I find sports, wellbeing and tourism to be really exciting, down-to-earth applications for Internet of Things technology. These are applications that touch people’s everyday lives and are easy to relate to. The ultimate sport application is of course the Olympics.
The 2008 Beijing Olympics were an incredible showcase for Internet technology. The event was 100% IPv6, included embedded IPv6 cameras, building automation systems, taxi monitoring and mobile devices for staff – the largest production IPv6 deployment to date, and an exciting IPv6 IoT experiment as well. Hats of to the Chinese organizers’ IT team, great work. Read more technical details here.
The 2014 Sochi Winter Olypics hosted in Russia, will be the ultimate showcase for embedded IPv6 and 6LoWPAN technology. Finland is known for supplying Russia with building and technology experience, and Sochi will be no exception. Snowpolis, a leading wellbeing, sport and winter technology park (where my office is) – has been elected to coordinate the Finnish effort to bid on Sochi contracts for building the sport and tourism infrastructure needed there. Sochi is currently a village in southern Russia. Almost the entire transportation, tourism and sport infrastructure needs to be built from scratch. I am excited to be working with Snowpolis in this process, on the exciting array of 6LoWPAN applications possible at Sochi. If you have ideas where low-power IPv6 could be applied at the 2014 Olympics, I’d love to hear them!

I am sure that you will be involved in this venture. So congratulations
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“Sochi is currently a village in southern Russia” – I really like this phrase! Place where 325k people are living (2.5 times more then in Oulu for example)) is a “village”… But nevertheless – Good Luck! It does not matter if you call it a “village” or a city, anyway latest technologies will be necessary there…
Hi! Thanks for the correction – maybe I was thinking about it on the Russian scale – I mean, Sochi is a tiny village compared to Moscow! Anyways, I hope to make it there myself for the winter olympics.