Monday, February 11, 2002

Dan Bricklin's photo Weblog Dan Bricklin, co-developer of the Apple killer app, VisiCalc, is posting photos of the Demo conference.  He notes that Cisco is providing free WiFi cards.  I don't know if he's posting the photos via WiFi, but WiFi speeds + Weblog software certainly make this easy and practical. The future of conferences and corporate meetings is right in front of your eye. 10:10:13 PM

VoiceStream purchases MobileStar Glenn Fleishman of 802.11b Networking News fame got the scoop here.  VoiceStream has purchased MobileStar and is "welcoming" existing MobileStar customers. Now we have VoiceStream with MobileStar going head-to-head against Sky Dayton's 802.11 "aggregator" company, Boingo Wireless. The cellular industry has entered WiFi space, and I'm getting very involved in this concept.  I just sent out a news alert to Reiter's Block subscribers. Dan Gillmor's wireless blogging Demo Dan Gillmor, the well-known San Jose Mercury News computer columnist and Weblogger, has set up a special section for using WiFi for updates about the Demo conference he's attending.  Yesterday I mentioned Dan hoped to do this. There appears to be a fair number of wireless demonstrations at Demo.  Dan writes that Sky Dayton is discussing Boingo Wireless' WiFi venture.  (I'm almost finished with an analysis of Boingo's business model, which I'll e-mail to my Reiter's Block e-mail subscribers.)  Embrace Networks is demonstrating placing Web servers on different devices and connecting wirelessly, Dan says. Sprint is demonstrating a voice recognition/voice synthesis product from its "labs":  E-Sandy, is a voice "assistant" that Dan says is similar to Wildfire, but more sophisticated.  Dan says he hates the artificial voice. The power of wireless + Weblogs As I have written -- and will continue to write -- wireless + Weblogs create a powerful combination.  I am bringing that message to the wireless industry. WiFi is preferred because of the high speed and relatively low (or free) cost.  But the launch of next generation cellular systems (GSM GPRS and CDMA 1xRTT) will enable users to, finally, get close to landline dialup speeds, perhaps even faster.  Wireless + Weblogs have tremendous implications for conferences, corporate meetings, journalism and information distribution in general. 5:03:38 PM

Wireless LAN industry:  Learn from cellular? I had an interesting briefing on last Friday with Jerry Yang, the president and CEO of NextComm.  Like me, Jerry has been in the wireless business a long time.  He's worked at AT&T Wireless, Sharp Microelectronics Technology and Motorola. We discussed NextComm's products and vision -- integrated circuits for wireless LANs -- as well as talking about wireless data in general.  Jerry had some interesting comments about how the wireless LAN industry could learn from cellular, and he allowed me to post those thoughts. Battery life and power management Jerry noted that some of the techniques employed in cellular would be useful for 802.11.  For example, he mentioned how the cellular industry has done a good job of increasing battery life, and how WiFi hardware needs to be more efficient.  (For many people the battery life of cellular phones is good enough.  Battery life has come a long way since I used the first cellular phones in 1982 and 1983, before Motorola introduced the first cellular portable phone.  The DynaTAC portable was heavy and clunky by today's standards, but at $3,500 -- if I correctly remember the retail price -- it was an engineering marvel in the 1980s.) I have a WiFi PC Card for my laptop computer and recently got a WiFi compact flash card for my Compaq IPAQ.  I can almost see the IPAQ's battery life being sucked out into the ether by the WiFi transceiver as I surf the Web on the IPAQ via my desktop PC's DSL connection.  I can certainly empathize about WiFi battery life, or the lack thereof. Jerry discussed the need for dynamic power management for WiFi products, citing cellular technology's advances.  Today, cellular phones operate at significantly less power than when they were introduced in the early 1980s.  Cellular systems dynamically reduce the output of handsets. It would be useful, obviously, if WiFi systems could employ some form of dynamic power management.  When you're close to an access point and there's a strong signal, you don't need as much power as when you're in a poor coverage coverage area. Is this already being done with WiFi products? 12:10:38 PM