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Wearables – What does the future hold?

Wearable devices represent the product category currently carrying the consumer electronics industry’s burden of being the ‘next big thing’. Driven by advances in processing and communications chipsets developed in the pursuit of ever-cheaper smartphones, wearables are exhibiting the potential for diversity in shape, colour and function that has been banished from the smartphone world. But are hardware vendors right to bet on smart wearables as a means of supporting margins in the ever-competitive consumer electronics world? There is no shortage of forecast … Read more…

IOT World Forum Day 2 – completing the picture

Day 2 of the Internet of Things World Forum was characterised by a similar mix of speakers as the first day, with the mobile operator community being a lot more visible and engaged in the debate. Although there was no shortage of big numbers nor of technology companies offering solutions, a new set of themes emerged. 1. Manufacturing represents the biggest immediate opportunity Bernd Heinrichs of Cisco opened the session with a sweeping view of the IoT landscape. Much was made of the importance of … Read more…

IOT World Forum Day One – Some things we learnt

Today saw the first of two days at the Internet of Things World Forum in London (not to be confused with the event with the same title hosted by Cisco in Chicago earlier this year). Attendance was very high, though predominantly a corporate crowd – technology providers, IT companies, operators and investors. The vast majority of the smaller companies were so-called ‘horizontal enablers’ selling some form of IOT-related platform, middleware or gateway or other. Although much of the discussion was on innovation in individual segments … Read more…

Blackberry’s Project Ion

A year ago Blackberry was in what appeared to be terminal decline and attempts to find new owners failed. Newly-appointed CEO John Chen sought to turnaround the company by reconnecting to its core enterprise customers, stemming the losses that were haemorrhaging the company, and outsourcing manufacturing to China’s Foxconn. The rather bizarrely shaped Blackberry Passport phone has been somewhat emblematic of Mr Chen’s first year at the company – slightly more successful than expected. One pillar of Blackberry’s overall strategy … Read more…

Internet of Things and Big Data – The concept of Data Gravity

A number of posts in this blog have dealt with the increasing variety and sheer number of ‘things’, be they sensors, wearables, appliances, actuators, industrial components etc. that will gain connectivity over the coming few years. There will however be no point adding connectivity to these items if they do not produce meaningful data, and in turn there will be no point collating this data unless insights are obtained that can be acted upon. This is why the ‘Internet of Things’ is invariably coupled with its close relative in the family of hyped buzzwords –  Mr ‘Big Data’.

To give an example of the scale of data being produced, Cisco estimates that by 2018, connected devices will generate 400 zettabytes of data annually. (I too needed to look that up. Apparently a zettabyte is 1021 bytes or 1 billion terabytes).

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Smart Thermostats – More than just a pretty app

An article in the UK mainstream press recently investigated the how smart thermostats and controls can be used to reduce household energy bills. The claims savings that can be achieve range from 10% by Hive of British Gas, up to around 20% for Google’s Nest thermostat. Given that the average energy bill of the UK household is around £1400/year, these represent significant amounts, though offset by the price of approx £200. While anything that significantly dents energy bills will be well-received, these smart … Read more…

Amazon Echo – Who’s listening & why?

As discussed previously in this blog, the proliferation of connected sensors will produce a stream of information back to a cloud-based service provider about what a person is doing throughout the day. Last week saw the announcement of two products that make use of sound sensors (i.e. microphones) as a key part of the product experience. The one that has got most interest, is the Amazon Echo. This is essentially a voice-controlled Bluetooth speaker with Cloud-based Artificial Intelligence in a similar vein to Apple’s … Read more…

The Internet of Things standards tussle – A phoney war?

  One thing that all commentators on the ‘connected everything’ space agree on is the need for common standards to allow a wide range of sensors, appliances and devices to talk to each other. This is nicely captured in an article in the Economist magazine, where the key problem is described as there being too many overlapping and conflicting initiatives. This is nothing new, and most new technologies which benefit from network effects, starting with the battle between direct and … Read more…

M2M device explosion to fuel growth in cloud infrastructure

This week, Cisco released its latest forecast on global data centre and cloud computing, covering the time period 2013 – 2014. During this time Cisco forecasts that annual data centre traffic will triple, a compound growth rate of 23%. But to what extent is this being driven by the growth in connected devices, and the traffic they generate? The answer can be found by digging into the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) published in June. Over this period, it can … Read more…

The many webs of things

Two recent posts dealt with the activities of Samsung and Google in the area of the physical web, otherwise known as the Web of Things. Given the announcements of these two heavyweights within a few weeks of each other, it is worth exploring what it means for the rest of us. For starters, what is the Web of Things? Put succinctly, it is the allocation of URLs or web addresses to physical objects, allowing apps, web interfaces, and cloud services … Read more…

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