At Sentilla we have a great relationship with the guys at Sun Labs's Project SunSPOT . The SunSPOTs team has been super-busy lately, releasing a ton of cool stuff. In fact, in the past month they have open-sourced their JVM, posted the hardware schematics for their hardware platform, and released a free software development kit that includes a simulator to test how programs would run in the real-world. It's all very exciting, and congratulations are in order!

With the SunSPOT team being so active lately, we've been getting lots of questions from customers exploring the technology. Since we both are pioneering the concept of pervasive computing with Java-based software for small computers it can seem like we're doing the same thing. Still, there are two main differences between us that are worth clarifying.

The first difference is that Sentilla technology runs on computers that are considerably more resource-constrained than SPOTs -- orders of magnitude, really. The following chart elucidates this pretty succinctly:

You'll see that Sentilla's software fits in a super-compact space and uses very little power; this means that Sentilla can be used in a larger range of devices and can function for longer time periods between charges. The easiest way to think about this is that the SunSPOTs are closer to cell phones in terms of available processing cycles and power consumption. This means they can do really amazing stuff with the extra cycles but need to be plugged in every night to be recharged. Sentilla motes have to do more with less, but can last for months or even years on a single battery charge.

The second difference is that SunSPOTs is a research project while Sentilla is a commercial company. The Lab's charter is to spark the imagination of what's possible using Java technology in this new world of pervasive computing; Sentilla has a similar mission to encourage the imagination of our users, but we also want to ensure that these ideas turn into commercial products. In fact, a substantial part of our business is providing dedicated resources to support our customers and help them turn their ideas into complete, profitable solutions.

So that's just a quick overview. We're each paving the way for this exciting new technology through Java software, so congratulations again to the whole SunSPOTs team. Keep up the great work!