Wireless Technology Companies Hope to Be Invited to Your Home
Upside magazine’s second annual Digital Living Room Conference brought high-technology movers, shakers and dreamers to the posh Ritz-Carlton resort in Laguna Niguel last week to contemplate what our connected homes might look like as we approach 2000.
(For the record, I write a column that appears weekly on Upside’s Web site.)
Much of this year’s talk focused on how to take advantage of broadband Internet access to the home. Today the vast majority of people using the Internet at home are dialing in with standard modems at 56K or slower. But more and more families are enjoying high-speed Internet access through a cable modem or a DSL (digital subscriber line) service that brings the Web to their screens at eight to 50 times the speed of a modem for as little as $30 a month.
In most cases, a single cable modem or DSL connection can be shared among several computers and other devices in the home. Along with cheaper PCs, that’s helping to fuel the market for home-based networks similar to the local-area networks employed in many offices. While it’s possible for homeowners to install the same Ethernet wires, hubs and connectors used in businesses, most of the networking vendors at Digital Living Room are convinced that consumers won’t want to go through that hassle. Hence the emergence of products that enable you to use your home’s phone wiring or electrical wiring to link together devices in different rooms. As I mentioned in a previous column, Intel is already shipping its ($99 per PC) AnyPoint Home Network, which uses existing home phone wires, and Diamond Multimedia offers its ($99 per machine) HomeFree wireless network with a range of up to 150 feet.
Motorola used Digital Living Room to announce that it soon will be offering a cable modem that is also a wireless hub that broadcasts Internet and PC data throughout the home at 1.6 megabits per second. That’s still much slower than the 10- to 100-megabit standard for today’s wired-office LANs, but a bit faster than existing wireless strategies.
ShareWave and RadioLAN were at the conference demonstrating their 10-megabit-per-second high-speed solutions, which are fast enough to transmit multimedia data between home devices. The difference between 1.6 and 10 megabits isn’t all that compelling when it comes to text and graphics, but it’s more useful for home networks that integrate PCs, TVs and portable viewing and Web-surfing devices. At this speed, you could have a single network that lets you transmit TV signals from your satellite dish or cable system to any connected “screen” in your home, giving you a houseful of Web-surfing possibilities.
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Wireless networking gets even more interesting when used with flat-panel displays such as those of laptop computers. National Semiconductor showed off its Orion WebPad, an 8 1/2-by-11-inch, 2.7-pound hand-held pad that you can use anywhere in or near the house for instant wireless Internet service. The device was strictly for show, though. National Semi hopes to persuade device manufacturers to integrate its technology into their own real products.
Devices that are thin and wireless also can be deployed in places where you’d least expect them. Instead of all those magnets and post-it notes on your refrigerator door, why not put up a wireless LCD screen? Sharewave showed off a prototype wireless refrigerator screen that could not only be used to display recipes but to provide Internet access. Hook up a bar code reader and you could scan your groceries as you stuff them in the refrigerator, creating an instant inventory of what foods you have.
An NCR research lab from Britain showed off a similar screen built into the door of a microwave oven. NCR calls it the “Microwave Bank” and envisions it being used as a kitchen-based Internet appliance for shopping and banking.
In addition to all the show’s “real soon” products, a few companies were displaying technologies that you can buy now or within weeks.
Replay Networks and TiVo were showing off their systems, which enable you record your favorite TV shows for later viewing without having to fool around with tape. They also let you pause live programs and pick what you want to record from an on-screen menu. NBC recently invested in TiVo and plans to offer special programming--perhaps broadcast in the middle of the night--for TiVo owners. What they didn’t address is where to fit yet another “set-top” box.
OneBox.com was showing off its free, integrated messaging system that will launch later this month. Like EFax.com, the company gives you a free phone number for incoming faxes, but it also will offer free voicemail and the ability to forward voicemail messages via e-mail to any Internet user. The nice thing about this concept is that your faxes, e-mail and voicemail all wind up in your e-mail basket.
Another product that’s ready for prime time is the iPhone from InfoGear (https://www.infogear.com). Part two-line phone, part Web browser and e-mail terminal, this 7.4-inch device has a monochrome screen and a pullout keyboard with a built-in 56K modem. It fits nicely on a kitchen cabinet and, at between $299 and $399, is a bit cheaper than a full-featured PC.
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The most revealing part of the conference was a short videotape in which Steven Kirsch, chairman and founder of Infoseek, showed off some of the incredibly expensive gadgets in his new $10-million Silicon Valley home.
It was a lesson in high technology as a mixed curse. His $15,000 video entertainment system is very cool, if you don’t consider that his flat panel plasma display interferes with his infrared remote control and the quality of the picture is lower than what he gets with his $100 portable TV.
Kirsch can open and close his window blinds by remote control, but sometimes they open or close when he doesn’t want them to. His state-of-the-art electronic safe is easier to use than one with an old-fashioned combination lock--until the battery dies. Kirsch’s experiences are reassuring for those of us who don’t have $10 million to spend on a new house. Maybe your old analog living room isn’t so bad after all.
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Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 1:48 p.m. weekdays on KNX (1070). He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com. On AOL, use keyword “LarryMagid.”
