The good folks at Botanicalls let you talk to your plants. Over the phone. The photo at the right is from their table at ETel07.

Sensors placed in a pot give up information about the plant's light and soil moisture. Ambient sensors pick up humidity, temperature, CO2/Oxygen and light. The sensors pass this to an app that stores, analyzes and presents the data.

An Asterisk server provides the phone interface. You can call or SkypeOut +1.212.202.8348 to hear ten plants speak their care and health. The plants call a local phone when they want to:

• request water
• confirm & thank for water
• request more water if first watering was not enough
• notify of unnecessary watering
• notify of extreme need for water when plant is too dry

It's an architecture, not a novelty.

It's Moore's Law driving down the cost of sensors, processing and communication. Right now it's feasible to meld the Real World with metadata and our cyberspaces. We're seeing telephony apps layered on medical, supply chain and other high value systems.

It's quickly becoming convenience cheap, leading to ubiquity. Then disposable cheap, so fashion and whim rule. "Hi, this is your Adidas calling. Your feet are hot and smelly and you need to buy me some new inserts." "This is Huggies calling for your baby. Time to change the diaper."

Plants are a great case study because they are alive and interact in complex ways with their environment.

I have a gray thumb and have doomed my share of house plants. Botanicalls gives me hope.

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