For a small operation the ZigBee Alliance appears to have an excellent public relations team working for it. Everybody you ask has heard of them. Of course very few people can actually tell you who they are or what they do.I was one of those avoiding the press releases and offers to do one-on-one interviews, but they finally caught me in a weak moment and I spoke with Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance.Now I know and I thought I’d pass it on to you. ZigBee is a group of major sensor manufacturers, Ember, Honeywell, Invensys, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Philips and Samsung, plus semiconductor manufacturers, wireless IP providers, OEMs and users.The goal is to take sensor technology mainstream by creating a standard for remote wireless monitoring and control. To that end ZigBee proponents want the radio to be IEEE 802.15.4 with ZigBee adding the logical network, security and application framework. IEEE 802.15.4 is low power, a single 9 volt battery can last for years in a sensor, has a low cost bill of materials, $3 compared to $9 for IEEE 802.11, according to ZigBee and it and it can support over 65,000 nodes in a mesh network. I wrote about sensors and mesh a few blogs ago, so use this link if you want to know more about that.Here’s a nice example of how it might work. Take a 50-story hotel in Manhattan and put a wireless sensor in every thermostat and one person sitting at the front desk can monitor the HVAC each individual room to insure an empty room is not being cooled or heated. Also, at check in a guest can request at the front desk a specific temperature. There are thousands of applications for sensors currently in use and if you sit down for a moment you can probably think of a dozen new applications yourself. IBM announced earlier this week it is investing $250 million in sensor technology so you can bet sensor technology will soon go beyond the market for industrial controllers.I believe sensors networked by mesh technology will rapidly change what we know about the world we live in. Technology Industry