About Us...

Who's behind Moteware? Started by a group of current and former graduate students at the University of California, our founders have deployed some of the largest sensornets, designed some popular sensor platforms, and written some widely-used operating system, networking, and storage software for sensornets.

Why was Moteware started? Moteware was started to disseminate open-source hardware, software, and courseware developed at the University of California by our founders. We realized that traditional business models and especially venture-funded business models do not serve academic and industrial researchers, early-stage technology developers, and low-volume customers very well. Moteware was started because the company's founders became frustrated at a pattern they saw repeated over-and-over: promising technology gets commercialized and leaves behind the research community that gave it birth. Perhaps this is a very natural path for technology to take as it finds its place in the world. Unfortunately, it's the research community that suffers. This seems unfair to us.

Why is this a problem? As technologies get commercialized, they become increasingly closed, products become highly integrated and narrower in scope, companies focus on large (or potentially large) markets, and venture investors demand big bets and rapid growth. Researchers, in contrast, require open technologies that provide the freedom to tinker, modular systems that allow only certain components to be improved while other components are leveraged from prior work, cutting-edge or costly technologies for which a (potentially) large market does not (yet) exist, and freedom to explore ideas ahead of market forces and economic justifications.

What's Moteware doing about it? Our goal is to make research-enabling platform technologies broadly available so that researchers can design, deploy, and evaluate new wireless, networked, and embedded sensor systems and applications. Our products are open-sourced, our operations are lean, and our metric for success is impact. Our goal is to design, build, and disseminate research-enabling research that accelerates innovation.