Welcome to the Spime Farm

During the last couple of years, BaseN Platform has been used to monitor and control an increasing amount of nodes, or devices, outside the traditional telecom and IT realm. As a consequence, we’ve vastly developed our capabilities of securely hosting complex algorithms which analyze – and, perhaps even more importantly, control things ranging from solar inverters to rat traps.

Fast-forward a few product development cycles of our customer. What do we actually host? The rat trap may send us images, temperature, humidity and olfactory sensor data, while we (the Platform) can issue the lethal blow if, and only if exactly the correct species of rat (and definitely not the rare red crested tree rat) enters the trap.

The trap itself is, actually, an algorithm within our Platform having (somewhat cruel) physical extensions in form of a killing spring and an array of sensors. This kind of physically augmented virtual entity is called spime, a term coined by author Bruce Sterling in 2004. The point is to emphasize the model over the manifestation.

Spimes, which record and manage the full lifecycle of their physical representations, enable immense efficiency improvements when combined with recycling and 3D printing technologies.

We believe that the role of hardware and software will intermingle toward the spime ideal, and there will be a need to manage untold numbers of variegated spimes-in-the-wild. This is the direction we’re heading towards, empowering our customers to devise their own, evolving algorithms for their own spimes. The first step on this road is my.basen, which is our first service that can be fully activated and operated via the web. Customers register, log in, start sending data and create algorithms and actions. All as a service.