The world is getting more connected.
Much of this is thanks to advancements in networking technology.
And much also is due to the massive introduction of new connected devices, which require fast and efficient networks so the information they accumulate can be shared in real time.
Many of these devices will be worn by consumers and be located in various parts of their homes.
This new connectivity will provide a host of innovative gateways for messaging from marketers to consumers.
And now a new lengthy and detailed global report just out is projecting that the number of connected devices will reach 100 billion by 2025.
Even if off by half, which is not likely, this will be an extraordinary number of connected devices.
The new Global Connectivity Index (GCI) by Chinese manufacturing giant Huawei is a measure of how 50 nations are progressing with digital transformation using information and communications technology. The 50 countries account for 90 percent of the global GDP and 78 percent of the global population.
The report also includes survey results from 3,000 businesses across 10 verticals in 10 nations to establish their progress in digital transformation compared with the GCI performance of their nation.
The verticals surveyed included retail, banking, finance, securities, and insurance, education, government and healthcare.
The goal of the index is to benchmark 50 countries according to current levels of connectivity and digital transformation, and to act as a leading indicator for future digital development and growth.
In the overall measurement, the U.S. is in the lead spot. Here are the top 10 countries based on the global connectivity index:
United States
Singapore
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
Denmark
South Korea
Netherlands
Japan
Norway
The report pointed out that the U.S. is continuing to invest heavily in the Internet of Things, with the top applications being smart homes, wearables, smart cities, smart grids, connected cars, connected health and smart retail.
The connections are coming. And then the interactions can begin between connected devices and people.
Category: Internet of Things
Connected Consumers: 55% Own Fitbit, 28% Nest Thermostat, 23% Apple Watch 04/13/2016
While many consumers haven’t yet bought into the idea of smart home devices or wearable technology like smartwatches or fitness trackers, those who have are selecting a very wide range of devices.
While Fitbits lead for what consumers wear and Google’s popular Nest thermostats top the list of smart home objects, that doesn’t provide the scope of how widespread the range of products is.
A new piece of research goes deep into the range of both wearables and smart home devices and provides a view of how wide the market is, as consumers select their own products for what could be any number of personal reasons.
The study comprised a survey of 500 U.S. adults from a panel representative of U.S. Census data and was conducted by Rocket Fuel.
For home connected devices, devices from Google’s Nest comprise three of the top five products, though no one product seems to dominate the market. Here’s the list of connected home devices consumers currently own:
28% — Nest learning thermostat
25%– Netatmo Weather Station
25% — Nest Cam
22% — Philips Hue connected bulb
21% — Nest Protect
21% — Other home security device
18% — Belkin WeMo Switch+ Motion
14% — August Smart Lock
14% — Other connected home appliance
11% — Canary (home security)
8% — GE/Quirky Aros smart window air conditioner
For wearable devices, the number of different devices is just as broad, ranging from those from Fitbit to Garmin. Here’s the current breakdown by wearable device currently owned:
55% — Fitbit
23% — Apple Watch
17% — Samsung Gear Fit
16% — Nike+ Fuelband
10% — Omron blood pressure monitor
9% — Microsoft Band
8% — Jawbone Up
8% — Other fitness health tracker
6% — Basis Peak
6% — Garmin Vivofit Fitness Band
5% — Pebble Smartwatch
4% — Other smartwatch
The challenge for advertisers is that many of the connected devices, whether worn or found in the home, have either a small or no screen.
But the advantage is that the devices can be a data source that informs smarter cross-device profiles to determine potential purchase influence points.
And many consumers are fine with sharing data gleaned from their connected devices. Here’s a breakdown of devices that consumers are comfortable or very comfortable in sharing their data and which sources of the data they would be willing to share:
31% — Console gaming data
30% — Media consumption data
29% — Health/fitness data
29% — Retail data
29% — Handheld gaming data
28% — Home management data
28% — Sports training data
26% — Smartwatch data
25% — Driving data
23% — Personal finance data
22% — Home security data
20% — Wireless audio data
While advertising may not come directly through the connected devices, the data from those smart objects can help determine the best messaging to be transmitted through many other avenue
What Nest’s product shutdown says about the Internet of Things
We’re still super early in the evolution of the Internet of Things. I’m not cautioning consumers against buying into new technology – the only way these devices get better, smarter and more adroit is with mass adoption – but buyers do need to recognize that the world of connected devices is different than unconnected devices.
This stuff isn’t going to last forever and we don’t know what upgrade and support cycles will look like. That’s markedly different than the way we used to buy gadgets. Sure, there was always the risk that a company would drop support for a product 49 days after release, but the risk of a product just not working anymore was significantly less.
In this new era, it’s important to think about the potential that your entire home could just stop working – and planning for those scenarios.
It’s also time for companies behind those products to recognize that the expectations buyers have for their products and the expectations they have for supporting said products aren’t always going to be in alignment.
Nest: more than a thermostat
Nest has several new products in development that together could help form a smart home security system, according to a report last week from The Information. The four products reportedly in Nest’s pipeline are:
Flintstone: a wireless gateway device that will connect all of the devices in a user’s home using Nest’s Thread wireless networking protocol. The device would also wirelessly connect those devices to the home Wi-Fi router and translate commands sent between the Thread and Wi-Fi networks. The thread networking protocol uses less battery power than Wi-Fi, making it a better option for connecting small, low-power devices like sensors and smart locks.
Pinna: a set of security sensors that send alerts to the Flintstone hub whenever a homeowner’s doors or windows are opened.
Keshi: a Thread-connected sensor that could be used for a variety of purposes. For instance, the sensor could be placed in a key fob and used to unlock a smart lock when the user gets home.
Voice-recognition device: Google is working on its own voice-recognition device that will compete with Amazon’s Echo, and Nest is part of the project, according to The Information. Google already has its own voice-recognition technology that is installed in the Android mobile operating system. The device Google is working on would bring that technology into the home and allow users to control their smart home devices by voice command.
Nest isn’t the only company that has struggled to make successful smart home products. There are many major barriers in the market that providers have yet to address including the high cost of smart home devices, the vulnerability of these devices to hackers, and the lack of standards that would allow different devices from different manufacturers to communicate with each other. Despite these overarching issues, improved home security is one of the biggest benefits that consumers want from their smart home devices. So Nest’s potential move into the home security market would be a logical one
Watch as augmented reality brings ‘Alice in Wonderland’ to life (VIDEO) | Read | Mobile | Malay Mail Online
I continue to get excited about the future of product marketing, education and training. AR is a game changer.
AUSTIN, March 26 — Sony Future Lab showcased a new device at the recently concluded SXSW festival that transforms any flat surface into an augmented display.
Using an Alice in Wonderland book as an example, a Sony representative demonstrated how touching any character will take them out of the pages and turn them into interactive animations.
And if you’re wondering how it works, The Verge did us all a favour by explaining it in a nutshell.
Basically, the technology is built from two components: A camera and projection.
The former “map[s] the terrain and tracks changes while hand and finger recognition provides the controls,” and the latter creates the images that appear in the physical space.
– See the video at
Running with Machines [Infographic]
Thanks to Jabil for an amazing infographic.
As technology advances at an unprecedented rate, humans and machines are increasingly able to collaborate in ways we never imagined. In order to succeed in the Digital Enterprise, leading companies must reimagine and blend their workforce to achieve higher levels of innovation through human-machine collaboration.
http://www.jabil.com/blog/Running-with-Machines.html
Intel Champions IoT at Embedded World 2016
Via Intel blog
Intel tech at Embedded World 2016Intel’s Internet of Things Group (IoTG) demonstrated embedded technologies serving a wide array of industry verticals—from smart transportation and smart factories, to the healthcare sector and beyond at Embedded World 2016.
Attendees of the annual Nuremberg, Germany event engaged with Intel IoT products and solutions while learning how IoT can improve real-time decision making, boost revenues, and lower costs. From the Linux Foundation’s collaborative Zephyr Project to the Intel IoT Commercial Developer Platform, here are some of our favorite
The open source Zephyr Project is a collaborative IoT project among the Linux Foundation and Intel companies Altera and Wind River. The open source project enables a scalable, real-time operating system that supports multiple architectures. Learn more.
Wind River’s Things to Cloud demo featured Wind River Rocket, a tiny-footprint, cloud-connected operating system for microcontrollers (MCUs). It directly connects to Wind River Helix App Cloud, a cloud-based development environment for building IoT applications. The demo showcased the development, debugging, and deployment of a Rocket-based agriculture application. Learn more.
The Adlink Smart Factory demo utilized the Adlink IoT Gateway, an EtherCAT solution, a smart camera, USB DAQ with Microsoft Windows 10 IoT OS, and the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. It included features to monitor operating conditions of equipment in the production line and production performance in real-time. It also displayed a database of alarm tags from equipment that was set up for equipment failure analysis. Learn more about Adlink factory
This demo showed how developers and device manufacturers can use Wind River Helix to create safe, secure, and reliable intelligent systems that connect through IoT. It showed how to move system data from secure and managed devices at the edge, through the gateway, across the critical network infrastructure, and to a cloud. Watch a video of the demo
To demonstrate a rapid path-to-product edge IoT solution for transportation, a proof of concept was created using the Grove IoT Commercial Developer Kit, and scaled as an industrial solution using an Intel IoT Gateway, industrial sensors, and Wind River Linux 7 OS. The gateway gathered data from a temperature and magnetic sensor for edge data analytics and monitoring. Learn more about the IoT Commercial Developer Kit.
The Intel IoT Developer Program for commercial solutions provides a fast, flexible, and scalable path for IoT solutions. It features a comprehensive set of resources, developer kits, tools, knowledge, and technical support for professionals to rapidly prototype, test, and deploy commercial IoT solutions. Based on the Intel IoT Platform, this demo included a temperature-controlled environment and included three edge devices that monitored temperature, light, and loudness. The sensors provided continuous streaming data to the Intel IoT Gateway, including indications of failures. Learn more about the Intel IoT
Intel’s Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) technology provides an “on-ramp” designed to help devices securely connect in alignment with the Intel IoT Platform. Intel’s EPID hardware-enforced integrity provides fixed device identity in a manner that is compatible with existing ISO and TCG standards, and helps protect privacy with sophisticated anonymity technology. Extending use of Intel EPID across the industry will help make IoT solutions more secure regardless of vendor choice. Watch a video of the demo from the show floor
The SRC-0800-4C smart gateway-based IoT energy efficiency management solution demo simulated the main energy equipment by way of multi-sectional LED lights. It collected meter data and status info from voltage sensors, current sensors, temperature and humidity sensors, and energy consumption via Modbus. When using 2G, 3G, or 4G networks, the system realizes real-time data upload to a cloud-based energy efficiency management platform. This enables real-time monitoring of power consumption data and operation status of each device for energy efficiency and emission reductions. Learn more about SRC-0800-4C.
An example featuring Intel System Studio, this demo showed microcontrollers being used to develop and debug firmware on an Intel Quark D2000 MCU-based device. It demonstrated an IoT-connected device being used to record transportation events including monitoring shock sensitive containers. Watch a video of the demo from the show floor.
ParceLive Product Tracking
ParceLive Product Tracking demo in the Intel booth at Embedded World 2016
ParceLive’s credit card-size shipment tracking module enables global shipment tracking using cellular connectivity, combined with sensors monitoring location, pressure, temperature, and humidity. The solution utilizes Intel EPID security features. Watch a video of the demo from the show floor.
That’s a wrap from this year’s Embedded World. To learn more about Intel IoT developments, subscribe to our RSS feed for email notifications of blog updates, or visit intel.com/IoT, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Quick Read: The WebVR 1.0 API Draft Proposal
Virtual reality has come a quite long way since Oculus Rift entered the stage a few years ago, opening up a whole new range of possibilities to experience digital content. Although its use cases were blurry and undefined, it gained huge traction which lead to Facebook acquiring Oculus for $2 billion. Such great expectations also lead to the inevitable influence of VR on the web, which is not likely to be a 2D exclusive environment by the year 2020.
WebVR Cardboard Headsets
As one of the main players advocating an open and free web, Mozilla has been actively helping chart the course of virtual reality on the web. As a result of their exploration of the area, the MozVR project was founded, which today is one of the key contributors to WebVR standards alongside Brandon Jones from the Google Chrome team. These contributors recently teamed up to announce the version 1.0 release of the WebVR API proposal. This is a big step for the future of virtual reality on the web so let’s have a look at what this means.
Note: Our very own Patrick Catanzariti covered WebVR and how to get started last year at SitePoint, so if you haven’t dipped your fingers into the big and immersive world of VR, make sure to check out his article.
Improvements
Concretely, as detailed in the official Mozilla Hacks blog post, the updated APIs offer various improvements. These are in a nutshell:
VR specific handling of device rendering and display.
The ability to traverse links between WebVR pages.
An input handling scheme that can enumerate VR inputs, including six degrees of freedom (6DoF) motion controllers.
Accommodation of both sitting and standing experiences.
Suitability for both desktop and mobile usage.
Feel free to check out the API draft for more changes and details (especially if you have tinkered with VR before).
Mozilla Unveils Its First Four Internet of Things Projects
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
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.
Pete Deutschman 