Exosite recently presented on Open Source Hardware at Minnebar - Minnesota's top (un)conference destination.

Most Engineers love to tinker - every so often someone at Exosite will put together some kind of office "efficiency" system that makes use of our Data Platform and Web Dashboards for remote monitoring and/or maintenance. Fun stuff - like office electricity power draw, coffee status, plant soil moisture, etc.... Depending on the engineer, they will use their favorite open source hardware device (e.g. Arduino, mbed, Fluid) to grab the data and put in online. The speed with which these open source hardware systems can be extended and deployed as part of a connected system really makes them fun to prototype with.

Part of the Exosite team attended CloudCamp Twin Cities last week. For those not familiar with CloudCamp, it is “an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.” During an unconference, all the panels and breakout sessions are generated on the fly and led by the attendees. Why were we there? The Exosite team wanted to check out what local people were saying about cloud technologies.

We are excited to make public that Exosite has partnered with Arrow Electronics (NYSE:ARW) to provide Arrow customers access to our cloud-based data platform technologies.

I get this question a lot - right after I think I've done a good job describing what we do at Exosite.  So, here it is:

We make it really easy for people to put sensor data on a web page.

Sure, it is a lot more than that, and it has a lot of ramifications, but that seems to be a good marriage of accuracy and digestibility.  A general way of saying could be: "We provide the software and interfaces to meaningfully connect data providers to information subscribers."

We here at Exosite have been working in the embedded systems and product design industry for over 20 years.  We've worked with it all - medical devices that are saving and sustaining lives, dual-redundant kill switches that know if a hot dog is posing as a finger, multi-channel oscopes that can tell when your car has the 1:100,000 manufacturer recall problem, massive electro magnets that count the new year's salmon run, golf ball tracking devices that never made it past spec - some really cool products and ideas.  One thing these devices all had in common - adding connectivity opens up new horizons on what can be done.

Our last announcement mentioned that Exosite Portals has the ability to make your dashboards public. Now we have created a list of public dashboards where you can view live data others are monitoring.

We’ve just updated Exosite Portals to 0.4.0.

We’ve just updated Exosite Portals to support multiple views-per-portal. This allows you to expose the data flowing in and out of the Portal in different ways for the different people who will be looking at it.

We’ve added an XMPP message interface to the OpenTether communication interfaces in the form of a chat bot named “Commander.”

The Exosite One management interface has been rebranded as “Exosite Portals” and released in beta at one.exosite.com. The back-end still supports the same devices, but the front-end now has an extensible menu structure with features previously only available to Exosite folks. Signup, login, try it out.