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March 1, 2004
Bionic Dust
The company lands a $7 million first round to scatter its tiny sensors
far and wide.
By Andrea Orr
If a tiny Berkeley, California networking company has its way, its
products will be as ubiquitous as its name suggests.
Dust Inc. made the transition from speculative university research group
to promising commercial business earlier this month, when it won venture
funding from a group of firms, including the Central Intelligence
Agency's In-Q-Tel venture arm.
It is not the biggest deal of the month, or even the week - Dust secured
a relatively modest $7 million in its first round - but it's enough to
win national media attention and capture the imagination of people who
still prefer to associate technology with a brave new future.
Dust makes small sensors designed to work together through "mesh"
networking technology to monitor everything from human movements and
systems malfunctions within a large office space or department store, to
enemy troop movements in Iraq. One military application, in particular,
has been in the spotlight: the idea is to scatter whole handfuls of
these sensors around a military base to detect movements in the area.
Each sensor, equipped with its own computer chip, power supply, and
wireless communications devices, would be able to record data on
everything from light to temperature to vibrations, forming an effective
and relatively low-cost barrier against enemy troupes in the area.
Sensing technology is not really new. Today, information-gathering
sensors are found in a host of consumer products from refrigerators to
cars. A Canadian winery has already used wireless sensors to track small
temperature fluctuations to determine the best time to harvest its
grapes. But Dust hopes it can make these sensors much more ubiquitous.
Building on more than 10 years of university research, the company has
reduced the size, the energy demands, and the cost of sensors to make
them practical in a wide range of applications. Each new generation of
the product takes it a step closer to becoming as small and commonplace
as the company name.
"The sensors themselves usually cost between $1 and $2," says Kris
Pister, Dust's chief technology officer. "But it can cost $600 to
install one. It's ridiculous."
Mr. Pister, who spent much of his career working on this technology
while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, projects
that within a year or two, installation costs for Dust sensors will be
closer to ten dollars. One big difference will be the size of these
sensors. Currently about as big as a pager, newer versions will be
smaller than a bottle cap, Mr. Pister says.
"We've got an enthusiastic response and have customers lined up," says
Mr. Pister, noting that potential customers include U.S. government
agencies and large private-sector manufacturing companies that make test
and measurement equipment, and are interested in incorporating remote
sensing technology into their products.
"I've been at this for years, but from a business perspective it came
out of nowhere," Mr. Pister says. "People in academic circles have known
about this for a long time, but suddenly, people started to say, 'you've
got to get this into our hands.'"
"It's an intriguing market," notes Paul Koontz, general partner of
Foundation Capital in Menlo Park, California., which led the latest
round of funding. He said that while there are several competitors
seeking to break into this rapidly expanding market, Dust has "a
combination of a brilliant technology and a prototype demonstrating that
much of the technological risk had been worked through."
Mr. Koontz says he was especially impressed by the way Dust's remote
sensors, also known as motes, can communicate with each other,
essentially building a network that automatically detects a weak link.
"If some are shut down, the mesh network will heal itself, and figure
out how to rout the data around the lost nodes."
As promising as the technology sounds, other companies have stumbled
trying to generate a broad market for these remote sensors. One such
company, Graviton, also won funding from the CIA's In-Q-Tel and
showcased promising ways to use wireless sensors to remotely monitor
security checkpoints and baggage-checking machines at airports. But the
technology never got off the ground, and Graviton's assets were later
acquired.
Dust's Mr. Pister, however, maintains that the main hurdle to broad
commercialization of these products is driving down costs. That is
something his company is rapidly achieving.
Another challenge is getting Dust sensors integrated into real-world
products. "There are some pretty far-out sounding applications, that are
really not that far away," he said.
Homeland Security is one such application. In theory, at least, it
should be possible to insert one of the company's wireless sensors in
every cargo container so that authorities could know before it arrives
on U.S. soil whether it has been opened or in any way tampered with
while it was en route.
He stresses though, that all the talk of national security uses of his
product should not diminish the more mundane, yet lucrative applications
closer to home.
One of the businesses Mr. Pister is most excited about is using Dust
sensors to track power consumption in big office buildings, grocery
stores or department stores, so that businesses can better identify
waste and system malfunctions, an often overlooked problem, that can
cost companies millions of dollars.
"Huge inefficiencies are created by empty offices that are heated, and a
lot can be done to better monitor this kind of thing," says Foundation
Capital's Mr. Koontz. "By installing sensors in every room, there is an
opportunity for savings of millions of dollars per year."
Small sensors that talk with each other across a vast area is no longer
pie in the sky technology. According to Mr. Koontz, the technology
itself is not complicated: "The basic notion of running on a low power
network is actually very simple," he says. What's more, "there are
prospects for a very large market."
With the technology no longer the stuff of the future and its potential
to boost efficiency and reduce costs in offices and elsewhere, don't
count on Dust being swept under the rug any time soon.
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