By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

[It is such a dreary, rainy day here in SF, and I have a touch of the flu, so I've been able to stay-in and catch up with stuff I should have written weeks ago.]

I recently had dinner with Selina Lo, CEO of Ruckus Wireless--a startup developing wireless multimedia IP technology for the home.

Women CEOs are rare in Silicon Valley but I don't think Ms Lo noticed. An organization would have to have a glass ceiling the thickness of a polar ice cap to keep Ms Lo in check--and I don't think that would work for long.

Take a glance at her bio:

Ms. Lo was the former vice president within Nortel Networks' Content Business Unit, which acquired Alteon WebSystems, a public networking equipment supplier, in 2000 for $7.8 billion.

At Alteon, Ms. Lo served as vice president of Marketing from its inception through IPO and the Nortel acquisition.

Prior to Alteon, Ms. Lo was the vice president of marketing at the Centillion Business Unit of Bay Networks which was purchased by Bay Networks in 1994.

Ms. Lo's career also includes several management roles at Network Equipment Technologies and Hewlett Packard. She holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

If you'd like to find out more about Ms Lo, here is a post from the very decent (7clicks/10) corporate blog The Ruckus Room. [BTW, please do NOT send marriage proposals to the company email address--it clogs their servers--contact Ms Lo at Lo.Sers@Gmail.com ]

Ms Lo had just gotten back from CES and so had a travel bag of stories--many of which I cannot share :-(. However, there were plenty of things I can write about.

One of the things Ms Lo noticed about CES was that there were larger numbers of media executives "and they seemed to know what they were talking about, they understood some of the technology. Usually they send their tech guys, but this time they were out there themselves."

That's a good sign, that media companies are realizing that they need to be "technology-enabled." It's phrase I like to use a lot, because I believe that savvy, technology-enabled media companies can be incredibly successful.

Ms Lo's company is trying to do something very simple: to allow people in homes to watch TV, movies, listen to music, surf, communicate, from anywhere in the house and with any applicable screen or device. I think of it as one-click multimedia wireless for the home.

It's a simple thing but tremendously hard--the way simple things always are. But Ruckus seems further along in the game than anybody else I've come across.

Ms Lo says the company is getting noticed by the cable companies, which is good. But waiting for the cable companies is like waiting for Godot--excruciating. There needs to be a disrupting force of some kind to kick them in the pants.

Ms Lo believes that the internet will provide a level playing field and the means for a disrupting force to come in and challenge any fat and happy incumbents. But I don't share her enthusiasm.

In the industry, we used to talk about the "last mile" to the home as a problem. Now, the "last mile" is a big advantage, because it is the best choke-point into the home, imho.

Anyway, you might want to put Ruckus on your radar screen, and there will be more on Ruckus coming up in SVW.

Incidentally, I was pleased to learn that Ms Lo shares a similar day/work schedule to mine, so that she can deal with customers in Asia.