We're taking a bit of a break to be with our loved ones over the holiday, and we hope you are too. A very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you, and we'd like to pass along a heartfelt "Thank You" for your readership. We'll be back posting again tomorrow once we can burn off some of the egg nog!

Sometimes I wish I could go back to college again, especially now that a growing number of campuses offer wireless access.

According to a new study from the Campus Computing Project, over a third (35.9%) of all U.S. college campuses have WiFi, and many more schools are planning to implement it in the very near future.

Of course, when you see the money generated from these schools just from tuition costs, it's easy to see where the funding for wireless access comes from. Nevertheless, wireless access gives students the opportunity to tap into all of the resources available within their respective campuses from virtually any location.

We've talked here many times about how folks should take every step necessary to protect their own home wireless networks from predators and freeloaders who will steal your personal information outright or use your network to do some unsavory things. Consider the story of two Florida woman whose wireless network was hacked into by someone at a local community college and was using their access to subscribe to porn sites. Pretty embarassing and unnerving, don't you think?

The linked story has a few more tips to help you keep your wireless network secure from intrusion. Obviously, there's no way you can be totally protected 100% of the time, but the point is that if you take just a few steps, the chances of being hacked will diminsh greatly.

One area we see quite often here at The Wireless Report are bungled implementations of good and great wireless solutions. A great idea can be toasted if not implemented in the most customized way for the customer using it. This entails studying the workflow of the customer, tailoring the solution/software to their needs, testing the solution and tweaking as needed, and also planning for changes and other paths so that the solution is flexible and adaptable.

For industries such as the medical establishment, the multi-level restaurant, the hopping-busy five-star hotel - and other hospitality markets - real-time retrieval of information about, well, anything affecting smooth operations and the delight of customers, is becoming absolutely key. This "real-time" solution, by definition, requires wireless technology to be involved - not only involved, but central and integral. WiFi standards such as 802.11b and 802.11g have really shaped the capability of these industries to arm their workers and employees with up-to-the-second data on their patients, customers, and equipment locations. Or have they? Yes - the ideas are sound and in many instances they work wonders for overall productivity. But, how about wireless security? How about "presence" status of equipment and objects? You can't run a hospital floor wirelessly or not without locking down that signal with the strongest protection/encryption possible - personal medical data can be just a little bit sensitive. Ok, very, very sensitive. Also, it's just not good enough to know where you equipment or objects are - whether this be a blood pressure monitor or a the timing of a dinner reservation for five guests - but you need to know its status, what it is being used for in real-time, and how long the "object" will most likely be in service. For example - a party of five has reservations at a top-flight restaurant. Using some kind of WiFi marker, the logistical operations folks (the managing staff) can time precisely when the party gets their drinks, appetizers, main entree, and dessert with split-second timing and can guess when - to the minute - they will be exiting the facility. This kind of "presence" location-based tracking is the kind of real assistance wireless technology can provide.

Enter Newbury Networks. A pioneer of WiFi security solutions such as WiFi WatchDog, they announced today the Active Asset^TM product - a WiFi asset tracking system that is used to locate and monitor large numbers of disparate WiFi assets in real-time. Using WiFi asset tags in variable physical sizes and power configurations, there are many ways to utilize the system. If you want your WiFi-enabled assets tracked, monitored, and even mapped to an overhead floor plan in real-time, Active Asset^TM has you covered. Talk about having visibility into some of your most important people and equipment at the click of a mouse button. Using a software tracking model for locations, for objects, and finally using custom services and rules, the Active Asset system could be quite a boon to many industries needing quick and accurate tracking and monitoring capabilities.

Newbury also announced today the industry's first "Presence" Platform for location-enabled applications - the Newbury Presence Platform^TM. This extensible software is what appears to match the Active Asset^TM system as a complementary flexible and scalable software platform that can be tailored to the tracking and location needs that best fits the customer and the situational deployment.  Said best by Chuck Conley, VP of Newbury Marketing, "Instead of just utilizing our location technology, these software platforms allow customers to put together applications that make these things more manageable."

So, has WiFi technology infiltrated the operational and logistical world? Judging from these Newbury announcements, one would have to say yes. The one over-riding principle that we sometimes see is the inability for "information managers" - which can be operations people all the way down to front-line staff - to have precise, updated and relevant access to the information they need to make quick and correct decisions. We say relevant because access to data is useless - no matter how real-time it is - if it is not 100% relevant to the task at hand. With that said, the medical community, with its bustling days, routines, patient moves and equipment usage could really stand to take a look at these Newbury solutions in order to help themselves cope with a growing need for health care technology. With that said, here is an example of how the Active Asset^TM solution could look for a medical establishment. Use the "Read" link below the image to read more about these two new  platforms at Newbury's website.