How Much is Riding on Wi-Fi?

nexex writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's John Cook explores the current flood of money on wireless networking startups and if they could be heading towards another dotcom bubble. Interesting tidbits include, ;More than 60 Wi-Fi start-ups have raised more than $650 million in the past two years, according to VentureWire. Last quarter, there was more money invested into wireless technologies than networking and enterprise software.'" The article's got some good commentary on grassroots-founded tech trends vs. investment-backed tech trends, and tries to explain why wi-fi has caught on so well.

Comments

Centrino

[Perdo]

Welcome to Intel, where if your laptop has a pentuim-M, an intel chipset and an Intel 802.11b card, you can call your laptop a Centrino. Oh, don't tell anyone that Apple has had the same functionality for three years, otherwise people would know we are not doing anything new, which we are!

For instance the new Pentium-M is an all new from the ground up processor that at 1.6 Ghz, outperforms the Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz. The Pentuim 4 is still faster than the Athlon though, becuase it has a higher clockspeed. Oh, and the Pentium-M is a Pentium III using a Pentium 4 bus and 1 mb of L2 Cache.

So, the Centrino is all new, using three year old technology pioneered by Apple and using a 4 year old processor that still manages to work over our all new Pentium 4.

At least the chipset is still good, just like Extreme(ly bad) graphics, Granite Bay with support for 8x AGP^H^H^H^H^H 4x AGP and the great i820 with a super reliable memory translator hub.

Umm....

OK! we have hotspots all over the world to use your brand new laptop with! Why, in China, an emerging market that we have invested billions in, there are 6 hotspots already! One for every 200,000,000 people...

OK, nevermind.. Centrino is just a PR campaign to sell the same warmed over crap we have been pushing for the last 5 years. Now shut up and buy it, were almost a monopoly again and we are not going to take your consumer crap when we have the market in a strangle hold again.

It will be just like the good old days when you all forked over $2000 for our latest steaming silicon turd.