Enabling Everything with Wireless

< The Wall Street Journal published an excellent article today on how wireless networking is being embedded in devices and used for activities that, until recently, wouldn’t be associated with wireless; things like slippers, bovine mating and pill bottles are all candidates for a wireless  treatment.  One of the people quoted in the article is Glenn Lurie, AT&T’s President of Emerging Devices, Resale and Partnerships.  Lurie was a keynote speaker at the CONNECTIONS™ event in Santa Clara last month and ViodiTV had the opportunity to speak with him about the future of what the techies call “Machine-to-Machine” or M2M.

What Lurie speaks of in this interview is using wireless to solve problems.  A big part of their strategy is to look at and understand the needs of different vertical markets.  He speaks of their foundry service that helps their partners in these different verticals embed wireless into devices and services.  He provides an example of a wireless  cap for a pill bottle that has the potential to provide health care savings through medication adherence.

The creative things he and his group are doing have as much to do with the way they shape the business model as it does morphing the technology to solve a problem.  As a result, his group is seeing spectacular growth rates going from zero to 12 million devices.  He explains that this is just the start and he believes that we will easily see greater than 300 to 400% penetration of devices in a couple of short years.

ViodiTV coverage of the 2011 CONNECTIONS™ conference brought to you by Parks Associates.