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January 18, 2005
The Always On Era Is Here
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
Motorola calls it Seamless Mobility. IEEE people call it Pervasive Computing. For the last two years I've been calling it Always-On.
Same thing, really. In discussing this with Motorola spokesman Paul Alfieri recently, once thing was crystal clear.
They get it.
A few quick corrections to our most recent post on the MS1000. You can build applications that run in flash on the device, that don't depend on the PC. The device is wide-open to applications through its OSGI-based Linux software core.
Now, you want to make some money?
- Want to control water usage in an arid place? Put out some sensors, tie them to the network, and voila.
- Medical applications to keep grandma safe and secure at home? Go for it.
- Want to build a hobbyist kit so ordinary people can create their own Always-On applications? How about a whole catalog? Call 'em.
- RFID applications? They could use some developers.
This is it, folks. What we need now is some talent to create applications people will want. We need developers, we need marketers, we need entrepreneurs.
We have a platform. It works.
Sure, Motorola could be a little snappier with the infrastructure. But they've got product managers, they're speaking at trade shows, they're doing the marketing, and they've built the device.
Let's make 2005 the Year of Always-On (or whatever). Internet applications in the air, connected to wherever you are, using data that you build in your daily life.
It's all here.
Yeah, I'm excited.
Comments (3)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. lindon on January 18, 2005 08:35 PM writes...
hmmm, looks like today is my day for being the nay-sayer. Sorry but we *dont* have a platform. A platform is the hardware and system software to run and *the managment software* that runs over the top.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I manage the development of a real-time network management product so I *might* be biased....
Lets look at your water-saving app.(not too different from what we do, in fact we even considered this for a while):
What are you measuring: Volume, throughput, outage, on/off, availability? Grief this list goes on.
What are you doing? Alarms? control?
Against what criteria?
With what device interface? This is the big one. Havng something "always on" doesn't mean much, it's what it's always on *for* that does, and then what you wanted to do about it and how quickly. There's no SNMP-ish protocol for these devices yet, and SNMP looks simplistic compared with what we'd want to do here.
Now all of this is pretty obvious. I'm sure you'd say: "well that's the app you need to write", the message I have for you is "that app is extremely non-trivial, especially in a real-time environment" and "not many people can do it properly, and certainly not your average web REST based developer, who can't even handle stateful systems properly...."
In short we dont have enough real-time software engineers to make this take off and fly. Sorry, I'll try and be more positive tomorrow...promise.
Permalink to Comment2. Jesse Kopelman on January 19, 2005 05:44 PM writes...
"In short we dont have enough real-time software engineers to make this take off and fly."
Isn't this good news? It should be to anyone in school who knows their interested in CS, but not sure where the jobs will be.
Permalink to Comment3. Lindon on January 20, 2005 02:14 AM writes...
...cept most schools dont teach real-time programming in CS, just transactional stuff...
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