In my day job, I have been working to develop a standard application platform for interactive television, the absence of which I think is responsible for the failure so far of ITV. (www.opencable.com/ocap) Not so coincidentally, it’s based on Sun’s Java technology, which has been very successful as a cell phone application platform.

“Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) is a new research project at Sun Labs…to make wireless sensors ready for mass commercial deployment by simplifying application development for them. Wireless sensors are inexpensive battery-powered, low-power communication devices composed of radios and exceptionally small mechanical structures that sense fields and forces in the physical world. These […] devices can be deployed throughout a physical space, providing dense sensing close to physical phenomena, processing and communicating this information, and coordinating actions with other nodes. Combining these capabilities with the system software technology that forms the Internet makes it possible to instrument the world with increasing fidelity.”

http://sig9.com/node/244