Month: February 2015

ARM, IBM and Freescale in new IoT partnership

In the quest to get mindshare of the maker movement, ARM and IBM yesterday announced an Internet of Things starter kit based on an ARM Cortex M4 powered board, connected to the IBM BlueMix cloud service. ARM’s aim, similar to a previous initiative by Intel covered on this site is to help migrate the IoT enthusiasts who may be the founders of the next big thing away from Arduino towards ARM-based development platforms that can then be easily productised. Intel’s Edison-based development … Read more…

Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the Internet of Things – with the help of the Cloud

We have already touched on the role that machine learning and artificial intelligence plays in building smart systems that provide value to customers and companies. From predicting when elevators will require maintenance and service to the advanced voice control functions used in iPhones, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. This blog however has not yet done justice to the extent to which the entry bar has been lowered for advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning to be incorporated into … Read more…

Amazon still king of the Cloud, though Microsoft is catching up

You can’t go far in reading the tech press before coming across the term ‘cloud’, a term that causes no end of confusion. In the enterprise IT world, the public cloud refers to the setup where IT applications and capabilities are provided to a company by an external provider via Internet connections on a shared infrastructure. This means that the company can benefit from shared economies of scale as other customers use the same infrastructure, and the same scale also provides the … Read more…

Wearables in Healthcare

This is an excellent article by Julie Papanek in TechCrunch providing a very small glimpse of how wearables can aid the monitoring and treatment of a wide range of conditions. Very apt quotation – “wearables are totally failing the people who need them most” – the old, the ill and the poor. Personally, I believe that there are huge untapped opportunities to make use of the combination of passive data collection and machine learning to empower patients in their relationships with healthcare … Read more…

Samsung buys LoopPay. A tactical acquisition?

Yesterday, Samsung announced that it acquired LoopPay, a mobile payments technology company, in a move that was widely reported as allowing Samsung to “build a viable Apple Pay competitor”. Samsung takes aim at Apple Pay with LoopPay acquisition The key differentiating feature of LoopPay is that unlike Apple Pay it does not use Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to speak to the point of sale terminal, but instead relies on its own proprietary technology that emits a magnetic field to simulate … Read more…

British Gas acquires AlertMe – A smart home leader

AlertMe, the Cambridge-based company behind the technology that powers the Hive Active Heating system sold by British Gas has just been acquired by British Gas itself. Originally holding an investment of around 20%, British Gas has now bought the entire outfit for around $100m. As AlertMe only has two large customers, British Gas itself and Lowe, in the US, it is unclear whether British Gas aims to use the platform and technology for its own energy customer base. However in a press release, Mary … Read more…

UK gives go-ahead for use of White Space spectrum

Radio spectrum, the lifeblood of any wireless or cellular service is a scarce resource, the pressures on which continue to grow in line with our hunger for mobile data. It is therefore not surprising that carriers and regulators are seeking ways to squeeze out better usage out of the available airwaves. The most recent step forward is the UK communications regulator Ofcom to allow wireless communications in so-called White Space spectrum. This is “prime-site” spectrum in the 470-790MHz range which has excellent … Read more…

Digital Health Platforms – A look at Apple HealthKit’s early lead

A Reuters report last week claimed that Apple’s HealthKit is being trialled by more hospitals in the US than Google Fit. Fourteen out of twenty-three ‘top’ (no info on how they were selected) hospitals contacted had already rolled out a pilot programme with Apple, way ahead of where they are with other significant personal health platforms. This clearly indicates that the convergence between personal devices and real medical healthcare, is beginning to move beyond the somewhat narcissistic counting of steps, fitness goals etc, … Read more…

IoT Network Sigfox secures $115 additional funding

Sigfox, the low-power wide area network being deployed by Arqiva in the UK secured a new round of funding to drive its international expansion. As discussed in a previous post, Sigfox allows devices to remain in contact with a network for several years using normal AA-style batteries, and represents a much lower cost alternative to cellular networks for applications such as metering. This makes it quite interesting that NTT Docomo, Telefonica and SK Telecom are amongst its investors, clearing seeking to … Read more…

+ More