When Robert Poor looks at the world, he sees 50 billion embedded microcontrollers, the workhorse chips inside cars, traffic lights and air conditioners, doing their jobs in splendid isolation. Then he imagines what will happen when they all can talk to one another.
Ember, the company that Poor cofounded in 2001, gives mundane devices the power to communicate wirelessly. For $10 a light switch, and without having to tear up any drywall, you can shut off all the lights in the house by tapping one button. “When I talked about networking light switches four years ago, people looked at me as if I was crazy,” he says.
Poor, 50, has always followed his own lead. He studied electronic music at Oberlin College in Ohio, moved to California and bounced through various computer jobs, including stints with George Lucas and Steve Jobs. Eight years ago Poor headed off to get a Ph.D. at MIT’s Media Lab. His thesis was based on algorithms that describe how a large number of independent devices could beam data to one another, an approach called mesh networking. Typical wireless networks merely adopted the wired approach of connecting one device to just one other. Instead, Poor imagined tiny radios blasting out their message to anything within earshot. The broadcasts had to be strong enough to be heard 200 feet away, but not so overpowering as to drain battery life. “If every table has a device, you don’t want them to all shout,” Poor says.
Bluetooth, a popular protocol for short-range networking, zips along at up to a megabit per second, but it bogs down when more than eight devices are linked up. Poor took a lead role in creating a rival standard called Zigbee, which moves data only one-fourth as fast as Bluetooth but can handle hundreds of devices at once. Zigbee devices are designed to last five years on a pair of AA batteries. With Zigbee in place, Ember began selling chips to others and building nodes that could send and receive data.
Cold-storage-device maker Sensitech attached Ember nodes to temperature gauges on refrigerated trucks. When fish from Boston reach Newark, a clerk can–without even cracking open the bay door–wave an electronic reader and learn whether the fish got too warm en route. A portfolio of two dozen Ember-linked wireless gadgets for controlling a home’s lights, temperature and entertainment gear is to debut in September, from Control4 of Salt Lake City.
Ember has 50 employees and 120 customers. It has raised $28 million and expects to raise more by summer’s end. Poor has removed himself from day-to-day matters, bringing in a CEO. “I did a ‘founder-ectomy,'” he says proudly. “I want Ember to be a big company. That means real capitalization, real growth to create large quantities of nodes. That means professional management.” Poor, meantime, listens for what billions of devices will say.
