Neurosphere

The ZigBee Alliance. I mean, you gotta love that name. Networking for Joe Sixpack. It’s becoming automatic for connectivity to be built in to almost every electronic device.

“The goal of the ZigBee Alliance is to provide the consumer with ultimate flexibility, mobility, and ease of use by building wireless intelligence and capabilities into every day devices. ZigBee technology will be embedded in a wide range of products and applications across consumer, commercial, industrial and government markets worldwide. For the first time, companies will have a standards-based wireless platform optimized for the unique needs of remote monitoring and control applications, including simplicity, reliability, low-cost and low-power.”

http://www.zigbee.org/en/about/

There is also a convergence going on with the advent of cheap sensors (you know, like automatic doors at supermarkets) being built into the same computer chips with wireless interconnection capability. Pros and cons, per the exchange quoted below, but an inevitable impact on our way of life.

“Srini Krishnamurthy, vice president of business development for Airbee Wireless, outlined a wireless sensor mesh project under study for Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C. Every door in the airport could be outfitted with 900-MHz wireless sensors and automated locks, networked to a central point where rules could be set for when a door could be opened, by whom, by time of day, without the need for guards. This idea sparked a pragmatic response from Samuel Reed, an electrical engineer with Key Technologies of Baltimore: “Can a terrorist walk into the airport with a 900-MHz jammer and shut the whole place down?”:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/100305-wireless-sensors.html?ts

Global nervous system, under construction, by some guys who are not shy about spending large amounts of money on big promises for the world of the future. This is the kind of centralized approach that was successful in creating the Internet (when it was DARPAnet). But it seems counter to the kind of organic approach consistent with an evolving Neurosphere the way I see it. As I say, nothing if not ambitious.

“GLIF, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, is an international virtual organization that promotes the paradigm of lambda networking. GLIF provides lambdas internationally as an integrated facility to support data-intensive scientific research, and supports middleware development for lambda networking. It brings together some of the world’s premier networking engineers who are working together to develop an international infrastructure by identifying equipment, connection requirements, and necessary engineering functions and services.”

http://www.glif.is/publications/#maps

And what do you do with it?

“Real-time Applications provide “windows” into the worldwide LambdaGrid. Scientists who generate terabytes and petabytes of data on remote computers or instruments demonstrate how they use the LambdaGrid to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate data from multiple sites; results are projected onto large visualization and/or virtual-reality displays. Applications in art, bioinformatics, chemistry, cosmology, cultural heritage, education, manufacturing, medicine, geoscience, neuroscience and physics are among those shown. A variety of Grid middleware developments, with emphasis on data management grids, data replication grids, visualization grids, data/visualization grids, computational grids, access grids, and grid portals are also featured, using a variety of computer-based technologies, including distributed computing, visualization and virtual reality, tele-science, data mining, remote instrumentation control, collaboration, high-definition media streaming, and human/computer interfaces.”

http://www.igrid2005.org/program/demos.html

The very name of this company recalls natural systems (phototropism in plants) and their technology “self-organizes” – according to biologists like Francisco Varela, one of the definining characteristics of living organisms.

“Tropos Networks is the proven market leader in delivering metro-scale Wi-Fi mesh network products and services, with more than 150 customers and 40 resellers in eight countries around the world at the end of 2004. Our solutions are the fastest, lowest cost and simplest way to deliver true wireless broadband (>1 Mbps) over large geographic areas using low-cost standard Wi-Fi clients. Our innovative and patented MetroMesh™ architecture provides maximizes throughput from client to server, eliminates the need for costly and complex per node wiring and automatically self-organizes as nodes are added or subtracted, backhaul supplied or removed, and interference comes and goes.”

http://www.tropos.com/company/about.html