Ultrawideband gear sprays low-power radio waves across a huge range of frequencies, letting them penetrate walls, among other feats.

FORBES: Freeing the Airwaves

ZigBee is a protocol that works on the 802.15.4 spectrum (WiFi is also known as 802.11 for its slice of spectrum.) As a short-range, low-power protocol, ZigBee is suited for two-way communications among small devices, and can be used to build self-organizing networks of devices.

FORBES: The Wireless Boom That Won't Need Us

The open source community is transitioning to create advanced Web-centric consumer devices using high profile open source based distributions and a wide range of high-performance, low-power ARM(R)-based SoCs.

ENGADGET: ARM, Samsung, IBM, Freescale, TI and more join to form Linaro, speed rollout of Linux-based devices

"Our approach gives a low-power route to the depth imaging of ordinary, small targets at very long range, " said Aongus McCarthy, a research fellow at Heriot-Watt.

BBC: Long-distance 3D laser camera unveiled by Edinburgh team