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Rococo Speaking at the Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days
We've been accepted to give a talk at the Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days Conference. This is on in late January in Santa Clara, California, and the lineup overall is looking pretty good.
Overview here.
We're going to cover the "Past, Present and Future of JSR82( Java Bluetooth APIs)". If there's anything you'd like us to cover (we have an hour) - drop a line!
Look forward to seeing you there!
Solar Powered Bluetooth Headset
Good idea. The battery life on most headsets isn't brilliant (definitely not in the "fuhgeddaboutit - battery lasts for ages!" category). So this little puppy from Orange/Iqua could catch on.
JSR82 Wiki
Bruno is putting a nice Wiki together on the Java.net site dedicated to JSR82. If you have a project, an article, a product or anything else - you might want to list it here.
VM's - Who's left?
Nice summary list of the remaining Java Virtual Machine Companies in the market over at Mutant's Musings.
I make that 8 VM vendors (excluding Sun, and the ones that have folded). Still indicates (at a crude, high level), that there's a business in JVMs - especially for mobile/consumer products. I think Esmertec and Aplix are the leading lights here, revenue-and-market-share-wise, unless anyone can tell me better?
Cool Game - Rolling Ball
Very nice implementation of a game called Rolling Ball, winner of a Mobile Application Contest at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Uses Bluetooth in Multiplayer mode to enable person to person play. Reminds me of a game from long ago called Marble Madness (trackball heaven).
Video of it in action here, details on the project here.
Curb Your Bluetooth?
I mentioned before that one of the issues for Bluetooth Headsets is the "other people's reaction" problem.
This is the social problem whereby, for "observers" (people seeing other people with Bluetooth Headsets, whether or not they're currently using them), the first reaction is often "dick - head", and for the potential users/wearers, they have concerns about being perceived as a DH.
Larry David (of Curb Your Enthusiasm) has a funny take on it here at Gizmodo:
By the way - the discussion that follows that clip on Gizmodo is both interesting and surprising! Worth a read.
CSR - Rockin'
CSR released their Q3 results a few days ago. As per last time, they make for interesting reading. Some highlights:
- Attach rates for Bluetooth in handsets heading somewhere between 40-50% in 2007
- CSR market share in headsets is still 80% and expected to remain that way in 2008. Wow.
- Pull-through rate for headsets (as in the percentage of phones that cause a headset to be sold) is 20% and rising
- Design wins for HiFi with Sony and Philips
- Slightly worrying increase in inventory - but not too worrying
All in all - pretty compelling stuff. With their push to ensure they have non-cellular (phone) sources of revenue, plus their move to non-Bluetooth areas (GPS, WiFi), plus their continued leadership within Bluetooth (Ultra Low Power, UWB, etc), they're being very smart about spreading their sources of revenue and seeding new growth segments in the market.
They're also some of the best technical speakers at conferences that you'll ever hear, period :-)
Anyway - stock price is (imho, deservedly) on the up as a result:
Bluetooth Evolution Conference (5) : The Internet Of Things
More on Ultra Low Power Bluetooth (formerly WiBree). Nick Hunn of EZURiO gave an excellent talk as part of yeaterday's Ultra Low Power panel session in the afternoon. One of the really striking points he made is about the latent opportunity in connecting "stuff" that hasn't traditionally been connected before. This is sometimes drily referred to as "M2M" or Machine-to-Machine applications, but is better described as "the internet of things".
It's sometimes difficult to convey certain idea, but I think his slide showing (for comparison), how few of our "machines" (washing machine, fridge, car, hoover, toilet, scales, industrial, ...) are currently connected to anything, and how numerous they are. I asked him could I re-use his slide here, and he kindly gave me permission:
Bluetooth Evolution Conference (4) : Low Power *doesn't* mean very short range
A short one this. Day two of the conference focused on the new Ultra Low Power (please, let's get a better name for it than that...) version of Bluetooth coming down the tracks, based on Nokia's WiBree technology. Mentioned here before, this technology is designed to handle Machine to Machine scenarios with ease, and will wireless-enable a new generation of watches, switches, sensors and industrial machinery with potentially profound effects (more on this later).
After an excellent introductory talk in the morning by Mirjam Hirvonen from Nokia, Nick Hunn of EZurio made a small-but-crucial comment to the audience. I'll paraphrase:
People often think of ULP/WiBree as "very short range" wireless (like, 2-3 meters). That's not necessarily correct. For example, a sensor with ULP could communicate with other devices within a 50 meter range, once every minute, for three years, on a single button cell battery. The same device could communicate with devices up to 5 meters away, every 5 *seconds*, also for three years. The kinds of applications enabled by this capability is quite mind-boggling.
Just thought I'd pass that on - as I think it's quite an important insight regarding ULP / WiBree Bluetooth, that's not obvious at first when you review the blurb. Moe anon about the kinds of applications this could unleash. As usual, I'm quite excited! :-)
Bluetooth Evolution Conference (3): Parrot making noise
Jens-Uwe Soehner, from Parrot, gave a great talk yesterday as part of the session covering Consumer Electronics. Parrot have really driven the market for Bluetooth in the car. Their car kits were the first ones to look good, be beautifully packaged, and (oh yeah) actually work well! :-) They've been growing rapidly, and have a "fabless" approach to manufacturing (they design the products and contract out the manufacturing), which gives them agility and flexibility in creating new products.
Recently they've been expanding in to other areas, including Photo Frames, and Wireless Speakers. It was the latter area that Jen-Uwe covered in his talk.
In particular, he covered such practical issues as:
- No one wants to pair to individual left and right speakers to set them up - the user perceives it as "a pair" and expects to see the pair appear as one entity when they scan, connect, pair and use. This was a really obvious point, but I have to say, hadn't occurred to me until he said it!
- Some of the issues involved in setting up and calibrating a pair of wireless speakers, especially with regard to issues of latency (basically: how to ensure music arrives and plays through both speakers in sync). He also covered how much more complex this gets in 5.1 surround sound systems, where audio must sync to videa streams.
- Power: could people adjust to the idea of "your speaker needs new batteries" (for home stereo/AV speakers)? Would they be re-chargeable? How can they be designed to minimise power drain.
Great talk. look out for it when the slides are on the site. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on their cool new speakers.
Bluetooth Evolution Conference (2) : Really, really fast Bluetooth
I'm at the Bluetooth Evolution Conference in London, yesterday and today. I'm partly here to educate myself on some aspects of where the Bluetooth standard is headed, and Day One proved very educational. The focus for the day was High Speed Bluetooth - which I've mentioned here before, and is the name given to a new version of the standard that will have much higher data rates.
High-Speed Bluetooth will enable such useful scenarios as downloading a full album to a device in about a second (yes please!), or grabbing a DVD-quality movie from a kiosk in about 30 seconds.
The High Speed Bluetooth plan for dummies is as follows:
- Integrate Ultra-Wide Band support in to the Bluetooth Standard (using the WiMedia Alliance's version of UWB)
- The Bluetooth Standard will remain backward compatible - so everything that works now continues to work
- The UWB elements at the lower levels (PHY and MAC layers) co-exist with the current Bluetooth Baseband and PHY layers, and are intended to be used only when needed (this means they don't drain power when not in use)
Several of the presentations covered how and why UWB is a great match for Bluetooth, providing significantly higher bandwidth (480Mbps at 2-4 meters, 110Mbps at 10 meters), good spatial separation (you can have lots of them around the house without causing interference to other wireless stuff or each other) and a really low power cost for transmission (downloading that movie won't blow your battery).
All in all - very compelling, and as a consumer, I'd have to say: I want it!
One of the interesting debates on the day broke out when there was open speculation about whether Bluetooth could do the same trick (incorporate a higher speed underlying transport), but with 802.11 (Wireless LAN) instead of UWB. Why would they do this? Peter Judge of TechWorld gives his own take on the debate here. He seems to take the view that some of the players consider Wireless LAN an alternative to UWB, and are frustrated with UWB progress.
I have to say, that's not exactly what I heard them say. My overall takeaway was: UWB will happen, and is happening in Asia (of course) already. I got the sense that one or two phone manufacturers may test the waters for higher speeds in Bluetooth using Wireless LAN for very specific use cases, but that this didn't amount to a full-on "let's switch from UWB" plan. For a variety of reasons (security, speed, antenna requirements and design purpose), I think UWB is very much on solid ground for High Speed Bluetooth.
The sooner the better.