Worth staying late...

Dan Hebert, CONTROL Senior Technical Editor, and I had a very late afternoon meeting with Gary Ambrosino, the new (since January) CEO of Sensicast Systems Inc., a major contender in the industrial wireless radio space. It was worth staying late for, and I think Gary would agree. "It's not the technology," Ambrosino said, "it's the applications...what you can do with the technology, that counts." This is a very different sort of thinking from the way most of the venture-capitalized Zigbee and other wireless players are thinking, and it is right side up in the extreme. I kept thinking, "Nunc dimittis Domine," as Ambrosino kept talking about how to grow the wireless business from an industrial plaything to an industrial indispensable tool. Like most CEOs, he told me stuff that if I told you, I'd have to kill you all...learn more here in a couple of months. Under new management, Sensicast is well worth watching...watching very closely. Many of you know that I am a science fiction fan, and have even written some published sf. In discussion with Gary Ambrosino, the subject of the use of self-organizing mesh sensors came up, as a science fiction trope. It so happens that two friends of mine, Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor have just published a science fiction novel, Boundary, in which self-organizing mesh sensor networks play a very important role in the plot. If you want a shot at cutting edge science fiction, I recommend it.