ZigBee Alliance Celebrates Anniversary Of Ratified Specification By Surpassing 200 Member Mark; CES 2006 To Feature ZigBee Pavilion, 25 Member Companies And Session With Chairman Bob Heile

16-Dec-05

The ZigBeeô Alliance, an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard, has celebrated the first anniversary of the launch of the global interoperable ZigBee specification. Since announcing the ratified specification in December 2004, the Alliance has nearly doubled its membership, surpassing 200 members and expanded its presence to 24 countries spanning six continents. OEMs and end-product manufacturers now represent 30 percent of the global membership. In the last year, the ZigBee Alliance announced the availability of six ZigBee network-compliant platforms and made the specification publicly available to product manufacturers, OEMs, universities, research institutions and software developers to review the technical details of the specification in its entirety. In the six months since the public availability of the specification, nearly 15,000 download requests have been processed. Adding to the list of highlights, a sold-out crowd attended ZigBee's inaugural ZigBee Developer's Conference and ZigBee was honored as the ""Best Technology of the Year"" for making the automated home a reality at the Connected@Home Conference. ""2005 has been an outstanding year for the ZigBee Alliance and ZigBee technology,"" said Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance. ""Our membership has made significant progress in making reliable automation, monitoring and control products a reality. As the Alliance continues to educate and shape the global market, our members will be delivering even more ZigBee devices to market in 2006. In fact, some of these technologies have already been demonstrated at our recent member meetings, and will be on display at CES."" The ZigBee Alliance will have a significant presence at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, January 5-8 with the ZigBee Alliance Pavilion (#70622) featuring Cambridge Consultants, Chipcon, Ember, Integration Associates, Jennic, LS Research, and Samsung. In addition, Analog Devices, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Honeywell, Motorola, Philips and Texas Instruments among others, will be featuring ZigBee technology in their respective booths, bringing the number of ZigBee Alliance member companies that will be represented at CES to more than 25. On January 5, Heile will participate in Session HN6, ""The Long and Short of Networking Technologies,"" focused on long-range and short-range networking solutions including WiFi, WiMax, Ultra-Wideband, MoCA, Coax, Powerline and ZigBee. The session will examine their differences, the products they support, the environments they work best in, and the opportunities, content and service providers feel they offer.

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