Smart Carpet Technology to be Featured in Tech Mus
San Jose, CA, November 8, 2005 8, 2005--Echelon Corporation has announced that its technology will be featured in The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California starting in February 2006.
Echelon is one of the premier recipients of The Tech Museum's new INNY Award, bestowed upon innovations that will impact people's lives. The company received this honor because of its demonstration of a ubiquitous embedded control network embodied by "smart" carpet at DEMOfall 2005 in September.
"The Tech seeks to provide visitors with unique museum experiences that will encourage them to become the next generation of innovators," said Phil Lindsey, Tech Museum Vice President of Exhibits and Programs. "We're truly excited to incorporate INNY-award winning products into the EnCounters, and start conversations with our visitors about technologies that make significant impacts on our lives."
The "smart" carpet demonstration at DEMOfall integrated sensors equipped with Echelon's technology with regular household carpeting in order to demonstrate one of the thousands of possibilities of incorporating technology into everyday objects. The resulting "smart" carpet was able to provide a wide array of information, such as detecting occupancy in case of a fire, and then send this information in the form of an alarm notification over the Internet or to a cell phone via standard SMS phone messaging.
Echelon's technologies will be displayed at special areas within The Tech that offer hands-on, facilitated experiences with the newest technologies that can have a significant impact on all our lives. Echelon's offering will feature interactions between common household things like carpeting, lamps and security systems; all combined in a network. In order to engage the imaginations of an expected 350,000 visitors, the demo will use the Internet, communications over electrical lines, and web browsers to allow children (and adults) to experience the control network, including turning on and off lights and security systems over the Internet.
"We are very proud to be a recipient of this first ever INNY Award and be invited to showcase our technology at The Tech," said Ken Oshman, Echelon's chairman and CEO. "The Tech is a great resource for the city of San Jose and Silicon Valley and is truly a mind-expanding experience for the many children, and adults, that visit every year. We're very excited to see how kids react to the world of control networks."
About Echelon Corporation
Echelon Corporation (NASDAQ:ELON) is a pioneer and world leader in control networking -- networks that connect machines and other electronic devices -- for the purpose of sensing, monitoring and controlling the world around us. Echelon's LonWorks(R) platform for control networking was released in 1990 and has become a worldwide standard in the building, industrial, transportation, and home automation markets. Launched in 2003, Echelon's Networked Energy Services system is an open, extensible, advanced metering infrastructure that can bring benefits to every aspect of a utility's operation, from metering and customer services to distribution operations and value-added business. In 2005 Echelon released the world's first embedded control network infrastructure, the Pyxos(TM) platform, extending the benefits of networking inside of machines to the sensors and actuators that make them function.
