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/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Explore more of Starbucks at Starbucks.com. http://www.starbucks.com/default.asp?ci=1015 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Apple Co-Founder Creates Electronic ID Tags July 21, 2003 By JOHN MARKOFF SAN FRANCISCO, July 20 - The co-founder of Apple Computer, Stephen Wozniak, recalls that it began with a series of lost dogs - a runaway husky, a roving Shar-Pei, a wayward bichon frisé. The problem led inexorably to a Wozniak solution: wireless location-monitoring technology that would use electronic tags to help people keep track of their animals, children or property. Now Mr. Wozniak, whose new company, Wheels of Zeus, has been operating in Silicon Valley stealth mode for 18 months, is ready to talk about the technology. This week the company - whose name is derived from the Woz in Wozniak - plans to announce its formal management structure. Its investors are: Mobius Venture Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Palo Alto Investors. While the company is not ready to identify the manufacturers, Wheels of Zeus says it has initial agreements with two large American makers of consumer electronics to produce the first commercial systems based on its technology, which is called WozNet. The chief operating officer, Rich Rifredi, said the first products were planned for introduction next year . In an interview last week in Wheels of Zeus's offices in Los Gatos, Calif., which are nondescript except for his Hummer parked out front, Mr. Wozniak described WozNet as a simple and inexpensive wireless network that uses radio signals and global positioning satellite data to keep track of a cluster of inexpensive tags within a one- or two-mile radius of each base station. WozNet, he said, will include a home-base station that has the ability to track the location of dozens or even hundreds of small wireless devices that can be attached to people, pets or property. The tags - expected to cost less than $25 each to produce - will be able to generate alerts, notifying the owner by phone or e-mail message when a child arrives at school, a dog leaves the yard or a car leaves the parking lot. "We started out with the idea of a product to keep track of stuff," said Mr. Wozniak, the 52-year-old engineer who was the technical brains behind the first Apple computer in 1976. "We ended up inventing a new class of wireless network." There may be other potential applications for the low-speed data system, like text messaging, Mr. Wozniak said, as well as other uses that he declined to describe. In addition to Mr. Wozniak, who is the chairman and chief executive, the company's notables include Frank Canova, who designed hand-held products at both Palm Computing and I.B.M. Wheels of Zeus, which has 17 employees, hopes that its low-power network will fit comfortably among other wireless technologies, including the cheap radio-frequency I.D. tags that are used in stores and factories, and the more expensive and higher speed Wi-Fi and cellular data networks. While other wireless data networks strive for high speed, Mr. Wozniak's network, which has data rates of no more than 20,000 bits a second, has been designed to transmit a very small amount of digital information through even radio-busy environments that are subject to interference. All of the components of WozNet will be capable of receiving location information from global positioning system satellites. Because the tags can report their location whether they are close to their home-base station or a neighbor's, the company is hoping to seed Silicon Valley and other large suburban communities with enough base stations to make it possible to easily track objects, even when they move outside the range of the owner's station. Analysts said that Wheels of Zeus was attempting a more ambitious approach than the G.P.S.-pager watch that is now on the market. "The idea has a lot of merit, particularly from the standpoint of parents and keeping track of children," said Tim Bajarin, a consumer electronics industry analyst who is president of Creative Strategies in Campbell, Calif. "Where this is more tricky is with respect to the privacy issue and personal tracking." The company says that because the network is voluntary, and will employ encryption that keeps unauthorized users from monitoring someone else's WozNet activities, privacy and surveillance concerns are not relevant. (If neighborhoods chose to operate a series of base stations in a "community watch" system, the encryption software could be adjusted to allow that.) WozNet will use the same 900-megahertz unlicensed radio spectrum now used by portable phones. The power of the network comes in the ability of any tag to communicate with any base station that may come within range. Thus the network could grow organically if it became commercially popular. Although the company would not disclose technical details and said that some of its network communications software remained unfinished, a person with detailed knowledge of the development effort said that Mr. Wozniak's role had in some ways paralleled his earlier work at Apple Computer. The original Apple personal computer succeeded because Mr. Wozniak was able to come up with innovative but simple ideas for the display of graphics and for the crucial disk controller for the Apple II. In the new company Mr. Wozniak has helped to adapt an inexpensive commercial G.P.S. chip, using it both for receiving location information and communicating over the wireless network. "He played a huge role in defining the parameters that had to be in the product such as battery life, size, cost and ease of use," said Greg Galanos, a partner at Mobius Venture Capital. Mr. Wozniak, who had little involvement in Apple after being seriously injured in a 1981 plane crash, founded Cloud 9 in 1985. That company developed a powerful consumer-electronics remote control device, but Cloud 9 was not commercially successful. After folding the company in 1988, Mr. Wozniak worked as a schoolteacher - primarily fifth grade - and has been involved in community affairs. He said that he would have returned to the Valley's start-up culture sooner, but that he had enjoyed teaching tremendously during the first half of the 1990's. "Then I watched the Internet start-up years, but my interest is more towards hardware," he said. "I was itching a little for another start-up experience. Also, it was easy to laugh and enjoy the ideas that the first few of us were coming up with, this time." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21ZEUS.html?ex=1059838281&ei=1&en=e2ce828bb68a9b3a --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! 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