RuBee

Summary

I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A device at the door monitors for the presence of a tag; when the tag is detected it plays an audio clip. Because this is the government, the device in question is highly specialized, fantastically expensive, and says "government cell phone" even though most of the phones in question are personal devices. Look, they already did the recording, they're not changing it now! One of the things that I love is weird little wireless networks. Long ago I wrote about ANT+, for example, a failed personal area network standard designed mostly around fitness applications. There's tons of these, and they have a lot of similarities---so it's fun to think about the protocols that went down a completely different path. It's even better, of course, if the protocol is obscure outside of an important niche. And a terrible website, too? What more could I ask for. The DoE's cell-phone nagging boxes, and an array of related but more critical applications, rely on an unusual personal area networking protocol called RuBee. RuBee is a product of Visible Assets Inc., or VAI, founded in 2004 by John K. Stevens. Stevens seems a somewhat improbable founder, with a background in biophysics and eye health, but he's a repeat entrepreneur. He's particularly fond of companies called Visible: he founded Visible Assets after his successful tenure as CEO of Visible Genetics. Visible Genetics was an early innovator in DNA sequencing, and still provides a specialty laboratory service that sequences samples of HIV in order to detect vulnerabilities to antiretroviral medications. Clinical trials in the early 2000s exposed Visible Genetics to one of the more frustrating parts of health care logistic...