Wednesday, October 12, 2005

There's a little heat up in the space self-defined as M2M (machine to machine). There hasn't been much on the M2M Blog for a long time. Especially since Benson Hougland of Opto 22 ceased posting to it, it has become pretty much a one-company vehicle. The other M2M blog, MachineBlog, is similarly supported by one company. But Glen Allmendinger and Ralph Lombreglia of Harbor Research just had an article published in the Harvard Business Review on the subject. Four Strategies for Smart Services discuss applications illustrating these smart services. Snippet: Smart services go beyond the kinds of upkeep and upgrades you may be bundling with your products, both in their value to customers and in their cost efficiency to you. To provide them, you mut build intelligence--that is, awareness and connectivity--into the products themselves. I've been doubtful of M2M as a specific market space. But I'm enthused by the potential for combining plentiful smart sensors, mesh networks, wireless and the ability to collect, analyze and act on the information. This is a coming BIG THING. 2:37:45 PM    comment []

Still catching up on some older news (hmmm, an oxymoron?). Once you get past the hype in the press release, here's another significant addition to the growing momentum in wireless sensors and Zigbee in particular. Tentril has released a software development platform for programming and deploying Zigbee wireless sensor networks. Product name it Tendril Service Broker. Although the ARC Advisory Group just released a report saying that wireless sensor networks were not ready for industrial applications, couple this news with my reports from Invensys and Emerson Process last week and you can see some definite momentum. 12:56:53 PM    comment []