Month: March 2016

Mozilla Unveils Its First Four Internet of Things Projects

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http://mobile.eweek.com/video/mozilla-unveils-its-first-four-internet-of-things-projects.html

Mozilla is revealing more details about its first Internet of things efforts since the company ended its failed Firefox OS smartphone in December.

Mozilla announced the first of its Internet of things projects that are evolving out of what was once its promising Mozilla Firefox OS operating system initiative.

Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s senior vice president for connected devices, unveiled the first four IoT “experiments” in a March 1 post on the Mozilla Blog, just a month after the company announced that it will soon end support for Firefox OS on its now-defunct smartphones. Mozilla’s smartphones and its operating system were the victims of poor consumer response in the marketplace.

After dropping the smartphone efforts back in December, the company said it would keep its Firefox OS alive as it worked to see how it could be used with the IoT.

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Jaaksi’s post describes the first of those efforts.

The first four experiments include Project Link, a “personal user agent that understands your preferences for how you want to interact with the world of devices in your home, and automate your connected world for you,” according to Jaaksi’s post.

The second experiment is Project Sensor Web, which is designed to help map out “the easiest path from sensors to open data for contributors to collaboratively build a detailed understanding of their living environments,” Jaaksi wrote. “We are launching a pilot project to build a crowdsourced pm2.5 sensor network.”

Next is Project Smart Home, which covers a “middle ground between ‘in a box’ solutions like Apple Homekit and DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi,” wrote Jaaksi. “Combining modular, affordable hardware with easy-to-use rules, Smart Home empowers people to solve unique everyday problems in new and creative ways.”

The fourth experiment is Project Vaani, an “IoT enabler package to developers, device makers and users who want to add a voice interface to their devices in a flexible and customizable way,” wrote Jaaksi. “We will prototype interactions at home in the near term, and in the future, showcase the ability to access services from the open Web.”

To grow the projects, Mozilla is now seeking developers and IoT enthusiasts to join its efforts to push the code and the projects into new directions, he wrote.

“We cannot do this without our dedicated and passionate community of developers and volunteers serving in an array of roles, as they are critical at ensuring each project has the best opportunity at making an impact,” he wrote. “If you are interested in participating as a developer or tester, please click here to get involved.”

The development is being organized through “a gated innovation process that includes time to brainstorm solutions to real life problems and evaluate the market opportunity for these ideas,” Jaaksi continued. “Additionally, we are aligning ourselves with users when it comes to simplicity, ease-of-use and engaging experiences, while ensuring everything is built with the Mozilla values of openness, transparency, privacy and user control at the core.”

Community participants are being asked to help develop, test and evaluate the first four projects, he wrote.

“We look forward to giving you updates on these projects as we continue to innovate with you all, out in the open,” he wrote.

In February, Mozilla announced that Version 2.6 of Firefox OS for smartphones will be the last version to be built and that plans for its eventual end are being formulated, according to an earlier eWEEK story. Also being shuttered is the Firefox Marketplace across various platforms, including smartphones, Firefox desktop and Firefox for Android.

Mozilla had announced the end of its two-year-old smartphone line in December after it failed to ignite the imaginations of consumers. At the time, Mozilla said that its Firefox OS would not disappear, however, and would continue to be used for smart TVs and potentially other devices in the future, including Panasonic’s Smart TV line of products.

In a related announcement, Mozilla said it is also ending live technical support in May for the Firefox OS after Version 2.6 on smartphone.

The Firefox OS effort first began in 2011 under the name Boot to Gecko (B2G) and was rebranded Firefox OS in July 2012, according to an earlier eWEEK report. Gecko is the name of the core rendering engine that powers Firefox, and the idea of B2G was to have a thin Linux base tightly integrated with Firefox as the foundation of a new operating system.

The Firefox OS system had the look of an Android operating system on the phones, with a home page full of app icons. Facebook and Twitter were preloaded. Also included was an adaptive app search system that lets a user search based on intentions, rather than proper nouns. If you put in “sushi, “for example, you wouldn’t just get apps with the word “sushi” in them but information on local sushi restaurants and maybe information on how to make sushi. A search for a band would turn up not just albums but information on buying concert tickets.

AR and VR on the rise…finally

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INVESTMENT IN AR/VR HITS AN ALL TIME HIGH: Investment in virtual and augmented reality has already surpassed $1.1 billion after only the first two months of 2016, according to Digi-Capital. This is the first time virtual and augmented reality have topped $1 billion in a single year. The incredibly rapid growth of investment is a clear signal that companies and industry pundits see the technology as not only viable, but an inevitable part of the future of mobile technology. For context, AR and VR investment reached just $692 million in all of 2015.

There is a lot of hype around virtual and augmented reality as major tech companies look to gain a foothold in the market. Vendors such as Oculus (owned by Facebook), Sony, and HTC have helped propel the development of the category in recent years. But they have also been joined by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and smartphone makers like Samsung. This makes sense considering that the AR/VR market is expected to reach $80 billion by 2025, according to recent Goldman Sachs estimates.

And while much of the consumer hype has been around VR devices, AR appears to be pulling ahead in terms of investor interest. In particular, Magic Leap, a US startup developing AR tech, accounted for the lion’s share of investment over the past year and two months. It has received $1.39 billion in funding, which includes $800 million in February’s Round C investment alone.  The company’s early investors include many global tech giants such as Google and Alibaba.

This is likely because AR provides more future use cases than VR. Unlike VR, which fully immerses users in a virtual environment, AR projects images and information onto the existing environment. For example, an engineer could use AR to look at the specs of a building while walking around a construction site.

Although adoption rates will be slow at first, due in part to the high cost of the hardware, it’s expected that once VR and AR adoption reach critical mass, they have the potential to upend everything from healthcare, to real estate, to gaming over the next 10 years.

Web VR has me excited; you should know about it

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Mozilla is offering this week the 1.0 release of its WebVR API proposal for displaying virtual reality content in the browser.

The proposal features interfaces to VR hardware like sensors and head-mounted displays, aiding developers in building VR experiences, according to the editor’s draft of WebVR. “Recent VR technology advances and community feedback have allowed us to improve the API to address developer needs,” said Mozilla’s Casey Yee, a virtual reality designer and developer, in a blog post. WebVR was co-developed by Mozilla technologies and Brandon Jones of the Google Chrome

The 1.0 specification includes VR-specific handling of device-rendering and display, the ability to traverse links between WebVR pages, and suitability for desktop and mobile experiences. Mozilla plans to include a stable implementation of the APIs in the Firefox Nightly test browser project sometime in the first half of 2016.

Virtual reality has recently come to be viewed as ready for enterprise business use for tasks like providing virtual 3D tours and simulated test drives. In elaborating on a newfound demand for VR, Yee said he expects 2016 to be a banner year for the technology, with VR products becoming available and software companies ramping up support. “The new medium has also driven demand for Web-enabled support from browser vendors,” he said.

WebVR offers support for virtual reality devices like Oculus Rift in Web applications. The specification lets developers ranslate position and movement information from a display into movement around a 3D scene, according to the Mozilla Developer Network.

In 2014, Mozilla set up a virtual reality Web site, MozVR, functioning with iOS and Android devices, Google Cardboard-compatible headsets, and the Oculus Rift headset. The site also has required a WebVR enabler add-on when using Firefox.

Amazon Echo has some new hardware

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AMAZON RELEASES NEW ECHO DEVICES, INTEGRATES NEST AND HONEYWELL: Amazon made several major updates to its Echo connected speaker and smart home hub yesterday. The Echo is quickly becoming one of the most popular smart home products in the US, and recent research from Argus Insights showed that consumers favor the Echo over Apple’s and Google’s platforms for controlling smart home devices. The latest updates should make the Echo brand even more popular and help improve the Alexa voice assistant platform that powers Echo speakers. The new updates include a pair of smart home integrations and two new speaker products.

Amazon announced that it will integrate Echo speakers with Nest and Honeywell smart thermostats with a software update by the end of this month. Amazon just added commands for smart thermostats to Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities last month, and has already integrated the Ecobee 3 smart thermostat. The integration with Nest’s thermostat is particularly notable as the Echo and the Nest thermostat are two of the most popular smart home devices on the market. Enabling the Echo to control Nest thermostats should heighten its appeal for smart home customers.

The first new speaker, the $89 Dot, is a small hockey puck-sized device that connects into any speaker to give it Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities. That means any speaker connected to the Dot can do all the things the Echo speaker can: play music on voice command, deliver news and weather updates, control smart home devices, and order an Uber car.

The second new device, the $129 Tap, is a smaller, portable version of the Echo speaker. The Tap has Alexa’s full set of voice commands, but the device is not voice activated. Users have to manually trigger the voice recognition system by pressing a button on the Tap. Amazon said this change was made to help preserve battery life on the smaller speaker. The Tap also has to be tethered to a smartphone to get a Wi-Fi connection, allowing users to take the Alexa platform with them on the go.
US consumers’ use of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is still lagging behind other voice assistants, including Apple’s Siri, Google’s ‘OK Google’, and Microsoft’s Cortana, according to a recent MindMeld survey. While adoption is low, MindMeld notes that the US consumer use of Alexa has doubled from 2% to 4% in the past year.