Dean FledderjohnGeneral Manager, M2M Division, Kyocera

It may be difficult to imagine two things more unrelated than Dean Fledderjohn's role as Kyocera's telematics evangelist and his long-rooted passion for all things equestrian. Perhaps you should try harder to imagine it, though, because as soon as Fledderjohn's machine-to-machine capsule technology is ready, the first thing it's going into is the Fledderjohn family's six-year-old paint horse, Dollie.

Fledderjohn doesn't just imagine Dollie with a RFID tag; he envisions a world where every poodle, briefcase, car and bicycle is transmitting over the cellular and PCS frequencies, becoming radio presences on wide area CDMA networks just like his mobile phone.

It's not that telematics, or machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, is a new idea. The industry for years has been talking about wireless meter readings, refrigerators reading expiration dates and compiling grocery lists, and mobile package tracking. Many of those ideas never got beyond their initial hype, but Fledderjohn said it's a mistake to write them off completely.

“Some of these ideas that seemed really crazy a few years back, now seem very possible,” Fledderjohn said. “A lot of things will be connected in the future that we never imagined would be connected. In fact, those connections will become so commonplace they'll fade into the background.”

Before you write Fledderjohn off as just another spewer of hype, realize that he has the credentials to back up his claim. He's general manager for Kyocera's M2M division and is responsible for designing that company's first CDMA M2M module. Kyocera is starting small and in the vertical markets: a vehicle-tracking contract here and a remote equipment monitoring contract there. But the technology is finally ready for primetime, Fledderjohn said, and most importantly, it's ready for deployments over wide area network technology like CDMA 1X, making it both pervasive and cheap.

So while his capsules may be only making their ways into trucks and industrial equipment now, Fledderjohn doesn't think it will be too long before radios start making it into the supply tags of every DVD player in Wal-Mart. You may not believe him, which is fine. But he'll be laughing the day he dials up Dollie on his cell phone.