Wireless Grids Wants to Hook You Up

The startup may have invented the holy grail of connectivity: a program that lets users link all of their content and devices—and share them with friends

by Jennifer L. Schenker

You might think kids in a college dorm could perform any digital feat imaginable, but even for the young and digitally adept there are limits. A student can't, for example, sit on a sofa in the common room, whip out an Apple (AAPL) iPhone, use it to browse a stash of photos on the computer in another room, and then drag and drop them over to a big-screen TV so everyone can look at them together.

The obstacle is this: Electronic gizmos like computers, mobile phones, and TVs weren't designed to share content with each other, and the networks they run on don't speak a common language.

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A Syracuse (N.Y.) startup called Wireless Grids intends to change that with software designed to break down the walls between different networks and devices. The technology behind Wireless Grids was developed with the aid of more than $2 million in U.S. government grant money from the National Science Foundation and about $500,000 in funding and research support from U.S. networking gearmakers Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Novell (NOVL), Britain's BT (BT), Japan's Hitachi (HIT), and Finland's Nokia (NOK). U.S. chipmaker Intel (INTC) is considering collaborating with Wireless Grids, while Telecom New Zealand (NZT) is evaluating the technology for use in homes.

The concept is that everyone should easily be able to access all of their own content, whether it is stored on a phone, a computer, or a personal video recorder. And users should be able to swap content among devices regardless of where those devices are located in the world. Even more radically, Wireless Grids says users should have the power to specify individuals with whom they'd like to share—and to decide who gets access to what. For this purpose, Wireless Grids says it has built in security measures that are all but hacker-proof.

Any device that can link to the Internet can download Wireless Grids' software, which will work across all types of networks or computer operating systems. Once the software is loaded, a menu pops up asking which things you'd like to share. The initial version allows users to share software files as well as computers, speakers, printers, cameras, and screens. Users click on an icon and select which files and devices they want to make available. The other parties can be located anywhere, as long as their devices also have the software loaded.

Beginning in January, 40 students in a dorm at New York's Syracuse University will test-drive the technology. As devices are loaded with the software and come online, the content tagged for sharing will become available in a kind of virtual repository that designated members can access inside or outside of the dorm. In theory, at least, copyright won't be an issue because the available files won't actually move from one device to another.

The first customer for this software is Syracuse itself, which helped develop the technology along with five other universities including MIT. If all goes well, Wireless Grids' software will be embedded in next-generation wireless devices by late next year. It will also be introduced into homes via new broadband offerings from phone companies, says Wireless Grids CEO Lee McKnight, a Syracuse University professor who worked with Internet pioneer Dave Clark on Internet economics and security issues in the early days of the Web.