Wired on Friday: If you want to make a mark in the consumer electronics world, traditional wisdom says: make a big splash. Pre-announce at a major conference (like this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) long before you're ready to ship a product. Talk big about your technology's capabilities. Promise the world. Knock the competition.

Mr Bob Heile has spent several years trying to do the opposite. Not that he's not relentlessly upbeat about his new technology. He's confident you'll see its logo on remote controls, light switches, industrial containers and electricity meters. Mr Heile is the chairman of the cross-industry ZigBee consortium, which has hunkered away for the last few years, working on yet another new digital local wireless standard.

In December, the final version of their standard was completed. ZigBee-enabled equipment will, sometime this year, join the radio waves shared by its equally oddly-named predecessors, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

But what does ZigBee do? In the face of the hype that surrounded Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, its specifications seem remarkably humble. It's a slower way of wirelessly communicating between electronic devices than Bluetooth; it has less range than Wi-Fi. It is determinedly unsophisticated.

The software (the "stack") to drive it is a fraction of the size of that required to communicate with a Bluetooth phone. You should be able to run ZigBee on the cheapest, dumbest chips. Which is all part of the plan. Low range and low speed means low power consumption. Systems that talk via ZigBee can be powered by batteries for months, even years, rather the hourly limits of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It's something for the very cheapest, simplest of electronic equipment to talk with one another. Don't think computers ("PCs are definitely not required!" barks Mr Heile), think light switches. In particular, think stick-on, portable, light switches. The switch talks without wires to your lighting system, wherever it might be. So you can move switches around as you re-think your living space.

You can turn off all the lights to your house from a single switch near the door.

Not exactly a revolutionary application, you might think. But consider large office blocks: central control of lighting would save property managers thousands in power bills. Not having to lay out complex cabling in new construction lowers costs there, too.

And lighting isn't the only basic convenience that could benefit from some chattiness. Temporary heaters could be controlled from your main thermostat. Electricity meters could talk to meter readers without them entering your house.

You really could have a single, universal remote control for your entire house.

ZigBee's humility comes from its target: digitally taking over the bottom end of the analog world of electronics, the same way digital has taken over the high-ends of hi-fi and telephony.

But while the principle and price is small, ZigBee isn't quite as dumb as a single light switch. To get around the small range of its transmitters (around 100 meters), ZigBee-talking equipment can piggy-back on one another to route the messages to its destination.

If the thermometer in the attic wants to tell the boiler in the basement to turn down the heat a bit, it might not have the strength to send a signal directly.

But its message can hitch a ride on any ZigBee component in between - hopping via light switch to your doorbell - until it reaches its destination.

Mr Heile says ZigBee learnt its humility from watching the growing pains of its predecessors. He was vice-chairman of the IEEE committee that created 802.11, the technology behind Wi-Fi. And he watched the often contentious evolution of Bluetooth, the local networking system used in many mobile phones. While ZigBee pronouncements are always keen to deny any competition with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Mr Heile says: "We learnt a lot from the Bluetooth group's experience. They were too visible and promised too much.

"They lost focus, and tried to solve everything: audio, sending files, world hunger. We made ZigBee deliberately simple. We've tried to underpromise and overdeliver."

The "keep it simple" principle seems to have saved ZigBee from some of wireless networking's earlier mistakes. For instance, instead of Bluetooth's cumbersome "pairing" system (where, to allow two devices to talk to one another, you have to type in a four-digit PIN), introducing a bit of ZigBee kit to the rest of your house, is simply a matter of holding it up to another node and pressing a button.

But the invisibility of ZigBee's development might not benefit it so well in the future. ZigBee was invented behind closed doors. It costs $10,000 (€7,587) for interested parties to even see the current specification. That's not good for ZigBee's visibility in the marketplace (there are already several competing technologies available) - and it's not good at inspiring the entrepreneurs who might otherwise create ZigBee's most innovative applications.

"Right now, I don't need it," said Mr Russ Nelson of Crynwr Software. Mr Nelson is a veteran coder whose early free implementation of the internet protocol helped popularise the internet. He rejected ZigBee for a monitoring system for bridges after discovering the cost of evaluating the technology.

Mr Heile says that the specification will be more widely available shortly, and the consortium expects to offer cheaper licenses once its members begin production of their chip sets.

ZigBee may have dodged the bullet of high expectations that dogged Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. But now it has the harder job of publicising itself - and its possibilities - from a standing start, in a potentially crowded market.

A potentially ubiquitous, barely-noticed technology, ZigBee now has to disappear into everyday use - not just disappear into the history books.