The early days of any technology are nerve racking. (That's the logo of Zigbee chip-maker Airbee Wireless.)

It's a dance of small companies looking for contracts that can become lifelines to survival, larger companies making big claims they may be unable to meet, and the nagging fear on the part of everyone they're about to become obsolete.

In the case of wireless sensor networks, I call this the Zigbee Dance.

Grab A Partner -- Small companies often need partnerships to survive. Airbee and LinkPlus are two such companies. Airbee has its own tweaks to Zigbee, and a full product line. LinkPlus has a development contract and one of those horrible sites where you can't link to internal pages.

Stake Your Claim -- Motorola's chip-unit, Freescale, is claiming a full Zigbee platform and has begun selling starter kits. They are far from alone in this, and in fact Ember may be ahead in defining the standard. As I said, time will tell.

Skip To My Lou -- Given the weakness of the U.S. in price-performance, it's inevitable that some of our gains in Zigbee are going to leak out. They're leaking. Airbee, mentioned above, is building its new R&D center in Chennai, India.

Real Applications -- They will be coming slowly over the next several months at least, but here's one. Helicomm has teamed with Agilent on a Zigbee-based imaging platform for use in "variance monitoring," making sure everything made in a factory is correct and identical.

Stay tuned.