This little ninja could control the world

There are ups and downs to trying out new software and apps and web services every day. On the up side, you discover lots of things that simplify your life. On the down side, they often only simplify one thing, and don't integrate with the rest of the things in your life. This is why services like If This Then That (IFTTT) feel essential; they force these disparate services to play nicely with one another to simplify your life even further.

Ninja Blocks serves a similar purpose, but jumps an even bigger gap.

Instead of connecting apps together, it connects the real world with apps and the cloud. A small, open source hardware unit powers a bunch of different sensors: Light, Humidity, Distance, Motion, Push button, and so forth, and actions read by those sensors then trigger actions in different Web apps like Twitter, Facebook, Google Docs, SMS/Phone, Xbox Live, Dropbox.

For example, if a motion sensor connected to the Ninja Blocks hardware sees motion, it can snap a picture with a webcam and text it to you, or if it hears a sound like the doorbell ringing when you're not home, it can display a message on an LCD screen in your window. The possibilities are actually a lot cooler than my bad example, and that's why the Ninja Blocks kickstarter was fully funded within 72 hours of launching at the end of January.

But the interaction isn't simply to have the real world effect the software world. Ninja Blocks actually stands in the middle, letting users control the real world from the real world via the web. The Web apps connected to the Ninja Blocks cloud service can also be used to interface relays, controllers, lights, motors, and other real-world objects.

The Ninja Blocks team illustrates this in the latest interaction they've developed with everybody's favorite anthropomorphized speech interface, Siri. As we see in the team's video, a command spoken to Siri is sent to the Ninja Block at home. By saying "Turn on the heater," the Ninja Block sends the code to turn on the heater to the connected IR blaster.

There is just a little more than a week left in the Ninja Blocks Kickstarter, and we are compiling some questions for the project's founder Marcus Schappi. So if there is anything you want to know about Ninja Blocks, ask away in the comments section!