Category Archives: Wireless Connectivity

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New form factors of the personal computer …
For years we have witnessed the slow evolution (or fast evolution?) of the personal computer. We started with the first IBM PC that was a large box with full-height 5.25″ floppy disks. That machine has not evolved into a variety of desktop and tower designs, and of course we now have laptops and notebooks of all shapes and sizes.

We are about to watch as people become aware of new form factors that computers are taking … and Microsoft is again going to lead this revolution. This article outlines what Microsoft is creating for the future … and what they are guiding other companies to develop. I believe that we are going to see more and more “Human Integrated” computing in the near future … and it will surprise a lot of people …

InfoWorld: Microsoft’s Tablet PC a year away. Microsoft’s super thin portable computer, called the Tablet PC, will be available in the second half of 2002, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates said Tuesday, and the company has begun giving developers the software they need to build applications for the device. [Tomalak’s Realm]

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Indoor Location Systems are coming … via 802.11b?
I am truly impressed with this project out of UCLA. It is addressing a very powerful area of “Indoor Location Services” … allowing a user to locate themselves within a building similar to how GPS can tell you your location outdoors.

Ok … so the technology and techniques are quite different, but the capability of locating yourself within a building – accurately – is now becoming a reality. And how are they doing it? With Orinoco 802.11b access points and cards!

This project is using the statistics available from a Orinoco 802.11b wireless card to create a “map” of locations and the associated access point signals detected at those locations. As a user roams around they can create a “fingerprint” of the signals detected at that location. Later, as they roam around the building, the application can tell where they are by the map that they created.

This is very impressive for a number of reasons, and gets me interested in downloading and running this. I’m downloading it now …

The UCLA Nibble Project

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But what about privacy when speaking to your devices?
One of the things that I have found using wearable computers and various devices is that there are times that you want privacy. Using voice recognition is difficult in a loud place filled with other conversations and most of the current systems are not the best at discriminating a voice, unless it is by the loudness. There are, in addition, times that I want to be able to interact with my computer privately without others being aware. For example, I might be working on business applications, wanting to call someone and keep the name private, or I might want to be making “notes” to my computer while interacting with another person.

All of these, IMHO, indicate that computer interaction can be by voice, but only for a small segment of the interaction that I want to have.

Speaking of Voice Recognition. Intel, Microsoft and other top technology companies form a group to develop speech-enabled software that will allow communication without pushing buttons. Elisa Batista reports from Mountain View, California. [Wired News]

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An Open Source Wearable Computer software project …
This appears to be a cool little project exploring the various UI aspects and human interactions of wearable computers. I’m not quite able to understand some of the objectives yet, however I am going to keep reading … I like the direction of this project.

I also found some very good links and references through this site … I really like Nooface … and I had not heard that Steve Mann had a movie – Cyberman made about his life and his experiences.

jAugment 2.3.134 (Unstable). A software infrastructure for wearable computers. [freshmeat.net]

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Why our 80211.net project can rule!
I spoke with Stewart at one of the Telecosm conferences, and we talked about the subject of viable business models. At that point I suggested that both Metricom and Mobilestar were on interesting paths that I could not see sustainable. Both of these organizations have run into extreme trouble. In my opinion Metricom went off track with it’s proprietary solution, and Mobilestar was never going to be able to finance the deployment of an “owned” infrastructure.

My team and I have developed a much different business model … and we are looking to deploy the first tests around the time of the Olympics here in Utah. Keep watching http://www.80211.net

Stewart Alsop: “Wireless rocks! Wireless stinks!”  [Scripting News]

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More articles on the 802.11b “parasitic grid” conversation …
Althought many people (like the cell phone companies) don’t like the concept, and many people (like the creators/users) don’t like the name, the result will end up being the same. We are going to see the development of a global wireless solution created by the users … and our organization is working to contribute to this. 80211.net is one of our “fun” projects that is slowly making progress … 😉

O’Reilly Networks’s Rob Flickenger and Dave Sims discuss the parasitic grid: nice discussion between two clued-in folks.

[80211b News]

Users reject notion of parasitic grid: although InfoWorld didn’t publish any of the many letters I was cc’d on about a column that appared in its pages a few weeks ago about free wireless networks, it did run this odd article. (My take on the initial issue is here.)

[80211b News]

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New antenna designs …
For wearable and mobile computing to take place, in my opinion, there will have to be some real transitions in how we think about wireless communciations. I do not believe that we will have one type of wireless, but several. So technologies which contribute to these architectures will continue to show up. Here is a company that is developing new antenna designs that allow a single antenna to be used for multiple wireless solutions at the same time. Cool stuff …

http://www.skycross.com/

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More on Ginger …
So this is a late post … and everyone has read or seen “Ginger” by now. Or most everyone. I wanted to post some links, and also make a few comments.

The most amazing thing about the Segway HT is that we are now seeing some of the potential that Ray Kurzweil alludes to. The Segway is an amazing device that can actually “balance” … and it can do so with a human rider! How can it do this? The same way that a human does! What we are seeing is when technology begins to reproduce or exceed the some of the same capabilities of a human being. The Segway HT is able to detect motion and “balance” (much like the inner ear), it is able to compute corrections (much like the brain and nervous system), and it is able to move itself (much like the muscles in our legs) to stay balanced.

I want one of these really bad … not only to experience, but to own one of the first pieces of a whole new realm of possibility!

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-8020427.html?tag=mn_hd

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/2001/segway/index.html

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Mesh Networks … the next step in wireless?
Over the last several years doing my research into wearable computers (and thinking about how to do peer to peer wireless with my friends while we are rollerblading!) I began to look into packet relay using low-power radios. I was then at one of the George Gilder Telecosm conferences where a presenter from MIT talked about his research into these types of networks.

The presenter (I can’t find his name now) talked about how huges areas could be covered with low power radios, and that they would relay/route for each other to allow for massive distributed networks to be created. I was intrigued. I started to look for radios that would meet the criteria that I had … decent distance with mid-speed bandwith. I am still looking for affordable radios to do this, but believe that I found some at Comdex that will fit the bill … more on this later.

The next steps were to think about routing in a completely distributed “mesh” network. If a group of people (firefighters, search and rescue, my friends and I on blades …) are scattered across a physical area, then how do you do the routing? If everyone relays all packets, then you run into the issues of too much noise and unnecessary packet repeating. How do you route then?

The answer hit me (of course while in the shower!) several months back while pondering this … GPS! With GPS I can actually create a routing protocol that is completely dependent on physical location … not network connections. If each person not only has a radio, but a working GPS, then I can address someone by their location. I have a location, and my friend has a location. I send a packet with my source location, and their destination location. Anyone that “hears” my packet can then determine if they are “in between” the two locations, and if it makes sense for them to relay the packet to assist.

When this hit me, I knew that I have this figured out. I am now on my quest for radios, and as I get my two new Xybernaut wearable computers, I am going to begin to work on this. In the mean time, one of my consulting clients is doing some work in this area to address some last-mile wireless issues … and this article is showing that the understanding of “mesh network” potential is growing!

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991593

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Comdex … slow, but a valuable trip …
I just returned from Comdex, and there were some real valuable finds … in a wide range of areas. I’ll be writing about a number of the companies and solutions in future stories, and as I get to evaluate the products. There were also a number of trends that were noticeable … the prescence of numerous tablet computers, wearable computers, heads up displays, 802.11b, Bluetooth, 802.11a, and solid state disk drives.

Tablets and wearables …
It seemed that there were a large number of WinCE tablet computers at Comdex this year. I am not impressed with these machines … although they appear to provide some level of features and functions. WinCE is still a limited OS, and the application support just isn’t there. Although the current price point is very good, most of the vendors were even pushing their solutions as a Windows “thin-client” solution … remotely display applications that were running on another machine. This just doesn’t make sense to me.
Peppered throughout the various WinCE solutions, were a few unique solutions that caught my attention … of course Xybernaut, along with PaceBlade, and a few others. These are full blown PCs, running full operatings systems. The PaceBlade was actually impressive as a tablet PC. I’m thinking that I will have to get one to try!

Wireless … why Bluetooth is lame …
I really wanted to check out the situation with Bluetooth wireless … and I found that it is in a miserable state! The products are coming available … most are already falling into commodity pricing due to Pacific Rim manufacturers. The software however sucks … big time! Most every vendor had their own little applications that would display Bluetooth devices and services, and allow for you to interact with these … but all in their own unique ways. The worst part of this is that I could not find a vendor who was willing to give away a developer kit that would allow the creation of new and innovative applications! When I found a vendor who seemed to think it was a good idea, they immediately indicated that they could put one together for me for thousands of dollars … yeah, right! Why would I pay for a dev kit to sell more hardware for a company? They could be paying me to assist them! How do they expect the “killer app” to be created for Bluetooth, when no one is releasing the foundation for new applications to developers? Bluetooth is doomed, IMHO, unless the vendors do something soon.
I’m meeting with a friend who works on the Bluetooth standards commitee on Monday … I am going to have a long talk with her and see what can be done …

Solid state flash disk …
One last thing for this post … the solid state disks are looking good. There were several vendors who offered IDE solid state flash disks with up to 2GB of capacity. This is going to be very good for the mobile market, and also for more fault tolerence in server boot drives of Internet appliances. These things are lightweight, fast, and reliable. They can take 1MM writes per sector … so it’s a lot of data. You will want an OS that does read-after-write verifications though …

I’ll be writing more soon … but the trip was inspiring … there were a lot of the components that I have been looking for … so that I can continue to create the future …