3D Gestures for Mobile Devices: IK Multimedia’s iRing
Here’s an inexpensive new product that promises hours of fun for musicians of all types – but it might also point the way to 3D interfaces for mobile devices.
802.11ac Wave 2: Sooner Than You Think, Part 2
Xirrus’ recent almost-announcement is a further indication that Wave 2 is going to get started in the market this year.
Motorola’s MPact: A Hybrid Indoor Positioning Platform
I've been involved in a good number of projects recently involving location and tracking (a common term for the combination of these two is now positioning, not to be confused with positioning in a marketing sense or any other), and...
IEEE's Rock Stars of Mobile Cloud: No Rock, But a Few Stars
I spent Tuesday last week at the IEEE Rock Stars of Mobile Cloud event in Boston. The IEEE is of course best known for its soporific standards and conferences of interest to few beyond geeks and nerds. This event, however, was...
Deploying 802.11ac: Notes from the Field
We just wrapped up the first four stops on the Wireless Infrastructure 2014 tour, just a few of the hundreds of events, by the way, that Network World produces every year. We've been concluding each of these with a workshop segment,...
Credit-Card Fraud has Met Its Match: Ondot Systems New CardControl Solution
My recent column on minimizing credit-card fraud suggested getting retailers out of the loop via a proxy relationship with credit-card processors. This at least minimizes the number of entities with access to sensitive information...
The Camera That Killed the Jeep – Part 2
So you may recall from my last posting on this subject that I have a Wi-Fi camera that can drain the battery in Donna Diamond's brand new Jeep Cherokee simply by being powered up nearby the car. All I have to do it turn the camera on...
WLAN Testing and Benchmarking: Notes from Syracuse University
My old friend and colleague David Molta invited me to speak in a couple of his classes at Syracuse University. Dave, whom I first met when he was spending his time at Network Computing, is one of truly great professionals in the...
IDC’s Directions 14: Some Interesting Observations on Mobility – and Beyond
I recently attended IDC's annual Directions conference in Boston, and this information-packed event is always worth a visit. IDC is, of course, the original analyst firm, today with over 1,000 analysts and always a fairly...
M2M, IoT – and Broadband
I recent spoke with a senior executive from FreeWave a Boulder (CO)-based company that has been designing and building wireless products, using mostly proprietary radio designs, for two decades. The firm specializes in such...
Enterprise WLANs 2014: A Few More Announcements
Who was it that said that anything in print is out of date? I think such may be true for anything published on the Web as well - as I received notice of two more announcements just after I posted my note on this subject last...
What’s Next for Enterprise Wireless LANs?
I've had several interesting conversations with attendees at recent Network World Wireless Infrastructure events regarding the future of enterprise-class wireless LAN systems. I've been theorizing that the advent (really a landslide...
RF Interference Like You’ve Never Seen Before
OK, this one is so weird that you're likely not going to believe what follows. Notice, however, that this is not the April Fools column, and, in fact, the following is 100% true.Farpoint Group's erstwhile Operations Manager, Donna...
5G Won’t Be What Most Are Expecting
5G was a hot topic at the recent Mobile World Congress event, and while a formal definition of 5G is still pending, numbers like 1 Gbps are being tossed around. And, you know what? Such is indeed possible. More speed in wireless is a...
Hot topics in wireless and mobile for 2014: Slides from my IEEE Talk
I'm a member of the IEEE and the IEEE Communications Society, and a member of the Executive Committee for the Boston Section of the Communications Society, and I urge anyone in the Boston area with a more than casual interest in...
Wireless and Cars: My Initial Experiments with Telematics
So the end-of-the-year car sales and the expiration of my previous lease converged in late December, leading to my leasing a shiny new Hyundai Santa Fe Sport. Hyundai builds great vehicles, with equally great price/performance, and...
Solving the Credit-Card Security Challenge
One of the key items on my 2014 prayer list is security. While I continue to believe that we really can address security to a very great (but, of course, not absolute) degree, we simply do not. Maybe it's the fact that the cost of a...
Deploying 802.11ac – A New Webinar Next Week
OK, so about two years ago I was a bit cautionary with respect to the deployment of 802.11ac. There weren't all that many products on the market, especially clients, and 802.11n was working just great for essentially everyone. But...
Extreme’s Purview Tool – Network Analytics That Change More Games Than One
Extreme Networks today announced a new analytics tool, Purview, which takes a unique approach to providing analytics and thus insight with respect to what's really happening on networks today. Yes, it is all about the apps, but what...
BoxTone’s Mobility TCO Tool – Food for Thought
It's a question we've been debating for years: just exactly what does mobility cost? While I've often boiled this argument down to one of cash flow (can the required dollars be found?) and productivity (the real ROI), absolute cost...