Mimosa Networks is
finally ready to help make gigabit wireless technology a reality. The
company, which recently came out of stealth, is launching a series of
products that it hopes to sell to a new generation of wireless ISPs.
Its wireless Internet products include its new B5 Backhaul radio
hardware and its Mimosa Cloud Services planning and analytics offering.
By using the two in combination, new ISPs can build high-capacity
wireless networks at a fraction of the cost it would take to lay a fiber
network.
The B5 backhaul radio is a piece of hardware that uses multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) technology to provide up to 16 streams and 4 Gbps of output when multiple radios are using the same channel.
With a single B5 radio, customers can provide a gigabit of throughput
for up to eight or nine miles, according to co-founder and chief
product officer Jaime Fink. The longer the distance, the less bandwidth
is available, of course. But Fink said the company is running one link
of about 60 miles that still gets a several hundred megabits of
throughput along the California coast.
Not only does the product offer high data speeds on 5 GHz wireless
spectrum, but it also makes that spectrum more efficient. It uses
spectrum analysis and load balancing to optimize bandwidth, frequency,
and power use based on historical and real-time data to adapt to
wireless interference and other issues.
In addition to the hardware, Mimosa’s cloud services will help
customers plan and deploy networks with analytics tools to determine how
powerful and efficiently their existing equipment is running. That will
enable new ISPs to more effectively determine where to place new
hardware to link up with other base stations.
The product also is designed to support networks as they grow, and it
makes sure that ISPs can spot problems as they happen. The Cloud
Services product is available now, but the backhaul radio will be
available for about $900 later this fall.
Mimosa
is launching these first products after raising $38 million in funding
from New Enterprise Associates and Oak Investment Partners. That
includes a $20 million Series C round led by return investor NEA that
was recently closed.
The company was founded by Brian Hinman,
who had previously co-founded PictureTel, Polycom, and 2Wire, along
with Fink, who previously served as CTO of 2Wire and SVP of technology
for Pace after it acquired the home networking equipment company. Now
they’re hoping to make wireless gigabit speeds available for new ISPs.
After Leap Motion's somewhat disappointing debut,
you'd be forgiving for wanting to wave off the idea of third-party
gesture control peripherals. But wait! Unlike Leap, Reactiv isn't trying
to revolutionize human-computer interactions with its Touch+
controller—there's no wizard-like finger waggling or Minority Report-style hand waving here. Instead, the Touch+'s dual cameras turn any surface into multi-touch input device.
Touch+ was born out of Haptix,
a Kickstarter project that raised more than $180,000 from backers. Over
the past year, Reactiv refined the Haptix vision to eventually become
Touch+.
While Touch+ certainly won't be for everyone, Reactiv is positioning the
multitouch PC controller as more than a mere tool for games and art
projects. The video above shows the device being used in an office
meeting, acting as a cursor control for a businessman's laptop before
being repositioned on the fly to point at a projected display, instantly
allowing the man to reach up with his hands to circle objects on the
image.
What's more, PCWorld sister site CITEWorld managed to snag a live demo with Touch+,
and the founders focused on the potential productivity uses of the
device: Enabling mouse-free control of Excel and PowerPoint, naturally
manipulating pictures in PhotoShop, creating designs in CAD, the
aforementioned presentation capabilities, and so forth.
The Touch+ works with Windows PCs or Macs, connecting via USB 2.0 or
3.0. If you choose to point it at your keyboard, the device will
temporarily suspend its multitouch capabilities while you type, then
resume when your fingers stop bobbing up and down.
Sound interesting? An alpha version of Touch+ is available now on the Reactiv website
for $75. Until we get our own hands on the device, however, we won't
know for sure how the device stacks up to competitors like the Leap
Motion.
The Internet of Things is still too hard. Even some of its biggest backers say so.
For all the long-term optimism at the M2M Evolution conference this week
in Las Vegas, many vendors and analysts are starkly realistic about how
far the vaunted set of technologies for connected objects still has to
go. IoT is already saving money for some enterprises and boosting
revenue for others, but it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet. That’s partly
because it’s too complicated to deploy, some say.
For now, implementations, market growth and standards are mostly
concentrated in specific sectors, according to several participants at
the conference who would love to see IoT span the world.
Cisco Systems has estimated
IoT will generate $14.4 trillion in economic value between last year
and 2022. But Kevin Shatzkamer, a distinguished systems architect at
Cisco, called IoT a misnomer, for now.
“I think we’re pretty far from envisioning this as an Internet,”
Shatzkamer said. “Today, what we have is lots of sets of intranets.”
Within enterprises, it’s mostly individual business units deploying IoT,
in a pattern that echoes the adoption of cloud computing, he said.
In the past, most of the networked machines in factories, energy grids
and other settings have been linked using custom-built, often local
networks based on proprietary technologies. IoT links those connected
machines to the Internet and lets organizations combine those data
streams with others. It’s also expected to foster an industry that’s
more like the Internet, with horizontal layers of technology and
multivendor ecosystems of products.
What’s holding back the Internet of Things
The good news is that cities, utilities, and companies are getting more
familiar with IoT and looking to use it. The less good news is that
they’re talking about limited IoT rollouts for specific purposes.
“You can’t sell a platform, because a platform doesn’t solve a problem. A
vertical solution solves a problem,” Shatzkamer said. “We’re stuck at
this impasse of working toward the horizontal while building the
vertical.”
“We’re no longer able to just go in and sort of bluff our way through a
technology discussion of what’s possible,” said Rick Lisa, Intel’s group
sales director for Global M2M. “They want to know what you can do for
me today that solves a problem.”
One of the most cited examples of IoT’s potential is the so-called
connected city, where myriad sensors and cameras will track the movement
of people and resources and generate data to make everything run more
efficiently and openly. But now, the key is to get one municipal project
up and running to prove it can be done, Lisa said.
The conference drew stories of many successful projects: A system for
tracking construction gear has caught numerous workers on camera walking
off with equipment and led to prosecutions. Sensors in taxis detect
unsafe driving maneuvers and alert the driver with a tone and a seat
vibration, then report it to the taxi company. Major League Baseball is
collecting gigabytes of data about every moment in a game, providing
more information for fans and teams.
But for the mass market of small and medium-size enterprises that don’t
have the resources to do a lot of custom development, even targeted IoT
rollouts are too daunting, said analyst James Brehm, founder of James
Brehm & Associates.
There are software platforms that pave over some of the complexity of
making various devices and applications talk to each other, such as the Omega DevCloud,
which RacoWireless introduced on Tuesday. The DevCloud lets developers
write applications in the language they know and make those apps work on
almost any type of device in the field, RacoWireless said. Thingworx,
Xively and Gemalto also offer software platforms that do some of the
work for users. But the various platforms on offer from IoT specialist
companies are still too fragmented for most customers, Brehm said. There
are too many types of platforms—for device activation, device
management, application development, and more. “The solutions are too
complex.”
He thinks that’s holding back the industry’s growth. Though the past few
years have seen rapid adoption in certain industries in certain
countries, sometimes promoted by governments—energy in the U.K.,
transportation in Brazil, security cameras in China—the IoT industry as a
whole is only growing by about 35 percent per year, Brehm estimates.
That’s a healthy pace, but not the steep “hockey stick” growth that has
made other Internet-driven technologies ubiquitous, he said.
What lies ahead
Brehm thinks IoT is in a period where customers are waiting for more
complete toolkits to implement it—essentially off-the-shelf products—and
the industry hasn’t consolidated enough to deliver them. More companies
have to merge, and it’s not clear when that will happen, he said.
“I thought we’d be out of it by now,” Brehm said. What’s hard about
consolidation is partly what’s hard about adoption, in that IoT is a
complex set of technologies, he said.
And don’t count on industry standards to simplify everything. IoT’s
scope is so broad that there’s no way one standard could define any part
of it, analysts said. The industry is evolving too quickly for
traditional standards processes, which are often mired in industry
politics, to keep up, according to Andy Castonguay, an analyst at IoT
research firm Machina.
Instead, individual industries will set their own standards while
software platforms such as Omega DevCloud help to solve the broader
fragmentation, Castonguay believes. Even the Industrial Internet
Consortium, formed earlier this year
to bring some coherence to IoT for conservative industries such as
energy and aviation, plans to work with existing standards from specific
industries rather than write its own.
Ryan Martin, an analyst at 451 Research, compared IoT standards to human languages.
“I’d be hard pressed to say we are going to have one universal language
that everyone in the world can speak,” and even if there were one, most
people would also speak a more local language, Martin said.