The Boston Globe this morning is running a feature on Ember Corp.

I'm sure it was written before the Red Sox played St. Louis last night, because otherwise the author's fingers would have been shaking too much for the story to be as clear as it is.

But Robert Weisman, in his zeal to give props to a local vendor, falls down on his understanding of what Ember is doing and how Always-On applications must reach the market.

Ember, as regular readers of this blog know, uses Zigbee. Zigbee is a very low-power, relatively low-bandwidth technology. Zigbee, known the IEEE geeks as 802.15.4. may or not prove relevant as Always-On develops. For now its only proven applications are in factories, where it can be used to control things like oil refineries.

In other words, it's very expensive, and takes a very long time, to develop a Zigbee application, although the results can be very powerful for your bottom line.

Unfortunately that means Zigbee is not the "Internet of Things" Weisman touts it as. It could become that, but first it must clear some big challenges:

• Zigbee must integrate with the networks consumers and businesses have, namely 802.11 or Wi-Fi networks.
• Zigbee production must scale-up.
• Zigbee applications must scale down, becoming cheaper and easier to design.

I hope Robert Weisman won't take any of this criticism personally. It's not meant that way. I've been a local reporter, and I know the drill. You talk up the company, you talk up its dreams, you don't go into details the reader may not follow.

But the devil's in the details. Editors who fail to understand this are underestimating their readers. When you talk to your editors, Bob, you can quote me on that.