Slow and steady sometimes wins the race

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Sep 8, 2003 | by Justin Pope, Associated Press

"It's very possible that by the end of 2004 you could go to Home Depot and buy a Zigbee light kit," she said.

For companies involved in Zigbee, the economics are tricky. Law says some have overhyped how inexpensive it will be off the bat, and Ember has found the market among the industrial customers it's targeting unexpectedly complicated. One company wants to monitor chemical flow five times a second, another wants to read a gas meter once a day for 10 years.

Ember decided to stop selling complete systems and now sells chips and software licenses, then helps customers build the technology into their own systems.

But Poor, a musician who went back to school at age 42 to pursue a Ph.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, still envisions a future in which tiny wireless networks go about their business unnoticed, cheap and puny in their individual components but powerful when working together.

"I can't tell you any more than I could in 1985 what the intelligence will be," he said. "In a sense, I hope there won't be a killer app. There will just be lots of things quietly doing their thing."