This week has been active in the field of wireless sensors. Instead of individual posts, lets summarize the developments in one long post instead.

Everyone is talking about Ember doubling their engineering staff in Cambridge to support increased development for Zigbee silicon. Although nice to know they're hiring, this is not very surprising since Ember is now competing head to head with Motorola (Freescale) and Texas Instruments (Chipcon). Fighting the established regime is tough, hopefully they'll ditch the XAP2 and integrate a nice easy-to-use architecture that simply blows the doors off everyone else (hint, ember, you need to exceed the specs of your competitors, not match them, to be on the "cutting edge"). You can read the press release at Ember's site, but I think one of the most interesting articles about the expansion announcement was from a little-known wireless journal in the UK:

http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/2683

On Monday, May 1, Tendril announced their first product to interact with data from Zigbee networks in the building control market. Although we're not yet sure what it does, it definitely wins the award for longest product name ever. Called "The Tendril Bridge for Building Automation Powered by Tridium's NiagaraAX Framework", it allows you to integrate Zigbee data to an Echelon control system using the Zigbee vendor of your choice--but currently they only support Ember. Other vendors are soon to come. See their press release to get the details.

Realizing that the oil and gas industry is making record profits (meaning more money to spend), Honeywell announced an industrial monitoring system using wireless. The motivation is cutting costs and reducing downtime, great quantifiable benefits (ROI) of using wireless sensors and a great boost to the industry. There's a bit of marking mixed in there too: they're expanding into wireless sensors and "hope to unite the data with the business value for the customer to create a complete solution". More info:

http://www.itp.net/business/features/details.php?id=4302&category=

Boeing is using WiFi to improve the production process. Although WiFi is a good immediate solution, I worry about the scalability of how to locate thousands of airplane parts while not running out of battery. Boeing is worried about how to manage all of the data coming in from the location system, a problem experience by numerous wireless users and even our own customers.

http://www.computerpartner.nl/article.php?news=int&id=3136

PCWorld has published an article about the "Invasion of Wireless Sensors" in the consumer space. The misnamed article has nothing really to do with wireless sensors but rather with robotics and cell phones. Everyone has jumped on the "wireless sensor" bandwagon.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125552,00.asp

The previously mentioned "Lover's Cups" in our blog is in the news again. You can read an updated view of the project from the Boston Herald (they presented the devices at CHI at the end of April).

http://theedge.bostonherald.com/lifeNews/view.bg?articleid=137290

I'll be at the Dow Jones Wireless Ventures conference for the rest of the week with another blog update about the newest, coolest wireless companies at the end of the week.

Finally, a number of folks have asked for direct links to the RSS feeds for our blog. To facilitate your RSS reading, I've posted the RSS feed links to the right side of the Main Moteiv Blog for your convenience.

<< 802.11s mesh networking | Main | Wireless Ventures Day 1 Report >>