Push Notifications and the Internet of Things
Today on Facebook's F8 conference they announced Parse for IoT. This a cool, but not unexpected move, especially since there is demand to have connected objects being part of an (enterprise) cloud systems. We will see more of that happening soon, and our lesson learned on traditional mobile, will be applied to IoT devices or "connected objects" in general.
In the AeroGear project we have done similar experiments, bringing functionality of our UnifiedPush Server to the IoT space. My colleage Sébastien Blanc did two short screencasts on his work in this area:
- Sending Push Notifications to Raspberry Pi
- Sending Push Notifications to a Lego Mindstorms EV3 Robot
The above examples basically leverage our support for SimplePush, which is a WebSocket based protocol used on Firefox OS for Push Notification. Due to the fact Firefox OS uses such an open protocol, we are able to extend this mechanism of Push Notifications delivery to other platforms, not just Firefox OS devices.
Bringing Push Notifications to the IoT sector is a logical move, to integrate connected objects and mobile cloud services!