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February 10, 2003
Volution Tech
Volution Tech is a spin-off of Center 7 and SCO. One product is called "Volution Manager" and provides remote managment capabilities to servers. For example, MacDonalds has SCO Unix servers sitting in thousands of stores around the globe that have no local IT support. Consequently they've been slow to migrate, upgrade, and install new applications in an effort to increase reliability. Volution manager allows all of those remote servers to be managed.
Another product they are selling is called "Pilot Center" and is aimed at the corporate data center and facilties management. Pilot Center is sold as a leased applicance that contains the hardware and software necessary to create the monitoring and management environment.
04:14 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Power Innovations
Bob Mount is the CEO of a company called Power Innovations. I've known Bob for 10 years or so. His company provides power solutions for digital equipment in specialized environments such as airport baggage scanners, military vehicles, oil exploration vehicles, mobile satellite launch vehicles, industrial applications, and aviation.
Power Innovations has developed power units for resuscitation units for premature infants. These units allow the unit to be removed from utility power for up to an hour so that the baby and unit can be transported. They also give feedback on operations so that a hospital can prove that a particular unit was working.
02:38 PM | Recommend This | Print This
MaxStream
MaxStream makes wireless networking gear, but their market isn't personal computers, but embedded devices. They build wireless modems in the 900MHz and 2.4GHz bands for use in weather stations, electric and gas meters, monitoring remote conditions in mobile and fixed applications, vending machines, point of sales devices, HVAC, gas lines, and so on.
Why not 802.11? I asked that question and the answer comes down to three things:
- Overhead - 802.11 implements and entire networking stack and lots of embedded devices don't need it.
- Range - There's an inverse relationship between range and bandwidth. Most embedded applications need range more than they need bandwidth.
- Cost - These devices in bulk need to be very cheap to be embedded in other devices.
On the other hand, why not X10 or something like it? It comes down to the advantage of digital signals over analog signals. MaxStream is digital and so provides packetization, retries, encryptions, and so on. X10 doesn't do that.
02:04 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Helius
Helius started out years ago building satellite interfaces into routers. The idea was to use the satellite for content distribution. They claim that its better, for certain applications, than either a standard satellite video system or terrestrial IP (i.e. Internet). In the case os satellite video, they have the advantage of having full IP, so they get VoIP, interactivity, and so on. In the case of terrestrial IP, they eliminate all the routers that would sit between the source and sink as well as getting multicast capabilities (which the Internet has failed to deploy).
Helius sells appliances. They have routers, video encoders and decoders (all IP based) and training systems. Their technology, however, is all about the software that lives on those boxes. As you can imagine, a lot of this involves digital rights management so that a company distributing training, for example, can determine who has paid for the training and authorize just those people to access the content.
Customers typically do training (corporate or otherwise) or distribute content to many locations (think of product advertisements inside retail establishments). They haven't graduated into the kind of aggressive personalization that was showcased in Minority Report, but its certainly possible, since this is all IP based, to tie it into the store's customer database.
11:46 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Veloxa
Veloxa is a subsidiary of eBiz Enterprises. Bruce Parsons is the President and CEO. Veloxa provides reconfigurable computing solutions based on FPGA technology. Second company in as many weeks, I've run into in this space.
Veloxa is creating tools that compile C/C++ into FPGA cores. Veloxa provides application specific cores that are pre-developed as well as development tools for creating customer specific applications.
Veloxa is targeting the seismic data processing in the oil exploration space, rendering in the entertainment space, defense and intelligence applications, genomic applications in the biotech arena.
Veloxa believes that their competitive advantage is in the application management infrastructure that they've developed (based on JXTA) that allows them to manage clusters of FPGA running multiple jobs, queuing data and cores, finding free nodes, and so on. Think of it as Tivoli for Linux clusters with application-specific FPGA-based co-processors. The management software takes requests that include data sources, data sinks, and processing needs and schedules the right core and data at an available node.
Veloxa has estimated that application-specific FPGAs could replace 30% of the current high performance computing market of $8.5 billion.
11:06 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Cogito
Next up is Cogito, a company that is focused on knowledge management. I first met Dallas Noyes, the founder, in 1998 when I was CTO at iMALL. The technology and the business plan are, obviously, much more mature now.
Their clients have primarily been military and security based. In the first phase, they've been primarily working with end users. Boeing has been a big customer. Their strategy is to move their product into OEM vendors of software tools that those end users employ to do their work. This market is called "product lifecycle management," or PLM, but you may know it better as "computer aided design."
In the PLM application, the technology allows one to build a database of parts and information about how they're used (configurations) and then the software will generate schematic drawings. Think of it as content management for engineering drawings.
The underlying technology differs from something like Autonomy in that Autonomy and others are building metamaps of existing archives to help find relationships in those archives, but at the end of the day, they are finding information. Cogito, builds conceptual models of the underlying archives with the goal of replacing those archives by being able to regenerate the useful features of those archives at will from the conceptual model.
I have to admit that when I first talked to Dallas in 1998, I didn't really understand what he was talking about. Part of the problem was that I was very focused on developing an ASP-model eCommerce system and I couldn't see a fit, so I didn't try that hard. Since then I've expanded my views and interests in IT and this time the meeting made perfect sense.
09:47 AM | Recommend This | Print This
iArchives
Today I'm spending the day at the Canopy Group's Banker's Summit. The Canopy Group is a private venture group backed by Ray Noorda, the driving force behind Novell in its hey day. The day is basically a back to back series of presentations by some of the Canopy companies. First up is iArchives, a company that makes analog documents (like paper and microfilm) fully searchable. Russ Wilding is the President of iArchives and an old friend. Our wives went to high school together, so I've known him long before there was any high-tech connection.
iArchives is fundamentally a company built on character recognition technology. They have contracts with some major newspapers to digitize old papers and make them available on-line. The character recognition is used to create indexes for searching, not to deliver text to the user. The user sees the original image.
Interestingly enough, there is a eGovernment connection with what they do. One of their clients is a firearms manufacturer who wants to make their records available electronically to the ATF. The IT process that places like the ATF use to track firearms would scare you. This kind of technology could help.