Age Of Wonders 3 Poor Connection

ZigBee Ushers in Age of Connected Devices

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It's a nifty sounding word—ZigBee—but most of the excitement so far here has been around protocol stacks, control modules, and interconnections. Necessary stuff, but deadly dull unless you're building the devices yourself. But based on my walk through the ZigBee Alliance's Open House and Member Meeting at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco this week, this exciting new standard is about to move from backroom boards to real products that consumers and businesses can buy.

What's ZigBee? Nothing more than a revolution in how devices communicate. The last ten years have been all about connecting people to people via computers and the internet. The next ten years will be all about things connecting to things, using standard networking protocols and without human intervention. The ZigBee standard encompasses a low-power and low-bandwidth mesh networking scheme, along with the ability for devices to form ad-hoc mesh networks to route information around.

It starts with things like controlling heating, air conditioning, and lights, but ZigBee's potential doesn't end there. We've already seen ZigBee enter the home-monitoring space with Lusora's upcoming line of products (think "I've fallen and I can't get up" for the 21st century), but a wide range of other fascinating applications were on display.

The emergence of ZigBee comes at an opportune time, as it parallels the development of smart, low-power sensors, and RFID. New sensors can monitor all sorts of interesting things, from temperature and radiation to how fast a device is accelerating (or stopping) and even to your own heartbeat and blood pressure. RFID adds name, rank, and serial number to any object—along with letting it broadcast that information to a sensor stationed nearby.

Combine these three capabilities, and you get a network of sensors that can communicate with each other and to the world—and smart devices that know what and where they are. With ZigBee, if you can sense it, you can broadcast it, and once transmitted, it can interface with just about anything.

I roamed the floor and captured pictures of everything from a radiation-monitoring device to Garfield the cat. Check out my for an amazing look at where ZigBee will take us in the next 12 months, and understand that this is just scratching the surface. Many more high-profile applications will be unveiled that will turn this odd-sounding wireless protocol into a household name.

Pointer Graphic for Fingerlinks Click here to read more about ZigBee.