I had some time to play with my newest chunk of hardware, the spark core. It is a sweet little board embedded in a breadboard for prototyping fun. It also connects to Wi-Fi and has a cloud to support it. You can read about it here. Of course a picture is warranted:
Registration begins with a smart phone app that assists in Wi-Fi registration, much like chromecast but not as smooth. Nonetheless it did connect after some handstands - hint you need WPA-2 not WEP and this finally moved me to upgrade my home network! It is a good thing.
The spark core folks include in their smart phone app tinker which lets you do elementary operations on the pins. You can flash an led from your iPhone and more.
More on hacking with it later in the week. Later, and Merry Christmas!