Wireless Mesh Networking Coming of Age
I just finished working on a news piece that will hit the Automation World web site next week about wireless mesh networking leader Ember. The Boston-based company with ties to MIT secured a round of financing for $25 million last week. In the process, though, co-founder and chairman Robert Poor yielded his position to longtime industry leader and MIT venture advisor Robert Metcalfe. Metcalfe is known as the father of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com. One of the investing companies is led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The company also announced a new CFO.
Looks to me like this is one of the cases where a visionary technical founder of a company eventually had to make way for business professionals if the company is to grow. Every time I've seen investors bring in a new top finance person it's a signal that they don't have confidence in the management.
This could be a move to strengthen management and give the industry a real boost. Ember and close competitor Millennial Net have been evangelizing technology based on IEEE 802.15.4 known as ZigBee. Invensys is an automation company working in this area. My interview with that company's Hesh Kagen will appear in the October Automation World. There he evangelizes for the Wireless Industrial Networking Alliance (WINA) and asks manufacturing professionals to visualize what fantastic benefits toward better management of manufacturing operations could come with the proliferation of inexpensive sensors feeding information in real time. Corrections to operations could be made in hours instead of next month when the accounting reports come out.
Check out Ember at http://www.ember.com; WINA at http://www.wina.org; the ZigBee Alliance at http://www.zigbee.org.
7:14:11 AM 
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