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MZ, formerly known as Machine Zone, formed its Satori open data project to take advantage of the real-time server infrastructure that it built for mobile games like Game of War, Mobile Strike, and Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire. And to stoke interest in the platform, Satori held a Live Data Hackathon recently in San Francisco. And from that, we got SmartTrash, a way to use the Internet of Things to improve trash pickups.
The SmartTrash team won $20,000 and took the top prize in the contest on how to take advantage of Satori.
Satori uses MZ’s live-data streaming technology that helped it secure a leadership position in games. MZ built a technical infrastructure to allow Game of War players from all over the world to communicate in real time in battles where seconds mattered. Because the game grew to millions of players, MZ had to scale its platform to handle massive amounts of data.
And now, it has made that infrastructure available for other purposes — like running New Zealand’s transportation system in real time. That drew the attention of Sergiy Osypov, a front-end Javascript developer in Mountain View, California. He got a few of his coworkers at Epam Systems together: Iaroslav Karandashev, Yan Davidovich, and Vladimir Malyarevich.
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Satori’s software development kit provided frameworks for Javascript, and so, Osypov said in an interview with VentureBeat that he thought it would be easy to develop for. At the hackathon, the Satori team asked contestants to use the platform, figure out how to stream data for it, and come up with ideas on how to make use of the infrastructure.
Osypov’s team of four engineers competed with 20 other teams. They were fresh to the technology and came up with the idea of SmartTrash.
Above: The winning team at the Satori hackathon.
Their idea was to embed a sensor in the lid of a trash can. That sensor would detect how much space was in the trash can. When it got to 90 percent full, they would notify the trash company that it was time to come pick up the trash. That way, the trash company only sends out a trash truck to pick up trash when it is needed, and it can reduce unnecessary trips.
“We implemented a proof of concept with both hardware and proximity sensors,” Osypov said. “We created server-side scripts on Satori.”
The team coded the project for a couple of days and then made a presentation.
“Live data is game changing. Nowadays, the regular pattern of data handling is store-read-process-store,” said Malyarevich, a member of the winning team. “Streaming data can be processed in real time. So end-users’ applications will have results immediately and can react appropriately (in real time).”
He added, “Having streambots and streamviews implemented as a part of Satori’s infrastructure makes it possible for us to move all logic (like data processing and aggregation) out from client’s side. So end-user devices and applications are relatively simple and cheap.”
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