A Malaysian paper, The Star, has a derisive story about Intel that makes a good review on what I like about them.

While describing its "mote" sensor network as old, a quick read reveals that, even if it is old, it's still real, real cool:

The sensors can be of any type – motion, temperature, vibration, light, sound and so on. The combined Mote and sensor form a sensor node which sends information via Bluetooth directly (or via another sensor node) to a gateway node (Intel’s Stargate hardware) which will then send information to other gateway nodes or host computers (PDA, laptop or desktop PC) via wireless 802.11b networking.

The Motes can work in a heterogeneous, multi-layered network. By using different wireless technologies, the range of the network can be extended and the battery life of the tiny Motes can be extended by offloading network connection responsibilities to the larger gateway nodes.

The network is self-organising too – Kling demonstrated this by re-arranging the positions of the Motes and resetting the system. Within seconds, the Motes reorganised their network topology and formed evenly spread layers, identifiable through colour-keyed LED lights which showed each node’s layer. Very clever.

One thing you need to understand about Intel is that it's not really an applications outfit. It's a technology company, a platform company. If it's doing applications it's because it has some cool stuff that it wants other people to get their hands on and create markets for.

So get your hands on it already.