It's been a while since I last ran one of the courses to show people how to get their Arduino hooked up to the Internet and interfacing with services like Pachube and Twitter.

So, once again over at Madlab as part of their Omniversity series I'll be spending the day taking people through the basics of the Internet of Things.

Whilst generally good for conversations, the 140-character limit in Twitter can make it hard to get across more nuanced ideas and thoughts. A recent discussion about the Internet of Things demonstrates that nicely.

Last Wednesday evening saw the third Internet of Things London meetup, and I was honoured to be asked along to give one of the talks. It's great to see such a group generating such interest - the event was a sell out, and some seventy or eighty people were shoehorned into the Centre for Creative Collaboration.

As promised on the night, here are my slides - along with the notes I made while pulling them together. They're notes, rather than a script, so only bear a resemblance to what I actually said, but hopefully the general points will come through. The first slide is here, and the remainder follow after the jump...

Back when the field that would come to be known as ubicomp or, more recently, the Internet of Things was just being forged, pioneer Mark Weiser also referred to it as Calm Technology.

It's a shame that the term has been ousted by the Internet of Things, because it's easy to see how connecting things to the Internet would be interesting and useful. It's less obvious that making them unobtrusive and calm is just as important.

Just a short post, partly to show that we're still here at MCQN HQ (just phenomenally busy with projects - more on that soon I hope) and to point out a couple of outings that Bubblino has had recently.

Just last Saturday he appeared on Cool Stuff Collective - a childrens TV show on ITV, one of the national stations here in the UK. They had a segment all about Arduino, and he was one of the examples they showed of what you can build with it, although sadly they didn't actually let him show off what he can do.

A quick update for anyone coming along to the Arduino Ethernet Internet of Things course I'm running at Madlab's Omniversity on 2nd July...

The lovely people over at Pachube will be giving every person who attends the course a free upgrade to Pachube Premium accounts, giving you the best possible Pachube experience.

I think we still have a few places left, so head over to the signup page if you want to come along.

Want to get to grips with the Internet of Things? In collaboration with Madlab's excellent Omniversity I'll be running another Arduino Ethernet course on Saturday 2nd July.

There's a bit of theory first, to give you an idea of how all the things connected to the Internet talk to each other, and then the majority of the day is spent hands-on - getting temperature sensors to publish data to Pachube; controlling lights with Twitter; sending tweets from an Arduino and making a simple web server.

In a couple of weeks I'll be heading back to where I did my degree, but this time just for a weekend and I'll be one of the "experts" in attendance.

Ever had the problem that when you were away from your Bubblino you couldn't keep track of your searches on Twitter? Or maybe you're one of the few people who hasn't bought their own Bubblino yet (though heaven knows why not... [We might be a bit biased there - Ed])

Well, thanks to iOS app developer John McKerrell you can now get some virtual bubbles, wherever you can take your iPhone.

The Liverpool Chamber of Commerce invited me to speak at their Insight11 digital marketing and communication conference, which took place yesterday. I tried to give a flavour of how the Internet of Things can help organisations produce interesting, different and engaging ways to connect with people, and my slides are below. I've included the notes that I made while preparing my talk, although they probably bear little resemblance to what I actually said on stage...