Cloud services are vital tools for storing, analyzing, and responding to data collected by sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT). With ThingSpeak, a popular web platform that provides these services, users can easily create cloud "channels" to receive, host, and visualize sensor data. In this study, we scrape public channels from 6,511 users to construct a comprehensive picture of both the ThingSpeak developer community and their applications. We release this data to support future work. From this data, we examine 37,989 visualizations and uncover relationships between application domains and visualization techniques utilized. Further, we investigate how ThingSpeak's interface impacts user design choices. To learn which channels most successfully disseminate information, we explore design patterns on channels "liked" on Facebook or discussed in ThingSpeak forums. Finally, we briefly comment on how services like ThingSpeak can better support users' needs moving forward.

Building connected, pervasive, human-facing, and responsive applications that incorporate local sensors, smartphone interactions, device actuation, and cloud-based learning--the promised features of the Internet of Things (IoT)---requires a complete suite of tools spanning both hardware and software. We present a set of these pieces, including a gateway, four hardware building blocks, multiple sensor platforms, an indoor localization system, and software for connecting users and devices. Each piece plays an integral role towards enabling applications, from facilitating rapid development of wireless smart devices to composing data streams and services from a diverse set of components. By providing layered interoperable systems, our toolkit offers cohesive support for moving beyond single-device, cloud-centric applications---typical in today's IoT landscape--and towards richer applications that incorporate multiple data streams, human interaction, cloud processing, location awareness, multiple communication protocols, historical data, access control, and on-demand user interfaces. To show how the pieces in the toolkit cooperate, we demonstrate a location-based access control application where a user's smartphone can control a room's lighting, but only from within the room. Further, data streams from the phone and nearby sensors are used to provide a constant lighting service which attempts to maintain a user-set brightness under variable external lighting conditions.

We are becoming increasingly surrounded by smart and connected devices, popularly known as the Internet of Things. The emerging user interface paradigm for many such things eschews physical buttons, knobs, and displays in favor of virtual interfaces that are downloaded from the web and rendered on remote platforms---like smartphones. However, such smartphone app-based interfaces often require tedious discovery and installation, as well as device discovery, pairing, and configuration before a user can interact with a nearby device. Requiring an explicit app install for each new device type scales poorly with device growth, and particularly hinders casual interactions with ambient devices. Instead of the high-friction, walled-garden approach now taking root, we propose name, a physical web browser that provides a seamless, scalable approach to browsing and interacting with nearby things. name leverages multiple network patterns and modern web technologies to provide users with rich device interfaces, even for devices under network or power constraints. We argue that this approach scales better and that it provides more intuitive and natural functionality for both users and developers. This demo presents the basic concept, allows others to experience our preliminary implementation, and raises several open research questions.