Whilst representing Ireland at the EU IPv6 Event in Brussels (Belgium) today I head about this new body that could be influential in standardising the use of IPv6 for sensor networks going forward.
IPSO Alliance: Promoting the use of IP for Smart Objects
The domain of Smart Objects is vast. As sensors for light, pressure, temperature, vibration, actuators, and other similar objects evolve, new applications and solutions are being created and implemented. Indeed, "smart cities", "smart grid", home and building automation, industrial applications, asset tracking, utility metering, etc are all taking of IPv6's rich history and adaptability.
Companies and consumers are ready for the level of automation that Smart Objects can bring. In order to satisfy the growing demand of information and standardization in the domain of the Internet of Things, more than 27 companies (IPSO Initial founders) have decided to join their efforts.
The IPSO Alliance will perform interoperability tests, document the use of new IP-based technologies, conduct marketing activities and serve as an information repository for users seeking to understand the role of IP in networks of physical objects. Its role will complement the work of entities such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) or the ISA which develop and ratify technical standards in the Internet community.
The IPSO Alliance is an open, informal and thought-leading association of like-minded organizations and individuals that promote the value of using the Internet Protocol for the networking of Smart Objects.
February 2009 Web Server Survey - Netcraft
It is interesting to note the massive impact, on statistics about on-line websites held by Netcraft.com, that one large Chinese hosting site, the Qzone blogging service, has had.
In the February 2009 survey we received responses from 215,675,903 sites. This reflects a phenomenal monthly gain of more than 30 million sites, bringing the total up by more than 16%.This majority of this month's growth is down to the appearance of 20 million Chinese sites served by QZHTTP. This web server is used by QQ to serve millions of Qzone sites beneath the qq.com domain.
QQ is already well known for providing the most widely used instant messenger client in China, but this month's inclusion of the Qzone blogging service instantly makes the company the largest blog site provider in the survey, surpassing the likes of Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and MySpace.
The web server they use, their own customized software called QZHTTP, is now the 3rd most popular web server in the world, after Apache and MS IIS, with just shy of a 10% share of the server market; that's real impact! I guess this is just the beginning of this type of phenomenon as the Chinese start to impact on many such on-line statistics.