Microsoft puts SPOT on stage

Microsoft’s announcement of its use of SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology), which uses FM signals to send one-way information to small devices such as watches, shows the trend toward digital convergence. Bill Mitchell, Microsoft’s general manager of SPOT, talked with InfoWorld Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz about convergence, the Direct Band Network and SPOT, and the push for smart devices

InfoWorld: Do you consider SPOT an example of digital convergence?

Mitchell: Certainly, but we also look at it as an example of disaggregation; where once you had a technology [wireless] that was at a premium, now you can build intelligence into any device that is small, with low power, and inexpensive.

InfoWorld: Why do you call that disaggregation?

Mitchell: [It’s] disaggregation because you’re taking information and moving it from a central location.

InfoWorld: Nokia executives we’ve spoken with recently see this as a way of trying to disaggregate the wireless carriers with a simpler direct way of getting information to the user. Is there some truth to that?

Mitchell: We certainly believe that there is not one [layer] of technology for all. Right now there is not another very low-power way to get the kind of reach that you get with a Direct Band [SPOT] network. So we had to build something. If a carrier already offered such a version, we’d obviously be using it.

InfoWorld: Back to convergence. Is there anything on the back-end of SPOT that we might find useful in the office?

Mitchell: We believe that the information that’s scheduled and then broadcast and pulled out by a smart receiver isn’t necessarily just for consumer data, like the weather. It can certainly be information that’s highly relevant to business people in a conference room, for example. Right now, what if I don’t have your cell phone number? That’s a problem and a pager is disruptive. Our focus groups told us that they want to be reached in a way that they can control through a buddy list and reached in a way that is nondetractive. So the watch vibrates or doesn’t even do anything other than display the message.

InfoWorld: So, with SPOT you have wide area coverage, excellent in-building penetration, and low power. You have three of the four key components for creating the perfect wireless device. The only thing missing is two-way communication.

Mitchell: In our focus groups, customers actually selected out of having two-way instant messaging. It came up in almost every city, and it’s fascinating to watch what happens. Without the moderator’s intervention somebody in the group would say — how would you do two-way? Would you have a tiny little keyboard? It’s too nerdy, and we don’t want that. And so generally, a two-way scenario forces you into UI devices that people just think of as unacceptable.

The question is really, what kind of two-way do you want? I think you have to go into the specific scenario. If people come up with specific scenarios like — well, this bar scenario, where I’m sitting in a bar and I want to be able to look at my watch to tell if that woman three stools away is potentially interested in me or not. She’s got her little watch and we could somehow communicate … that is something that is really, really attractive, and boy, that’s a super-motivation kind of scenario. Then we’ll go do the same kind of testing and figure out what technology to put in.

For now, the basic piece of the SPOT technology that we wanted was to be able to build a software technology that makes everyday devices smarter.

InfoWorld: How so? Isn’t SPOT like an electronic form of autism, where the device offers information that’s unrelated to its own existence?

Mitchell: Well, some of what we learned from the earliest days when we actually partnered with Timex on the [DayLink] watch is in this technology, too. When mobile professionals look at their watches, it was not to tell it’s a quarter to three , but it’s to tell that it’s 15 minutes till I have to be in another building.

Linking the time to the next thing that you do, which is typically pulling out a piece of paper that tells you where you have to be, makes a watch smarter and calendaring is automatically updated.

InfoWorld: Right, so you could put SPOT in a pen and make a smarter pen?

Mitchell: Actually, the pieces of the pen would be able to store information in the pen.

InfoWorld: Like notes from the last meeting?

Mitchell: Yeah. Certainly you need some of that, right? And a way to get that information out to some kind of device that so it can be viewed.

InfoWorld: But how would SPOT be used as a way to get that information?

Mitchell: SPOT is an initiative around making everyday devices smarter. I could use the pen to record the data and then later on, translate it to a peer device or back to a PC.

InfoWorld: Transmitting over FM?

Mitchell: No, Bluetooth or [802].11. We’re not trying to say that this is a one-size-fits-all concept.

InfoWorld: So direct band doesn’t have to be FM. Direct Band is more of a concept than one particular technology?

Mitchell: Direct Band is associated with this very specific FM network. The SPOT initiative itself use direct band. But we can use all sorts of radio technology.

InfoWorld: Can you elaborate on your own quote from the press release? “We foresee a time when smart objects, PCs, and computer appliances interact with each other in complementary ways.”

Mitchell: There are two things here. One is if you’re going to be able to have the information spread throughout your environment, it has to be in places that you can look at conveniently. Then there starts to become this big question — well, now how do I actually configure all of those things? I don’t want to have 15 of these things spread throughout my environment, if I actually have to go and customize them all. That starts to become as bad as having clocks all over the house that I constantly have to set. So if I configure one and I say — the kind of weather information I’m really interested in, because I ski I don’t want to have to configure that again and again and again for each kind of device that I have. I have one in my car dash, one sitting in my kitchen, and the one on my watch. This is part of the configuration issue.

The other one starts to get interesting when you have technology that gives you two-way and peer interaction. And we certainly welcome the opportunity to interoperate with other wide-area solutions. The solution that we have with Direct Band, together with the peer technology and then you suddenly have the ability to have watch-to-watch interaction and watch-to-PC.

InfoWorld: When you said peer technology, I immediately thought of Mesh Networks over [802].11. Is that the kind of thing they’re thinking of?

Mitchell: [802].11 or Bluetooth, they’re both very exciting. Right now, both the power requirement and the cost of those chip sets sort of precludes putting them in a watch in addition to Direct Band.

I’m just saying radio is obviously becoming cheap and a commodity and if you follow the processor curve, we can certainly look out a couple of years, five years, and say, “Gosh, we have low-power 802.11 and and cheaper chip sets” and so you can talk about putting multiple radios in a single package and actually having the battery life sustain it.

InfoWorld: So in a sense that almost sounds like this FM technology will help make the market, and then at some point when [802].11 chips get cheaper and lower power and so on … then it’s just an upgrade to two-way technology?

Mitchell: I think our hardest thing is actually getting a reach solution.

InfoWorld: You could do it in mesh.

Mitchell: You have to imagine sort of a mesh infrastructure. You know, like the mesh that covers the highway as you’re driving.

InfoWorld: Right. You will definitely have smart devices interacting with each other and with PCs, and I think they’ll use a range of solutions to do that.

InfoWorld: Let’s get back to the current SPOT technology as it will be deployed in its first iteration. Can you execute on the data once it is received or just view it? I’m thinking of those calendar updates. If you had a device that had your whole calendar in it, and so you get a calendar update over SPOT. Can that update your calendar?

Mitchell: Yeah — one of the things we showed in our booth was a Pocket PC with both an SD [secure digital] card version of the Direct Band radio, as well as one built right into the actual the body of the Pocket PC. For those kinds of applications, the data is useable by the Pocket PC by sending it to the [processor] chip set from the radio chip set. Certainly you can put the information that you’re getting over the direct band directly into

InfoWorld: What about scalability of this new Direct Band network?

Mitchell: It givers you more than the 4 Kbps that you get with flex paging. With FM infrastructure and with our frequency agile tuner, if you need more capacity, and suddenly you’ve got hundreds of thousands of customers signing up in the L.A. area, it’s a simple matter of going to another radio station and leasing the FM subcarrier license from them. And for us, it’s a pretty quick operation to get a generator box up in their station voila, we’re on the air.