Saturday, November 3, 2007

Wireless Sensor Technology Dust Networks, a provider of embedded wireless sensor networking (WSN) solutions, has announced the SmartMesh IA-500 family of standards-based WSN systems with the first in this family compatible with the WirelessHART standard. "Dust has played a pioneering role in wireless sensor networking. The company's Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP), now a foundational building block of the WirelessHART standard, has served as a catalyst for the industrial market," said Harry Forbes, senior analyst at ARC Advisory Group. "Dust's embedded WSN solutions are a critical step in accelerating the broad adoption of standards-based wireless field devices." Key features include: WirelessHART compliance Variable bandwidth and efficient allocation of timeslots enable a single network to meet the latency and throughput needs of multiple industrial automation applications.   Advanced network optimization and intelligent routing algorithms coupled with dynamic interference assessment, frequency hopping, time synchronization and full mesh networking ensure high reliability even in the most challenging industrial environments. Power-efficient radio technology, combined with intelligent network management, provides unmatched low-power operation that can offer more than a decade of battery life on a pair of AA batteries.  Comprehensive APIs offer rapid product development integration while ensuring compliance to the complex WirelessHART command structure. Incorporates AES 128-bit cipher on dynamically updated multi-level encryption key scheme, as well as access control lists to provide end users with the highest level of WirelessHART network security. The 2.4GHz SmartMesh IA-510 system consists of the PM2510 embedded network manager, which is easily integrated into WirelessHART gateway solutions, and two mote form factors: the DN2510 MoC integrated in a 12mm x 12mm system-in-package (SiP) and the M2510 RF-certified mote module. Products will be available in Q1 2008. 8:54:10 AM    comment []

Gasp, it's dying (maybe) Here's an article on TechCrunch about PC World closing the print edition in Australia, going all Web, due to a drop in subscribers. Premise of the article is print continues to die. I think TechCrunch only got it partly right. Sure, InfoWorld moved from print to Web this year. For my part, I've let my subscription to PC Magazine lapse after having been a subscriber since the late 80s. There are two things at work in the technology space. First off, pretty much all the tech magazines were product books. They'd throw in some columns and a how-to for a little balance. But look at the changes in the industry and reader habits. In the late 80s and continuing for a lot of the 90s, there were tons of new products. The PC platform was open, the motherboard only had a little functionality and it became the Wild West for hardware developers. The PC magazines were filled with ads for all the latest computers and add-in boards -- sound, graphics, peripheral. My first pure marketing job in 88-90 was with a company that had a printer graphics card. By 1989 I could see that the power of the 80386 microprocessor from Intel (and its roadmap) would put most of the peripheral people out of business. The CPU could handle the processing that we did on a card and then some. So PC Magazine became all about digital cameras and other consumer digital stuff. InfoWorld had nowhere to go. What happened was the confluence of two streams into a river: massive consolidation of the hardware vendors leading to fewer ad pages, and reader ability to go on the Web for new product specs. Tech reporting has moved to the Web right now, probably because no one has hit a good magazine idea. And tech is all about Web-based software, so it makes sense to cover it on the Web. There are still lots of new magazines springing up. Mr. Magazine blog reported recently that October was a very hot market in general for magazine start ups. Print is hardly dead, it's just that the market is morphing. Look at the manufacturing control and automation space. We  used to have magazines that were primarily product oriented. One (that I shall not name) managed to morph from product roundup articles to a little more technology focused. The others (called tabloids in the trade) either folded up or found a presence on the Web. That's why when Jane and I were in a three-month long deep discussion about what would make a new magazine interesting and successful, we constantly talked about reporting on people who would be our readers. "Let's try to make the stories interesting," one or both of us said. And we looked for examples outside our narrow niche. This has been hard to do -- we had to convince writers to break their old habits, and change suppliers who were used to just getting a marketing manager quote in an article giving their particular spin and calling that input -- but overall it's been fun and rewarding. If we just wrote about products like trade magazines did in 1985, it wouldn't work. Product magazines work in new markets or a fad market. Mostly people want useful, thoughtful information. Memo to TechCrunch: print in general isn't dead, but product books are dying. 8:37:28 AM    comment []