It may be too early to say for certain, but the apparent darling of this year's conference is Wireless. McQuillan and Passmore both spent some time addressing it during the conference introduction. The following keynote address featured Sean Maloney, Intel Communication Group VP and GM. The title of Maloney's presentation was "Evolution vs. Revolution: The Modular Network". It was almost completely centered on WiFi and Intel's WiMAX technology. The interim plenary session was filled with many references to Wireless.

Without any stretch of imagination a person could have spent the whole day in WiFi discussion. Both afternoon tracks featured WiFi presentations. The most fascinating was the late afternoon discussion of the changing Wireless architecture. If I didn't know better this conference could easily be confused with one dedicated to wireless.

I'll not take time to give a complete synopsis of today's sessions. That can be found on the BCR web site. I will take the time to give my impressions.

There seems to be two main directions regarding Wireless and its future. These can be boiled down to:

1. Technologies

2. Operations

Wireless is really a generic term inclusive of all technologies. WiFi is generally specific to 802.11b/a/g/i. Pick your favorite. Ultra Wide Band (UWB) and Blue Tooth are other competing technologies, although these seem to be looked on by the experts with less favor. Maloney intimated that Wireless devices will be equipped in the near future with 802.11x and blue tooth chips. Maloney was less complimentary of UWB. Two years ago it was all cellular. Anything else was not reliable enough. Maloney used our acceptance of inferior cellular voice (can you hear me now) as evidence that the Telcos obsession with toll quality and reliability is out of touch in today's world.

Operational issues include management of access points, security, reliability, coverage and many more areas of lesser concern. It comes down to the mass proliferation of access points and the inability of the IT staff to centrally manage these.

Passmore told an interesting story. He was lodging in a Manhattan hotel (with a recognizable name) without WiFi Internet access. He set his laptop on a window ledge and immediately located six wireless networks, two without any authentication. He was able to access files and remote applications. Within a minute his IM popped up with a message from his 14 year old (always on the net) daughter. That was followed up a minute of so later with a voice "hello, dad". He carried on a "phone" conversation using voice enabled IM. Who needs the phone company?

Changing the Way We Learn

A most interesting demonstration took place during Maloney's presentation. He invited someone from Harvard Medical to show a teaching app. Harvard Medical is capturing every class on streaming video. No big deal there. The real news is that the lectures are all automated. From encoding, to indexing to online access, there is no human intervention. Within a few hours every class is online and searchable. They are using a voice recognition application to do the indexing. Any student can do a search on all content and within sub second search times have every resource, by subject, available to them.

UEN, and Utah educators, need this solution. Of course, the main difference, besides the sheer size difference, is that UEN is state funded with a tight budget, compared to the financial clout of the Harvard Medical School. Regardless, it was an impressive demonstration. I can see that this access to information would have a big impact on note taking in class and study after hours. Way cool............
7:52:22 PM    comment []