For more information visit us online at http://www.a7eng.com or contact sales@a7eng.com.

About A7 Engineering
A7 Engineering is a leading supplier of connectivity and interoperability solutions for the embedded marketplace. A7 offers a team of experts with a proven track record in consulting and engineering, a portfolio of innovative products, and unmatched Bluetooth and Windows Embedded expertise.

For more information please contact research@a7eng.com.

About A7 Engineering
A7 Engineering is an engineering and design firm specializing in connectivity and interoperability solutions for the embedded marketplace. A7 provides services ranging from engineering assistance to custom features and complete designs. A7's EmbeddedBlue line of products provide industry leading simplicity in an affordable, standardized, and easy to integrate wireless solution across 8, 16, and 32 bit systems.

About A7 Engineering
A7 Engineering is an engineering and design firm specializing in connectivity and interoperability solutions for the embedded marketplace. A7 provides services ranging from engineering assistance to custom features and complete designs. A7's EmbeddedBlue line of products provide industry leading simplicity in an affordable, standardized, and easy to integrate wireless solution across 8, 16, and 32 bit systems.

About Rabbit Semiconductor
Rabbit Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company specializing in high-performance microprocessors and development tools for embedded control, communications, and Ethernet connectivity. The industry award-winning RabbitCore™ line of microprocessor core modules was first introduced in 2001. Rabbit Semiconductor offers customers a complete embedded design system, including low-cost development kits and comprehensive technical support.

Bryan Hall, CTO of A7 commented, "We found that our customers had significant questions about Bluetooth technology that were difficult to answer in more static documentation like a manual or an FAQ. Wireless technology is evolving rapidly and we want to put information out to customers quickly to help them make sense of it all. I think that we found the right medium for this with the blog." He added, "Our response to the recent reports of Bluetooth security flaws is an example of the value of this format. A number of media sources put quite a bit of misleading information out there and we wanted to add a more knowledgeable voice to the conversation."

About A7 Engineering
A7 Engineering is an engineering and design firm specializing in connectivity and interoperability solutions for the embedded marketplace. A7 provides services ranging from engineering assistance to custom features and complete designs. A7's EmbeddedBlue line of products provide industry leading simplicity in an affordable, standardized, and easy to integrate wireless solution across 8, 16, and 32 bit systems.

A7 Engineering designs smart solutions for smart devices

A7 Engineering (A7) is a company that found its way to market through a group of engineers deciding to pool their expertise in embedded engineering and education. A7 is privately held and was incorporated in early 2002 with a focus on Windows Embedded professional engineering services and training. “From the beginning our philosophy has been to help our customers to help themselves. Out of this basic idea has grown a suite of highly interconnected offerings including training to get customer staff up to speed on new technology, engineering services to assist with implementation, and OEM products to simplify the development process so that new designs can be brought to market more quickly.” said A7’s CEO Randy W. Moore.

Incisor visited the company’s offices in Poway (just North of San Diego), and met with Chief Executive Officer Randy W. Moore, Chief Technical Officer Bryan Hall (ex-Widcomm) and Director of Engineering Larry Mittag.

A7 is highly focused on Windows Embedded as evidenced by its engineering services and training offerings. Software engineers are trained from a global customer base with the majority of training focused on Windows CE, including Pocket PC and Smartphone. Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm number amongst its clients. This training activity provides A7 with unique insight to the thinking and goals of its customers, enabling the creation of innovative solutions to their problems.

Since its inception the business has grown quickly allowing A7 to develop a broad vision for its OEM products. “A7 is a Microsoft Windows Embedded Partner and we are deeply involved in the Windows Mobile world,” said Moore. “We have extensive knowledge of Microsoft’s .Net strategy and it has become a core theme for us.” A7 firmly believes that most long-term advances will be in the area of web services. “The convergence of three areas – web services, embedded systems, and desktop/mobile computing – is unquestionably one of the most important sectors, and it is happening now. With our extensive Windows Embedded experience, A7 is in a unique position to take full advantage of the opportunities that this technology shift presents” said Moore.

With its core philosophy in mind A7’s OEM products are focused on solving real world problems for its customers. “While the full power of the Microsoft .Net strategy will not be realized until the release of Longhorn (the next version of Windows), with EmbeddedBlue we have already begun to release products centred on connectivity to low cost devices”, said Hall. The first few Bluetooth products released by A7 are designed to interface seamlessly with low cost microcontrollers such as the Microchip PIC, ZWorld Rabbit, and Parallax Basic Stamp. Hall went on to say, “The current generation of EmbeddedBlue designs are just the tip of the iceberg for A7, but they illustrate the basic goal of solving complex problems for our customers. By fully embedding the Bluetooth stack into our modules and providing detailed connectivity samples for PCs, PDAs, and cell phones, our customers are able to get their designs up and running in hours rather than weeks or months.”

When asked about the initial choice of Bluetooth technology to solve these connectivity issues, Moore said “The U.S. has been lagging behind the rest of the world in adopting Bluetooth, but from our early-market experience we knew that Bluetooth would be big. We were servicing customers outside of the U.S. that were working with Bluetooth and could see clear solutions to their problems.” He went on to say, “Bluetooth provides plenty of scope for A7 to add value for clients due to its complexity. Other standards, such as ZigBee and RFID are by their nature simpler, with less scope for us. We are more interested in the prospects for Wireless USB, 802.11, and - later - UWB. As co-existence between wireless technologies becomes more commonplace, we have plenty of scope to work on interoperability.”

Because it offers OEM solutions that can be integrated with minimal engineering costs, A7 often deals with customers shipping products in the hundreds or low thousands of units. These types of products operate on a very different economic scale than high volume Bluetooth devices and therefore present unique challenges. One problem singled out by Moore is the expense of certification. “The costs are the same for a small company designing a low volume product as for a major manufacturer creating a cell phone. We have customers that will develop niche products with a total development budget of less than $200,000. At current levels Bluetooth certification will use up 10 – 15% of that pretty easily and can drive customers to proprietary RF solutions even though Bluetooth technically is a better choice.”

As is often the case, A7’s physical location was determined as much by the roots of its founders as any other factor. That said, the company feels that California still has plenty to offer IT companies, and singles out its own, Southern-Californian base as being at the heart of a wireless centre of excellence. Moore commented, “With companies such as Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Silicon Wave operating out of San Diego, there is a very valuable pool of wireless engineering excellence in this area.” That said, Moore feels that traditional factors relating to location are changing. “The electronic age means that 90% or more of our business is done online. Those customers that don’t come to us from partner recommendations have normally found us on the web.”

A7 was founded by a team of talented people working towards a common goal and that philosophy has stuck with the business. This was confirmed by Moore, who concluded ‘When I look at A7 I believe that Neil Simon was describing our team with his definition of talent - "Talent is the gift plus the passion - a desire to succeed so intense that no force on earth can stop it."’

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For further information:

A7 Engineering - http://www.a7eng.com

Bluetooth® Wireless Technology Shipments Hit Two Million a Week

08-Jun-2004 | Bluetooth SIG

From the 2004 Wireless Connectivity show in Amsterdam, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) today announced that Bluetooth wireless technology has reached yet another milestone – shipments of products with the technology now exceed two million units per week worldwide. This comes less than nine months after surpassing the one million per week mark with mobile phones, PDAs, notebooks and mobile accessories being the key drivers for the continued surge in shipments.

"Bluetooth wireless technology is definitively moving into the consumer mainstream with more than 150 million units shipped so far and shipments now running at more than two million units a week,” said Stuart Carlaw, senior Bluetooth analyst with IMS Research.

The SIG today also announced the launch of a new prototype specification named “Enhanced Data Rate” (EDR). The new specification will provide faster data transmissions and improve the user experience through higher transmission speeds and even lower power consumption, providing a platform for data transfer speeds of up to three times current levels. The new specification also provides improved facilities to use several functions or devices simultaneously, due to more available bandwidth. This will further enhance the multi-tasking possibilities when using devices built with the wireless technology. The lower power consumption will enable a new generation of Bluetooth devices to last up to twice the current operating time. EDR is backwards compatible with the previous specifications. The Bluetooth SIG expects the EDR specification to be finalized in fall 2004, with products based upon the specification available in 2005.

“We at the SIG are constantly talking to our members about how we can continue to drive up adoption rates. In recent months, what we’ve seen has been phenomenal. The market is now embracing the technology and consumers are developing creative platforms on which to fully exploit the technology with many new applications that allow users to wirelessly connect and transfer information between devices, at work, at home or in their car,” said Anders Edlund, Marketing Director of the Bluetooth SIG. “People are now seeing that Bluetooth wireless technology is not a geeky toy or a corporate luxury, but rather the only short-range, global standard for linking wireless products in a convenient and easy to use way.”

“Bluetooth has become a key component of our mobile environment in a short period of time,” said Bruce Hawver, vice president and general manager of companion products for Motorola’s Personal Communications Sector. “Twelve months ago Bluetooth was a periphery to our core proposition, but now it’s becoming an essential component. Today Bluetooth can be found in a rapidly increasing number of mobile phones as well as in many new exciting accessories ranging from motorcycle helmets to car kits to stereo speakers.”

To better assist manufacturers in deploying the technology in real products, the SIG has established a new policy for finalizing specifications requiring three interoperable prototypes to be demonstrated at Bluetooth SIG test events before a new specification is adopted. By following this new robust procedure, the Bluetooth SIG expects to virtually eliminate the risk for interoperability issues in early devices built on new versions of Bluetooth specifications.

About the Bluetooth SIG, Inc.
Bluetooth(R) wireless technology is revolutionizing the personal connectivity market by providing freedom from wired connections. It is a specification for a small-form factor, low-cost radio solution providing links between mobile computers, mobile phones, automobiles and other mobile devices, and connectivity to the Internet. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), comprised of leaders in the telecommunications, computing, automotive and network industries, is driving development of the technology and bringing it to market. The Bluetooth SIG includes promoter group companies Agere, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia and Toshiba, and thousands of Associate and Adopter member companies. The Bluetooth SIG, Inc. headquarters are located in Overland Park, Kansas, U.S.A. For more information please visit www.bluetooth.com.

The Bluetooth word mark and logo are registered trademarks and are owned by the Bluetooth SIG, Inc.