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The USB Lego, bluetooth coffee cups and connected cats of Computex 2015

The cloud's got consumer tech in a nasty tangle

ARM coins it in the IoT, costumes, landfill rescue and the internet of cats

Off the beaten track at Computex is all manner of enterprise and industrial kit. This year I spotted quite a few white box servers and switches, more than a few in open compute form factors. Anything with an interface – serial, parallel , digital, analog or pigeon-powered – is now a Thing, as in Internet of …

I'd need a week at Computex to do that stuff justice, so let's stay close to home for a quick peek in the form of ARM's new Cordio platform, a tiny Bluetooth LE radio ready for integration with its Cortex processors.

Internet of Cats feeder

ARM's Cordio Bluetooth button

Cordio needs under one volt to do the business. Combined with a Cortex CPU it should give Intel's button-sized Cure system-on-a-chip a run for its money. Intel revealed Curie in January and says its committed to the idea but isn't in a rush to productise it. Perhaps the competition from ARM will spur it along?

The device most-often trying to claim “Thing” status was surveillance gear, either video cameras or other sensors. Most were of a muchness, but the little robots below caught my eye. The idea is that you'll get your old phone and instead of turning it into landfill, strap it to these bots and let them roam about your house or office.

USB_phonebot_Computex

Landfill phones can live again as a robot's eyes and ears

There's an app for that, but for control purposes only. The makers are happy for you to use FaceTime, or Skype or another video calling app to handle video chores. Sadly they didn't have a cat handy to see how a feline would respond.

A few booths away, however, was this contraption.

Internet of Cats feeder

The Internet of Cats is upon us

That's a toy cat, thankfully. If it were real, the device would do a face scan to see if it is your beloved moggie and not an interloper. If the former, the device dispenses food in doses determined by algorithms that assess whether your pet is overweight.

Another notable thing about this cat feed: it's being crowdfunded, as were a few products I spotted around the show. Some were from startups, others from established businesses using crowdfunding to test demand for their ideas. That means the show is now partly a forum for vapourware. Chew on that, if you will.

Sex sells at Computex and even big global brands who know the presence of scantily-clad women on a stand in the USA or Europe would mean a hailstorm of criticism think nothing of employing them here.

Hence Gigabyte develops elaborate costumes like the ones below. Readers: know that I endured a ten-deep queue of salarimen to bring you this shot.

Gigabyte fantasy gaming girls

I deeply suspect next year's Computex will be more interesting than 2015's edition. USB 3.1 and the type-C connector are bound to get gadget-makers thinking beyond the tangle-tamers and USB power-bearers that dominated the show floor this year.

There's also clearly much more to come in the fields of wireless power and video transmission.

For now, Taiwan's manufacturers are getting very good at making all manner of technology more decorative and finding more corners of your home in which to place it. Hopefully before long we also get greater functionality, because this year the show feels like it's held back by a mighty braid of wires. ®

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