The acquisition price of $18 million in cash by MEMSIC is not bad. For Crossbow is at least a success story when compared to some wireless motes companies, particularly those university spawned ones, that hoped to catch the WSN frenzy but folded along the way. Whether this is the exit strategy Crossbow had initially hoped for is hard to say. At least they found a buyer. But this deal also includes business lines which accounted for approximately $10 million in sales annually by Crossbow. Looks like the growth in demand for wireless sensor motes has not been quite as projected years ago. Anyway it is probably best for the Crossbow that the manufacturing, sales and marketing side of the business be in the hands of MEMSIC, who is better at it, while they concentrate on where they initially did best, higher up in the value chain. Make no bones about it, wireless motes will ultimately become low cost commodities. It is going to be tough to keep two conflicting business ambitions running at the same time for any small company. So it is a good move for Crossbow afterall.

Climate change and energy shortage, potentially, are demanding people to think twice now when they want to switch on their heating or air-conditioning. Rightly so, human has been too wasteful for too long. Gas guzzling vehicles for style, for recognition. Electronic equipments switched on all day long for no good reasons. My company has just participated in the “Big Switch Off” this weekend to see how much energy companies have wasted had they not switched off unused equipments over the weekend.

Question is, do we actually need such studies to learn that we should be switching off unused equipments? It does not matter how much current the equipment draws. If it is not needed, turn it off! Simple as that. Sometimes it is just frustrating to see human’s ignorant behaviours. Of course companies would want to save their fuel bills, especially now when the economy is doing so badly, jobs cutting everywhere, everyday. But it is when it becomes the companies’ job to persuade employees to save energy that it seems a bit laughable.

It’s the same at home. There are products in the market where people can plug them onto their power sockets to see how much energy they are consuming on their devices before they will decide whether or not they will want to use less of those devices, for example when not needed! They want information in their face before they will consider changing their behaviours. Switching off things is just too “time-consuming”, sigh, as if most of these people are always so occupied.

With such inconsiderate human behaviour, it almost becomes inevitable that it makes sense to “institutionalise” plans to save energy. For example new buildings to be built need to meet certain level of energy efficiency criteria before they will be approved. Good news is this will present opportunities and incentives for builders to come up with better building designs that are energy efficient, sustainable and environmental friendly. It is true that wireless sensor networks will probably come in quite handy in helping to improve building design. But I think it will mostly be in the arena of improving comfort rather than energy efficiency, unfortunately. Afterall building materials are limited and are well studied by the construction industry already?

It wasn’t that long ago when 3G network was touted to give mobile users broadband experience on the move. Till today, even though I have 3G capabled mobile phone, I still am not experiencing the “web surfing” experience I enjoy 7-8 years ago using my desktop machine. Whereas the speed of fixed line broadband has increased considerably over these years, the bandwidth you get from 3G connection has not really managed to catch up. It is a wonder if 3G can ever live up to the expectation they once jazzed up years ago.

Then there is the multi-hop ad hoc networks which threatened to compete with network operators’ infrastructure, extending the coverage of the last mile access and potentially squeezing the core networks. Thankfully after the telecom bubble, the hype surrounding this was much less than the 3G circus, but it is a networking concept that has captured many’s imagination initially. To be honest, it is still a very unique networking concept, and has shown to work, but just has not been good enough, yet again. It is more realistic at the moment to use it in a more static environment than trying to get it to work satisfactorily in an environment where every nodes can potentially move around.

So is the wireless sensor network. It seems to also come to a stage where the hype is slowly fading away and people are getting back to basic. Rather than trying to capture investors’ attention by telling them that, “hey, these little motes can be thrown out of the aeroplane and they can ’self-configure’ to form a network and propagate monitoring information back to the base station”, people are more prudent and use it in a more sensible way in the form of Zigbee network with a star topology for example. Multi-hop, long lifespan wireless sensor network is still some way from being ready for deployment.

Anyway the point is new technologies will keep emerging all the time. It’s good to feel excited about new technologies. But unless you are in the position to do something about the technologies, there’s no need to get overly distracted by the hype surrounding it, created by marketing people who don’t know that much about the technologies, yet somehow manage to leave a bad taste in many people’s mouth.

Streaming video over wireless sensor networks? Multiple hops? And over IEEE 802.15.4? I really wanted to scream why? Sometimes I would give the researchers the benefit of the doubt when I come across some bizarre piece of research which I don’t claim expertise in. Afterall, the researchers could be brilliant, and I’m just not on the same wavelength as they are. So it’s probably a good idea I’m not making a fool out of myself. BUT quite often there are many researchers, particularly those that just finished their degree, and then pursue a PhD straight away, have little idea whether their research are useful, if novel at all. For them, it seems to me, fundings for their research are easy to come by, because people in the UK don’t fight over each other to become researchers. Many top graduates instead prefer to work in the more lucrative financial sectors in the City. So research becomes an easy way out for graduates who couldn’t get into the industries.

Fair enough, universities may not be able to always retain the best people to do cutting edge research. That’s life. But those who stay on to do research are no muppets either. They are highly educated. So what’s gone wrong when you see a lot of mickey mouse papers being accepted in conferences? Oh come on, I’m sure many of you have come across such papers or presentations before. I’ve a friend who got his PhD from Cambridge. He gives me the impression that the more publications you have, the more impressive your CV becomes. When asked about the quality, he told me that very often people can get away with the quality of the publications provided that you have enough quantity. Because, employers often do not know enough about the research area of the PhDs, particularly when they move to work in a different field. Scandalous, especially when there are so many obscure conferences around that pretty much accept any paper as long as you submit one. This is really a waste of taxpayers money, on people who have no ambition of producing good research.

Having said that, I believe the supervisors of the PhD students are partly to blame as well. I’ve come across some supervisors who give very little guidance to the students. These students then work like headless chicken, with no good directions given by their supervisors. The results are, these students end up spending a lot of time working on something that add little value to the state-of-the-art, despite their effort. This is a shame. At least the situation is better in the UK, compare to some other parts of Europe, where students are not awarded their doctorate if their work are not up to their mark. This is good, as getting a PhD ain’t no walk in the park. In some countries, at least I’m aware of, not only did some jokers get their PhD, they are now assistant professors! There’s no way, in my mind, that these people have what it takes to become assistant professors so soon. In the UK, I don’t think they are even qualified to be a lecturer! So you can get a feel of why the work produced by the PhDs can sometimes be so bad.

In all honesty, the industries have an important role to play in shaping the research as well, for example when the industries are involved in collaboration work with the academia. But unfortunately, from what I’ve seen so far, a lot of the companies put their own agenda first when it comes to working in this kind of environment. In some European Integrated Project I’ve involved in, it feels like the partners work together by working independently. Incredible. And some companies are part of the consortium just because they are giant brands in their industries. They get a slice of the fundings yet can get away without contributing much to the project. Frustrating isn’t it? If European research wants to be on a par with those across the atlantic, think all the stakeholders above really need to get their act together!