Home Ecophobia

We loathe the word "ecosystem" ...mostly because

1. we didn't come up with it
2. it sounds too political while at the same time to "naturey"
3. it reeks of John Chambers (we're big fans of him and will vote for him when he runs for office)

Yet since Ruckus came out of the closet, we've had a ton of folks come show us cool new stuff they're building for the home that will incorporate Wi-Fi and will need a stable Wi-Fi connection.

You see, now that Wi-Fi has found a true home with consumers, there are going to be countless companies and new products that will incorporate Wi-Fi. There already are. But the current iteration of Wi-Fi isn't industrial-strength enough to help the technology become the utility in the home that it needs to be. And 802.11n isn't the panacea (more on that in the next post).

That said, here's just a smattering of hot and interesting home eco-phobes that (we believe) are working on some really interesting consumer electronics products:

http://www.slimdevices.com/
These guys make a cool product called Squeezebox (great name).  It's a very small device with built in 802.11g that uses Wi-Fi to stream digital music from your MP3 Jukebox to any room. You can have one of these things in any and all rooms and stream different songs to different rooms over Wi-Fi.  The Squeezebox connects to the audio system in each room. And it supports a myriad of digital music formats like MP3, WMA, FLAC, AAC, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis.  Wow.

http://www.avegasystems.com/
Avega integrates surround decoding, power amplification, 802.11 and UPnP connectivity directly into speakers. The system eliminates the stack of A/V boxes and myriad of wires found in a traditional AV setup. Their technology overcomes key technical challenges associated with the networking of loudspeakers based on 802.11 and TCP/IP,including speaker synchronization, reliability of data transmission, lip-sync, and interoperability.

http://www.kaleidescape.com/
If you're an entertainment junkie, do these folks have a system for you! This company builds a fairly (mid to high-end) revolutionary system.  It consists of a multimedia "entertainment" server, movie player, music player and reader that helps people collect and manage digital content.  Basically it's a large, super fast RAID with a fantastic and intuitive user interface that let's you literally build a digital Blockbuster store in your home. They use high-speed 100BASE-T connections to move the movies around the home (if you have an 100BASE-T jack in every room).

http://www.streamium.com/index.cfm
Streamium is a very cool line of wireless home entertainment products from Phillips - who are really interested in using Wi-Fi in the home to leverage digital multimedia.  Their Streamium stuff includes a Wi-Fi entertainment system, a Wi-Fi music center and Wi-Fi PVRs (ultimately).  Their Streamium MX6000i lets you stream digital audio, video and photos directly from the Internet.