I do a bit of driving around the San Francisco Bay area visiting clients. When I’m on the road, I love to listen to the Software Engineering Radio podcast. Their most recent podcast, Episode 56: Sensor Networks, is very interesting and discusses cool topics like how to track containers (as they travel on ships/trains/trucks), while monitoring events, measuring environmental conditions, and transmitting data wirelessly via ZigBee, GSM, and Satellite networks. They discuss power considerations, embedded system design, and other interesting aspects of this application. They also discuss the “Internet of Things” and how to track information about anything in a distributed system of databases and communicate that information with directories and web services.