Gerry Blackwell

The Apple iPhone may be the quintessential nomadic device, but it’s being co-opted by the home automation industry to use as a wireless remote—over Wi-Fi around the house, over cellular when out and about. Could the power of iPhone mania actually help kick-start the perennially not-quite-ready-for-prime-time home automation market? That might be a bit much […]

Sputnik Inc. has been orbiting the public access Wi-Fi market since 2002, offering browser-based tools for managing hotspots. Now, says founder and CEO David LaDuke, mission success is on the horizon. Not that Sputnik has grown enormous or anything. It’s still a lean, mean entrepreneurial machine, with fewer than ten employees. But it evidently hasn’t […]

Apple’s iconic iPhone 3G may be the only mobile device you’ll ever need–heck, the only device, period. (Until Apple comes out with a 4G version, of course.) The new iPhone, released in July, is available from AT&T for $199 with a two-year voice-data plan ($70 – $130 a month), and from Rogers in Canada for […]

Jim Baker is the classic Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur—only transplanted to the UK. Like others of his breed, Baker seems addicted to starting, then selling companies. He did it twice in California with streaming media ventures, then came home to England and turned his attention to Wi-Fi. Now, true to form, his latest company, Moovera […]

Is there room in the market for yet another Web-based collaboration service? After all, we already have WebEx and GoToMeeting, among others. Yugma Inc., a Minneapolis company that recently launched version 3 of its collaboration software, thinks the answer is Yes. We tested the service recently and came away frustrated initially, but in the end […]

Worldwide market leader AeroScout believes Wi-Fi can push RFID into the mainstream. Back in 2003, when AeroScout and a few competitors started making Wi-Fi RFID tags, RFID tracking was already an established—if still relatively new-fangled—technology. Wi-Fi was the interloper, the new kid on the block. Existing systems operated on other frequencies, with other radio technologies. A […]

Stelera Wireless is hoping to use wireless network technology to extend broadband Internet access to under-served rural and small town markets. Can its founder’s plan to go with HSPA instead of WiMAX or Wi-Fi succeed? The motivating idea behind Ed Evans’ new venture, Stelera Wireless, may not sound particularly original: use wireless network technology to […]

Until yesterday, iPass only provided access to its high-speed Wi-Fi service to enterprise customers. Now, there is a pay-as-you-go model that is perfect for small business and consumer users. For years, virtual network operator and Wi-Fi hotspot aggregator iPass Inc. has been selling its services to enterprises, usually with multi-user, long-term contracts. The core service […]

New Web conferencing services seem to pop up on an almost monthly basis these days, inspired perhaps by the global success of Skype on the one hand, but its failure to seize the business market opportunity on the other. We look here at two that have in fact been around for a while—SightSpeed from SightSpeed […]

Product: ASUS AIR Internet Radio Manufacturer’s URL: http://usa.asus.com/index.aspx Price: MSRP $199 Pros: Looks good, thousands of pre-programmed radio stations, easy set-up Cons: Awkward interface for some functions, monaural speaker system In Europe, the Web radio appliance, a dedicated hardware device that connects to a home network and then to the Internet to play live audio […]

The Dual-Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router (WRT600N) from Linksys, part of the Cisco subsidiary’s N Ultra Rangeplus line, has one thing going for it that few, if any, other consumer-grade Wi-Fi products do. It’s a dual-band, dual-radio router that can run two simultaneous wireless networks. In effect, you get double the network capacity. Of course, you […]