February 18, 2008
The BBC named both Near Field Communication (NFC) and Ultra Wideband (UWB) as two of their top five technologies for 2008.
Good news for Bluetooth - which is incorporating both technologies in Bluetooth as part of their world-dominating "embrace and extend" philosophy!
November 12, 2007
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?
November 09, 2007
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:
November 02, 2007
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:
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! :-)
November 01, 2007
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.
September 18, 2007
If these latest stats quoted are even remotely correct, then there's a bright future for Bluetooth in marketing.
Two killer factoids:
At a shopping centre in Newcastle, out of a possible 45,000 shoppers who were offered to receive Bluetooth content, over 20 per cent opted to download
Another recent study carried out on a global sample by Universal McCann demonstrates that opt-in Bluetooth content is the most popular form of mobile advertising, with 72 per cent of the global sample expressing their approval. Conversely, ‘interruptive’ mobile advertising, including banners on mobile internet pages and TV adverts on mobiles, were rejected by 61 per cent of respondents.
I'm quoting from this story about Bluetooth marketing in Cinemas in the UK. If these numbers hold up (and I see some anecdotal evidence that people are more willing to opt-in to Bluetooth campaigns), then we're going to see lots more Bluetooth marketing in the next 12-24 months.
Good news for JSR82 too I suspect.
June 13, 2007
(I stuck a short glossary at the end of this post as I realised I got a little abbreviation-happy!)
You're bored listening to it, and I'm bored saying it (well, not really), but Bluetooth is on a roll. Market-wise, it's never seen so many units going out the door per week (15M per week now, or higher).
And standards-wise, the Bluetooth SIG's strategy of co-opetition (or whatever buzzphrase you're having this week) is working.
The latest to lay down and be absorbed: WiBbree - the short-lived super-low-power alternative from Nokia, has now graciously decided to throw its lot in with Bluetooth.
So now we have:
Pretty impressive. Bluetooth now goes from higher bandwidth usage scenarios where it can stream HD DVDs from a DVD player wirelessly to a HD flat panel TV, down to very low power and NFC-style apps for personal and industrial apps.
Kudos to the SIG and Mike Foley for pursuing the strategy so well and with such focus. It's working, and I think consumers will benefit over the next few years, with a range of products that will continue to be branded as "Bluetooth", and will hopefully achieve Mac-like nirvana and "just work".
See Bluetooth 2.1+EDR in action here.
In a later post I'll outline some of the potential for extending JSR82 to cover some of the new mouth-watering functionality contained in these absorbed standards. One of the great things though is that JSR82 will continue to "just work" with these right now, as they appear in deployed products. Cool.
Glossary:
[UWB = Ultra Wide Band]
[NFC = Near Field Communication]
[ZigBee = Alternative low-power short range communication standard]
[SIG = shorthand for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group]
[HD DVDs = High Definition DVDs or TVs]
[Bluetooth 2.1+EDR = latest version of the Bluetooth Specification ; EDR stands for Enhanced Data Rate]
[JSR82 - the world's only and best standard Java APIs for Bluetooth]
March 30, 2007
Latest stats from the Bluetooth SIG make good reading for promoters of the technology.
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.
May 11, 2005
Another factoid from the Parlay conference this week. Takanobu Okada from NTT was speaking this morning on Building next generation networks. he's with NTT Network Services Systems Labs, where they prepare NTT for next generation technologies.
As part of his introduction, he gave the state of play on broadband usage in Japan. ADSL has 13.3 million subscribers in Japan, and typical rates are 10Mb/s down, 2Mb/s up. Costs about $25 / month or less. The big news however, is the uptake of FTTH (Fibre To The Home). this has a bandwidth of 100Mb/s to the home (!!). There are now 3 Million subscribers for this in Japan - this has tripled in the last year. At this rate, people using 801.11G in the home find that it, not the broadband access, is the bottleneck. Cost is $62 per month, an extra $5 per month gives you free IP telephony as well.
Anyoen based in Ireland can only sigh ... and wait.