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Sunday, January 1, 2006 |
The ZigBee Alliance, an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard, has celebrated the first anniversary of the launch of the global interoperable ZigBee specification. Since announcing the ratified specification in December 2004, the Alliance has nearly doubled its membership, surpassing 200 members and expanded its presence to 24 countries spanning six continents. Original equipment manufacturers and end-product manufacturers now represent 30 percent of the global membership.
"2005 has been an outstanding year for the ZigBee Alliance and ZigBee technology," said Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance. "Our membership has made significant progress in making reliable automation, monitoring and control products a reality. As the Alliance continues to educate and shape the global market, our members will be delivering even more ZigBee devices to market in 2006."
8:32:49 PM 
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The Open Applications Group and ISA announce their intent to work together to minimize redundancy and converge their standards work.
Working in support of the Open O&M Initiative, the Open Applications Group (OAGi) and ISA-SP95 committee announced their intent to converge standards for manufacturing interoperability. The groups are collaborating on development of integration standards for process, discrete and mixed-mode manufacturers. ISA-SP95 has started this effort by including a portion of the OAGIS standard in its soon to be published ANSI/ISA-95 Part 5- Business to Manufacturing Transactions standard.
"Many enterprises today are struggling with the myriad of standards available to them and often don't know which standards they should be using," said David Connelly, chief executive officer of the Open Applications Group. "Many of our OAGIS users are using both ISA-95 and OAGIS and we want to cooperate in order to simplify their efforts and provide our customers with a common solution."
"We don't think it makes sense to re-invent work that others have completed and proven in the field," said Keith Unger, chairman of the ISA-SP95 committee. "We want to leverage our best contributors from both efforts and provide a better standard for our customers. Delivery of the ISA-95 Part 4 "Object Models and Attributes of Manufacturing Operations Management" standard will be greatly accelerated by leveraging the work of OAGi, and the other OpenO&M Initiative members."
Bob Mick, ARC Advisory Group comments: "Interoperability in the plant to business (P2B) domain has been underserved for years with only ISA and OAGi addressing the standard needed to take this issue off the table. Only a small fraction of the work has been done and an alignment between these two organizations is one of the most significant events to happen in this area. The alignment of ISA-95 part 5 with OAGIS has been a pilot and has proven that alignment can accelerate the standards development process. What we need now is for the end users to step up and help ISA and OAGi plan deeper alignment to make P2B real interoperability a reality."
The details and timing of the convergence efforts are under discussion now and more details will be announced as they are developed.
8:30:19 PM
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I was in Florida for five days around Christmas at my son's house. Our daughter and her fiance were able to come down from Chicago for a while and my wife's two sisters and mother came for a couple. Lots of people around. Not much time for blogging.
While I was there Wednesday morning, Derek had his TV on MSNBC-TV. Suddenly there was "breaking news" of an "emergency" where a Frontier airlines Airbus had taken off with a cargo door open. Oops, maybe it was just an indicator light that was on. Don't know. Anchor hired for her looks and ability to parrot questions from the producer asks someone "shouldn't someone have checked for that" insinuating something like pilot error. Then their "expert" comes on. As he describes what's happening, he mentions that he has no Airbus experience. I wonder if he's the guy I heard once talking about how instruments work even though he is just VFR (a Cessna pilot during clear weather).
My son is an airline pilot (anyone have openings at a major airline?). He has no idea exactly what's happening in this case, of course, but just his knowledge of systems and procedures, if transferred to this so-called journalist on MSNBC, would have brought a lot of sense to the "story." On the other hand, an ex-English teacher and part-time newspaper writer I know, enjoyed the fake drama immensely, viewing it not as news but as entertainment. Maybe that's what I'm missing with today's journalism--I expect facts not entertainment. Maybe that's why I don't drink Bud Light.
It's stuff like that on TV that make me cringe when I say that I'm a journalist now. And mainstream media columnists are writing articles about how you can't trust bloggers. Wonder whose head is in a dark place.
7:54:53 PM
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Guy Kawasaki, Apple Fellow and venture capitalist, is blogging now. Here is a post on presentations-The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. This is good for engineers, marketing people and even editors who give presentations. The 10/20/30 rule is 10 slides given in 20 minutes using nothing less than 30 point type on your slides. He also includes a 10 point outline for entrepreneurs giving pitches to VCs for money.
Gary's points for marketing people making presentations to editors is similar:
Problem
Your solution
Business model
Underlying magic/technology
Marketing and sales
Competition
Don't use words like "first", "best", "only" and so forth unless you can show facts to justify it. Most of the time, I'm pretty familiar with the technology that you're pitching to me. Fill me with BS and I'll tune you out very quickly. Have 50 slides with 40 slides of preliminary state of the "something" to show how smart you are, and I'll tune you out.
Get to the point. Give facts about the product. Tell me how you're going to sell it--and to whom. Position it with the competition. That will get my attention. I love technology. I had bull.
7:32:14 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Gary Mintchell.
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