IDF San Francisco
August 19-21, 2008
Moscone Center
San Francisco, CA  

7th PHY Registration Event
Aug 25-28, 2008
Agilent Labs
Colorado Springs, CO  

IEEE International Conference on Ultra Wideband
Speaker: Industry Keynote: Stephen Wood
September 10-12, 2008
Hannover, Germany  

13th Platform Interoperability Certification Event
September 16 -19, 2008
Santa Clara Biltmore
Santa Clara, CA  

Wireless China 2008
Wireless China Industry Summit
September 17-18, 2008
Landmark Hotel & Towers
Beijing, China  

IDF Taipei
October 20-21, 2008
TICC
Taipei, Taiwan  

20th WiMedia Member Meeting (MEMBERS ONLY)
October 21-23, 2008
WiMedia Open House – October 22 (OPEN TO PUBLIC)
JW Marriott Hotel Seoul
Seoul, South Korea  

Dear WiMedia Members,

As WiMedia continues to gain traction, we’d like to update you on some of the Board’s activities this past quarter.

The Walter Project
WiMedia has begun working with a new project funded by the European Commission. The Wireless Alliance for Testing Experiment and Research (WALTER) is developing a general-purpose broadband wireless test-bed to address the needs of research, industry and regulators. Its initial application will be to develop this capability for the WiMedia UWB MAC and PHY. Several WiMedia members are also members of this Alliance and WiMedia is investigating how we might align our efforts to help both organizations.

Final Deliverables
On July 15th, 2008, the WiMedia Board of Directors approved the Spectrum Extensions Release as a Final Deliverable.  This release offers implementers the ability to use additional band combinations to achieve greater spectral agility and offers additional tools for use in meeting varied regulatory requirements.  Many thanks to all of those in the TSC and the technical working groups for their dedication and hard work.

What are the three priorities you're working on as the VP of Business Development for WiMedia?
Kristine: The three key areas I am focusing on for WiMedia are our membership, growth of the WiMedia roadmap and creation of a business model for WiMedia.  The membership activities include retention of members and recruiting new members; the roadmap responsibilities include maintenance of the roadmap, communication of the roadmap while maintaining focus on near-term and long-term goals; and the business model activities include establishing how WiMedia maintains status as a not-for-profit organization while generating sufficient revenue to maintain the Alliance. 

What retention and recruitment marketing efforts will you focus on this year?
Kristine: The WiMedia membership goal is to provide value to the members we have now and to grow our membership numbers.  Now that we have completed the Frisco MRD my hope is that many handset vendors will want to come and work with WiMedia to help develop the Low Power portion of the Frisco release.  This will be a great opportunity for them to share their technical expertise for using UWB in the mobile market.

Please describe the importance and value of the roadmap.
Kristine: “If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there” wrote Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.  Without a marketing roadmap organizations appear to be stagnant, unfocused and not growing.  The current goals for WiMedia, having just formed the new Roadmapping Task Group, are to analyze the markets that we currently enjoy and look at new markets that we would like to participate in and communicate this to our membership and the OEM/ODMs.  From there we can better understand what we must include in our technology in order to meet the growth goals for those markets and communicate it. I encourage anybody who is interested in helping to develop our roadmap to join the roadmap task group.
The near-term goals for now are to grow our market share and increase consumer awareness of what value WiMedia adds for them.  We want consumers to say "I want one of those!"

Marketing Working Group Update
As usual the MWG pursued a busy agenda, working for six sessions over a two-day period. Some of the highlights of the meetings are summarized below.

Market Requirements Documents. The Frisco MRD was approved. This MRD covers several extensions to the current specifications, including a 1Gbps data rate extension, implementation of Detect and Avoid (DAA) capability, and a low-power extension for mobile applications. Work is also ongoing on the IP Networking and Video Study Group (VSG) MRDs.

Press. We welcomed our new PR firm, Cain Communications, at the meeting. Already we are beginning to see more mentions by the press and analyst community. Much discussion revolved around the public face of WiMedia, the marketing director's report outlined the problems we face and a number of actions being taken to turn around the situation. In addition to increasing the number of interviews conducted and producing a series of white papers and other collateral, our public website is being updated to provide more information about the growing momentum behind WiMedia. Incisor magazine was also onsite, taping video interviews with Alliance members for an upcoming WiMedia special edition.

CES. Discussions about the 2009 show continued and we resolved to push ahead with the most exciting exhibit option wherein we create actual working environments showing WiMedia technology in action.
 
Regulatory. This is a very dynamic area at the moment with various regions adopting regulations to allow the use of WiMedia frequency bands. To keep our membership informed of the latest information we decided to add a regulatory chart to the WiMedia website. There is a link to the chart on the WiMedia home page and in the Resources tab:  (http://www.wimedia.org/en/resources/index.asp?id=res).
 
Roadmap. The MWG has been chartered by the board to create and maintain the roadmap for WiMedia's future. At the meeting we set up a Task Group to spearhead this activity and outlined a charter, along with other tasks ahead.

Wireless USB. We brainstormed a number of possible ways in which we can work with the USB-IF to help speed adoption of the W-USB technology. We will be supporting W-USB at the forthcoming IDF in San Francisco and have set up communications channels to keep each other better informed in the future.

Bluetooth. The BT sub-committee reported on current status with the Bluetooth SIG and discussed how we can position ourselves to respond to inquiries related to the Seattle release. Since a lot of the SIG activity is only visible to SIG members subject to NDA we are somewhat limited in what we can and cannot say. However WMA members are continuing to press toward adoption of the UWB high-speed spec.

Full MWG presentation and meeting minutes of the meetings are available to members via the WiMedia portal.
MWG Presentation: http://www.wimedia.org/imwp/download.asp?ContentID=13536
6/17 Meeting Minutes: http://www.wimedia.org/imwp/download.asp?ContentID=13540
6/18 Meeting Minutes: http://www.wimedia.org/imwp/download.asp?ContentID=13541

Below is a link to the WiMedia website Photo Gallery for the photos from the event
http://www.wimedia.org/en/gallery/2008_06_MM-Frisco/gallery.asp

Ultrawideband in multimedia handsets UWB holds promise for wirelessly connecting peripherals once reserved for wired connections
EE Times, 6/26/2008
By Mark Moore, Artimi http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208800618  

Read the complete announcements by going to: http://www.wimedia.org/en/events/memberrel.asp