Sorry about the multiple puns, I couldn’t resist (you’ll see what I mean if you read on). I spent a bit of time loitering around the NICTA stand at CeBit and was impressed by the number of projects coming out of their research labs, some which have already been commercialised and spun out into successful companies.

For those of you who don’t know NICTA it is funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) and the Australian Research Council (ARC). NICTA is a world class research institute and basically consists of some of the best talent from Australia and the world carrying out research on some pretty cool technology.

One of their spinouts, OK Labs (Open Kernel labs), is a leading developer of microkernel and virtualisation technology for use in embedded systems and recently won a $2.5 million grant through the governments (AusIndustry) “Commercial Ready” program. OK Labs boasts a large team of independent microkernel developers and their OKL4 platform is the result of 10 years of research in this field. The NICTA spinout is backed by VC firm, Neo Technology Ventures, and boasts a customer base that includes some of the big players in the wireless sector including Qualcomm and Samsung. Their OKL4 platform can also be found on a number of HTC and Toshiba devices.

The money received from the grant will go towards further development and prototyping of their microkernel and ‘Secure HyperCell’ technology which is aimed at providing more secure software for mobile devices and embedded systems.

Personally I think the market timing for this type of technology is perfect. The last few years has seen a massive growth in next generation consumer electronics (Media players, Set tops, Satellite navigation) as well as more and more sophisticated mobile devices. This is creating a whole new computing paradigm, one that requires a different approach to the traditional monolithic kernel architecture.

If anyone is interested there is a wealth of information on the OK Labs website, including various blogs and whitepapers. Some entries of interest to me were written by the co founder and CTO, Gernot Heiser, whom I briefly met at the CeBit show, and in which he talks about the security of embedded and networked systems including links to an article about researchers who hacked an implantable defibrillator, enabling them to kill the wearer by remote control

If anyone is interest I will try to post more over the coming weeks on some of their other projects and spin outs, but just to whet your appetite these include the context aware mobility project (software that sits on a mobile device and learns your movements to make predictions on your network requirements), gigabit wireless and an open source software platform for the Machine Learning community.