Rococo

A few people asked about the slides from the Java Mobile and Embedded Conference. I stuck them up on SlideShare, and here they are through the magic of embeds. Now writing a few articles on the background and future options for JSR82. if anyone has suggestions, thoughts or input - please shout!!

Thanks to C. Enrique Ortiz in particular for his excellent code samples contained herein, and shamelessly listed from and accredited to his set of tech articles.

| View | Upload your own

Posted by Sean at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Belatedly, I must wish Bluetooth and the SIG a very Happy 10th Birthday.

I think that the SIG has been playing a stormer recently, in terms of growing brand awareness for Bluetooth, integrating other cool short range wireless standards, and simplifying life for users. The future for Bluetooth looks very, very bright indeed!

- 1.8 Billion devices shipped to date
- 500 Million Bluetooth enabled phones shipped last year
- All main game consoles now ship with Bluetooth
- New product categories emerging in Industrial, Healthcare, Automotive by the week

"Long May Ye Run"

As part of the celebrates at CES, the SIG announced their winners of the Best of CES a while back at the CES show. My favourite is definitely the Parrot Wireless Speakers (review here) - the Parrot products generally rock, and I never appreciated how tricky it is to do this well, until I attended some of the talks at the Bluetooth Evolution Conference back in late '07.

Posted by Sean at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes - I know it's been quiet here for a while, for which I apologise to both my readers. I'll hopefully be more active over the next while.

This is a brief update on the Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days event which I was lucky enough to attend a couple of weeks ago in rainy (yes, rainy!) Santa Clara. Hosted by Sun, and organised by Terrence Barr and Roger Brinkley (and supporting team from Sun), this was the first time such a gathering of the Mobile/Embedded Java community had been attempted by Sun.

And it worked! Several hundred people attended, maybe 200 or so in person, and another couple of hundred joined in remotely, via the excellent ustream.tv platform. Check here for videos from the two days. James Gosling kicked off the proceedings, and from there on it was quite a mix of detailed technical and community sessions covering everything from 3D to Robots to Security to the notion of a Developer alliance.

Highlights for me included some detailed coverage on SunSpots, the embedded hardware/software wireless sensor platform from Sun, including the announcement that they have open-sourced the Squawk VM; the TrackBot talk and demo (uses SunSpots); the presentations on JXTA, now with new proxyless ME implementation, and the general updates on tools, phoneME and all the other goodies coming down the tracks.

All in all - quite a lot to digest, and in my case, I had to miss a lot of Day 2 due to other work commitments. All the slides are available at the site, and Terrence has a good wrap-up here.

Half the value of any event like this is really the interaction with the people at the event, and this one really delivered. The attendees were mostly practitioners in the wireless/embedded area, and so the quality of questions and general banter at the show was very high. I also got to meet C. Enrique Ortiz, whom I've wanted to meet for a long time, as he's written pretty much the best articles on JSR82 and Java/Bluetooth over the years.

My talk was on "Past, Present and Future of JSR82, the Java/Bluetooth APIs". It was well-attended, and seemed to go well (always hard to tell).

All in all, an excellent event, and I look forward to the next one. I also got a sense of a certain "buzzed-ness" around the Sun people there; they were upbeat, passionate about their projects, and pretty excited about the potential for the new developments in the Java mobile / embedded arena. For a company that's had its trials and tribulations over the recent years, this was great to see. I look forward to seeing how things turn out for Java and Sun in 2008.

Posted by Sean at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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!

Posted by Sean at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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! :-)

Posted by Sean at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Sean at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Sean at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm at the Bluetooth Evolution Conference in London today and tomorrow. I'll drop a few items in as I watch the presentations.

To kick off, here's one I missed, from 2006, that was mentioned in one of this morning's presentations: The Hug Shirt.

Yes, it's a shirt. And Yes, it has Bluetooth. The idea is - you couple it with a Java enabled mobile phone, and use it as follows:

- You and your friend both get hug shirts
- Pair with your phones
- Then one of you, eh, hugs yourself; sensors in the shirt create hug data
- The hug data is sent to the phone, which then sends it to your friend's phone (via SMS, I *think*)
- Your friend's phone then sends the hug data to the shirt, which then gives the hug to your friend (via actuators, also in the shirt)

Apparently it's washable as well. Amazing!

Posted by Sean at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've mentioned CSR here before, in many ways the poster-child for Bluetooth Technology. Well they've just released their Q2 results, which make interesting reading. As ever, it's a "record" quarter yada yada :-) Some selected highlights:

- Revenue for the quarter is up to $215.9m (Q2 2006: $182.4m)
- Operating Profit is up $44.8m (Q2 2006: $42.4m), but operating margin is down to 20.8% (Q2 2006: 23.2%)
- Non handset segment of the business growing nicely - now 21% of total revenues (H1 2006: 13%)

I also found these comments interesting:

- They reckon they can do average revenue growth of 15% - 20% p.a. over the next five years which implies CSR will reach $2 billion revenue by 2012
- They see attach rates (% of handsets having Bluetooth) growing from 35% (2006) to 40-50% (2007) to 70% ("medium term")
- The non handset areas flagged as opportunities are MP3 and MP4 players, digital televisions, gaming consoles, PCs, cars and cameras.
- As for headsets (where they are dominant): they "expect to maintain our headset market share at above 80% in 2007 and achieve a significant leadership position thereafter."
- They have stacks of cash ($185.1M), DSO is down, Inventory looks pretty well managed
- They have a range new products under development outside of "traditional" Bluetooth (GPS, Ultra low power Bluetooth, Ultra Wideband, etc.)

All in all - I think this is a pretty good story. They have loads of cash, are managing their way out of a) handset dependency and b) Bluetooth dependency, have some new gear in the pipeline, and seem to have reasonably well-managed costs. Will have to watch that margin slippage though, but it's likely that as Bluetooth matures, the margins on that side of the business slip further, especially as China becomes a larger mix in the target market (China kills margins, methinks!!).

The market reacted to the short term guidance (which was at the low to medium end of expectations) by taking the stock down 14%. I think this is probably a buying opportunity :-)

[Disclosure: I own no CSR stock]

Posted by Sean at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Latest stats from the Bluetooth SIG make good reading for promoters of the technology.

• 1 Billion Deployed devices (need to say this with little finger at the mouth, like this: “1 ..... BILL - YON!!! Wah Hah Hah HAAAAAAH!!!”)
• 13 million units shipping per week

As CSR is a bit of a bellwether for the whole Bluetooth industry, their results also make rather interesting reading. Apart from the fact that they are generating shedloads of cash, the following was enlightening:

- Over 50 per cent of revenue is now from non-phone areas, including Sony PS3, Samsung TVs and Digital Media Players
- PCs, gaming and automotive seen as key growth areas in 2007 and beyond
- CSR wins an astonishing 84% of Bluetooth headset design wins in 2006!!! Talk about dominant!

The only wrinkle was a reference to a “challenging second half”, due to two things : 1) over ordering form a key account, and 2) market shift to low-cost phones (most of which are currently without Bluetooth). Share price got somewhat hammered as a result. Interesting punt if you believe that both their operational efficiency, and market dynamics will recover in 2007.

In more Bluetooth Good News, the SIG announced the latest version of the standard a few weeks ago. The snappily titled “Bluetooth Core Specification Version 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)), is actually very good news for, eh, humans, as follows:

- Simplified pairing of devices to enhance the chances of your mum using it
- Much better power management (up to five times better) for certain types of devices (mice, watches, keyboards etc)

All in all - a good period for Bluetooth.

Posted by Sean at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other thing that was "hot" at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference was presence. Presence was, well, everywhere :-) Some offering intelligent presence solutions that figure out your presence status based on rules, inference and heuristics, while others are gearing up for grand "master plan" approaches that look to "solve" presence for a broad spectrum of users. The big announcement along the latter lines, was of course, Tello who launched as the conference started, and picked up great coverage in BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal. It's clear there's going to be a need for presence aggregation - software or services that handle the management and doling out of presence information across the blizzard of devices and access methods we use to communicate.

Posted by Sean at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently the open source PBX Asterix was pretty much ubiquitous at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference last week. Mark Spencer himself was there, but what most impressed our person at the show, was that half the presentations either made reference to, or were using Asterix. Good news for Digium, but also indicative of how Open Source software can play a pivotal role in accelerating the disruptive spread of something like VoIP and associated value-add services. Based on the early stage stuff at the show, I'd expect to see lots of new services on offer in 2006, based on Asterix.

Posted by Sean at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)