Friday, October 10, 2008

Emfrasys hopes to bring Internet 0 home to market

By Jim Kozubek, Special to Mass High Tech

Emfrasys Inc., a startup with a home-based office in Windham, N.H., has been formed in an effort to seek commercial applications for Internet 0, a set of MIT technologies that involve the slow-rate transport of information packets on a network of varied devices within a home or business.

CEO Ravi Periasamy registered the company in Delaware in August and said he will seek $4 million to $6 million in venture capital within 90 days. He is a former vice president of software and solutions for Canada-based PMC-Sierra Inc., a company that makes semiconductor chips for wireless communication.

Periasamy said he wants to site his company someplace between Andover and Cambridge, but has not ruled out New Hampshire for its headquarters.

MIT Center for Bits and Atoms director Neil Gershenfeld, along with Raffi Krikorian and Danny Cohen, introduced the concept of Internet 0 in a September 2004 article in Scientific American titled “The Internet of Things,” a vision of assigning Internet protocol addresses to devices and setting up a network.  

Unlike a network that sends heavy streams of large packet files and is indicative of today’s Internet and web, Internet 0 takes an alternative approach, working with small packet transfers at slower rates. 

Internet 0 became an MIT research program focusing on the connection of devices, appliances, electronics and any power-driven device in a building to the Internet at an affordable cost. It gained financial and researcher support from France-based Schneider Electric SA, Cisco Systems Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Todd Snide and David Kopp, senior system architects at Schneider Electric’s North Andover facility, had a direct role in R&D, and Kopp said Internet 0 could find applications in industrial, building, residential and aerospace sectors.

Snide said one application, a wireless home automation network, could make use of sensors and microprocessors in switches to control everything from lighting and heating to electronics and security from a single keypad or even a cell phone.

Smart houses and commercial buildings could make use of software to regulate a network with routed communication on radio frequency or existing powerline carriers, he said.

“We are sending only several hundred kilobits per second, a data rate that is tiny for purposes of command and control,” Snide said. “We are giving up fast data and reducing it to software and nodes.”

 Periasamy said he will seek a licensing application and complete a business plan within the month to determine the course of product development, markets, partnerships and routes to secure investment.

Emfrasys would not be the first company in building automation. Honeywell International Inc., Lutron Electronics Inc., Leviton Manufacturing and Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence Inc. have automation systems on the market, but many can run into the thousands of dollars.

Kopp said Internet 0 technology is reducing costs for automation, with nodes costing around $1.50 and automation for a single room now achievable for a cost in the “tens of dollars.”

Walter Erikson, owner of Merrimack, N.H.-based energy consultancy Waste of Energy Inc., said adoption of existing systems has been impeded by their inability to intercommunicate, but that integrators have found makeshift routes to connect using open protocol codes. Kopp said Internet 0 is Internet protocol-based, eliminating barriers to connecting an Ethernet network to the web, and therefore reducing costs. 

“Internet 0 developed a flexible medium to connect these things,” Emfrasys’ Periasamy agreed.

Jim Kozubek is a freelance writer in Portsmouth, N.H.