David Binetti: March 2008 Archives

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!

It's been a long time coming, but I'm proud to announce.... my first blog entry! OK, maybe that's not news, but what is news is that we have a new CEO. His name is Bob Davis, and he's meshing right into the company fabric. (And yes, I can hear the groans reverberating across the net...)

But before I get into Bob, I wanted to take a moment to recognize Rick Schell, our outgoing CEO, who guided us through our transformation from a wireless sensor network pioneer to a pervasive computing company. Rick did a fabulous job, and was exactly what we needed as we made this leap of faith. His steady hand and fervent belief in our mission to extend computing everywhere was precisely what we needed to bring us to where we are today. Rick was the first VP of Engineering at another pioneering company -- Netscape -- and I can say without any equivocation that we would never have made it to this place without his experience, guidance, vision, and leadership. But that said, Rick was clear from the outset that he wanted to take us only so far and no farther, and so we are at once forlorn and grateful as we reluctantly give Rick back to his wife and family.... (Inside joke: "So long, Rick, and thanks for all the fish!")

Which bring us to "farther". And for farther, we have Bob Davis. Bob comes to us from CA (meaning Computer Associates, not California) where he ran their storage business after CA acquired his last startup. Bob has been with us only a few weeks and suffice it to say that we are all astonished at how quickly he's picked up our business and gotten right to work. Those of us in this space know how tough the technology can be, even if <shameless plug>we're making it much easier with Java technology. </shameless plug> But Bob figured it all out in a week and is picking things up without missing a beat. Bob's specialty is taking startups to the next level of growth and development. He's exactly the right guy to take us farther, and we're ridiculously excited about the future.

So speaking for Joe, Cory, Rob and everyone else here at Sentilla: welcome to Bob, thank you to Rick, and stay tuned as we continue to bring computing to where it's never been before...