Collaborative robots, or “cobots”, tend to be inexpensive, easy to use and safe to be around. They can easily be adapted to new tasks, making them well-suited to small-batch manufacturing and ever-shortening product cycles.

Cobots can typically lift loads of up 10 kilograms (22 lb) and can be small enough to put on top of a workbench. They can help with repetitive tasks like picking and placing, packaging or gluing and welding.

Some can repeat a task after being guided once through the process by a worker and recording it. The price of a cobot can be as little as $10,000, although typically they cost two to three times that.

The global cobot market is set to grow from $116 million last year to $11.5 billion by 2025, capital goods analysts at Barclays estimate. That would be roughly equal to the size of the entire industrial robotics market today.

“By 2020 it will be a game-changer,” said Stefan Lampa, head of robotics of Germany’s Kuka, during a panel discussion organized by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) at the Automatica trade fair in Munich.

Growth in industrial robot unit sales slowed to 12 percent last year from 29 percent in 2014, the IFR said on Wednesday, weighed by a sharp fall in top buyer China.

The world’s top industrial robot makers – Japan’s Fanuc and Yaskawa, Swiss ABB and Kuka – all have collaborative robots on the market, although sales are not yet significant for them.

But the market leader and pioneer is Denmark’s Universal Robots, a start-up that sold its first cobot in 2009 and was acquired by U.S. automatic test equipment maker Teradyne for $285 million last year.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/interest-grows-in-collaborative-robots.html

Bernstein Research’s senior analyst Mark C. Newman said that the competitive dynamic in the memory chip industry is not as good as we thought due to Samsung’s aggressive and opportunistic behavior. This is analyst speak for Samsung is engaging in a supply and price war with the other big names in the memory chip marking business – SK hynix and Micron.

“Rather than sit back and enjoy elevated profit margins with a 40 percent market share in DRAMs, Samsung is intent on stretching their share to closer to 50 percent,” he said.

Newman said the company is gaining significant market share in the NAND sector.

“Although Samsung cares about profits, their actions have been opportunistic and more aggressive than we predicted at the expense of laggards particularly Micron Technology in DRAMs and SK hynix in NANDs,” he said.

SK hynix is expected to suffer. “In NAND, we see Samsung continuing to stretch their lead in 3D NAND, which will put continued pressure on the rest of the field. SK hynix is one of the two obvious losers.”

Newman said that Samsung’s antics have destroyed the “level of trust” among competitors, perhaps “permanently,” as demand has dropped drastically with PC sales growth down to high single digits in 2015 with this year shaping up to be the same.

“Sales of smartphones, the main savior to memory demand growth have also weakened considerably to single digit growth this year and servers with datacenters are not strong enough to absorb the excess, particularly in DRAM,” Newman said.

He is worried that Samsung could create an oversupply in the industry.

“The oversupply issue is if anything only getting worse, with higher than normal inventories now an even bigger worry. Although we were right about the shrink slowing, thus reducing supply growth, the flip side of this trend is that capital spending and R&D costs are soaring thus putting a dent in memory cost declines,” he said.

China’s potential entry into the market and new technologies will provide further worries “over the longer term.”

“Today’s oversupply situation would become infinitely worse if and when China’s XMC ramps up big amounts of capacity. New memory technologies such as 3D X-point, ReRAM and MRAM stand on the sidelines and threaten to cannibalize part of the mainstream memory market,” he said.

Courtesy-Fud

While there have been cut-down Linux implementations before the increase in numbers of smart, connected devices has made something a little more specialized more important.

Zephyr is all about minimizing the power, space, and cost budgets of IoT hardware.
For example a cut down Linux needs 200KB of RAM and 1MB of flash, IoT end points, which will often be controlled by tiny microcontrollers.

Zephyr has a small footpoint “microkernel” and an even tinier “nanokernel.” All this enables it to be CPU architecture independent, run on as little as 10KB while being scalable.

It can still support a broad range of wireless and wired technologies and of course is entirely open saucy released under the Apache v2.0 License.

It works on Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, and IEEE 802.15.4 (6LoWPAN) at the moment and supports x86, ARM, and ARC architectures.

Courtesy-Fud

The Android fork, which adds conventional desktop features such as a taskbar, start menu and support for multiple windows, has been a huge hit, overshadowing the implementation of Android revealed in Google’s recent high-end tablet the Pixel C.

The initial build, as ever, is designed to fish for bugs and aid developers. A beta will follow in the coming weeks. The Alpha doesn’t contain Google Mobile Services apps such as the Play store and Gmail, but the finished version will. In the meantime, users can sideload the gApps package or go to the Amazon Web Store.

There may also be problems with some video codecs, but we’re told this is a licensing issue which will be resolved in the final version too. In the meantime, the first release is perfectly useable.

Compatibility with most Android apps is instant, but the user community can ‘upvote’ their favourites on the Remix OS site to flag what’s working best in each category.

The company has already released a small desktop machine of its own, called the Remix Mini, the world’s first fully functioning Android PC, priced at just $70 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. It has also developed a 2-in-1 ultrabook, the Remix Ultra, and has licensed Remix OS to several Far East tablet manufacturers.

In this new move, the company has teamed up with Android-x86, a group that has been working on an executable version of Android for computers since 2009, to launch a Remix OS installer which will allow existing hardware to become Remix OS powered, or as a partition on a dual-boot machine.

A third option is to store the OS on a USB stick, meaning that you can make any computer your own. This technique has already been popular through the Keepod programme which offers Android on a stick to countries without access to high-speed computers.

The advantages of Remix OS to the developing world are significant. Bench tests have shown that Remix OS works significantly faster than Windows, which will potentially breathe new life into older machines and make modern machines run at previously impossible speeds.

Remix OS was designed by three ex-Google engineers and includes access to the full Google Apps suite and the Google Play store.

David Ko, co-founder of Jide Technology, said: “Today’s public release of Remix OS, based on Android-x86, is something that we’ve been working towards since we founded Jide Technology in 2014.

“All of us are driven by the goal of making computing a more accessible experience, and this free, public release allows us to do this. We believe Remix OS is the natural evolution of Android and we’re proud to be at the forefront of this change.”

The public Alpha will be available to download from Jide and android-x86 from 12 January, and a beta update is expected swiftly afterwards. The INQUIRER has been using a Remix Mini for over a month now, and a full review of the operating system is coming soon.

Courtesy-TheInq

In an address on day two of Microsoft’s Future Decoded event in London, Kevin Ashton showed examples of supposed IoT devices such as the wine bottle that tells you if you’re drunk and the toothbrush that tells you if you’ve brushed your teeth.

Describing Kickstarter as “where bad ideas go to get funded”, he talked about the true nature of IoT and its roots in machine-to-machine communication that’s neither accessed nor processed by humans.

“This information isn’t going on a spreadsheet or a pivot table,” he explained. “It’s a sensor on a device in the world sending data to another device which makes a decision which feeds out into the world.”

In short: “We don’t collect data. Machines collect data from sensors and we turn the world into data.”

The perfect example of this is the mobile phone. “We call a phone a phone for legacy reasons,” he said. “A phone is just an app on your device. You probably use Candy Crush or Angry Birds more than you use it for actual calls. What a smartphone actually is, is a wireless sensor platform.”

He said that historically the UK has been at the forefront of internet developments, so it’s only right that the country takes a leading role in the evolution of the IoT.

Citing self-driving cars as a good example of the IoT at work, he predicted that by 2030 such vehicles will be the norm, and that the question should not be “Are self-driving cars safe?” but “Are human-driven cars safe?”, pointing out that 3,000 people are killed on the roads every day by human-driven cars, and so far at least, there have been no serious accidents involving autonomous vehicles.

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/are-some-iot-gadgets-pointless.html

These are devices like smart thermostats that allow users to remotely control household temperatures or LED lights that can be switched on and off from a smartphone. Basically it is the same thing as the IoT concept in the residential setting.

Navigant Research, global revenue from shipments of residential IoT devices is expected to total more than US$330 billion from 2015-2025. That is a lot of talking fridges and Internet connected underware.

Neil Strother, principal research analyst with Navigant Research said that the IoT is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without any edge pieces, with the number of pieces growing exponentially into the billions.

“Communicating devices in the IoT traverse a wide range of industries and sectors-virtually all areas of life can expect to see some form of this connected world.”

Despite the many drivers for the residential IoT market, there are at present multiple protocols and standards that are creating an interoperability barrier, he said.
Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, and others are all vying for market viability, which is creating confusion for consumers and stalling overall adoption, he said.

Courtesy-Fud

The carrier also announced it is creating a new dedicated network core for IoT connections that can scale far beyond the ability of its existing networks with the intent to reach billions of sensors and devices.

“Continued innovation in smart cities, connected cars and wearables demonstrates that IoT is the future for how we will live and work,” said Mike Lanman, senior vice president of enterprise products at Verizon during an event held at Verizon’s San Francisco Innovation Center. He said Verizon is taking a “holistic approach” to help expand the IoT market from millions of connections to billions. The event was webcast.

Other major wireless carriers, including AT&T, are developing programs to offer a range of services to industries and cities for connecting IoT sensors to wireless networks and then to cloud services for data analysis.

At Verizon, Lanman said the company is working to lower the cost of connecting billions of existing devices that companies have used for years to Verizon’s network. Holding up a new computer chip made by Sequans Communications, an LTE chip maker, he said the chip will provide a “significant reduction in cost…that changes the game.” It will provide 4G LTE connectivity in modules connected to IoT devices to “make the wide-area network more accessible to developers.”

Also, next year Verizon will launch a new IoT core network within its LTE network to provide a “much lower cost” than with Verizon’s existing wired and wireless networks.

“The cost for an IoT module and the cost to connect will both drop dramatically,” Lanman added. “Whether you are connecting your dog or water meters and any other low-payload devices, we’ll handle it through a new IoT core.”

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/consumer-category/verizon-launches-thingspace-for-iot-development.html

ABI has added up the numbers and divided by its shoe size and multiplied by the age of its youngest child and worked out that China’s IoT market will grow more than five times in the next five years, exceeding $41 billion by 2020.

Dan Shey, VP and IoT practice director at ABI Research said that driving China’s IoT numbers is the smart meter segment.

“It leads all other segments in both connections and revenues. In fact, by 2020, smart meter connections will exceed the next highest market segment in total connections by nearly 10 to 1.”

Other major segments driving the China IoT market are home security and automation, OEM telematics, video surveillance, home appliances, aftermarket telematics and home monitoring.
Home monitoring is expected to become an important market in China as it attempts to care for its aging population, which will reach nearly 340 million people in 2020 for citizens age 55 and older.

“Data analytics revenues will generate the most IoT revenues in China. This statistic is reflective of the sheer volume of smart meter connections,” Shey said.

This is indicative of the relative lack of revenues in both platform and professional services in the China market.

“Platform revenues are not as high due to, for example, a higher share of proprietary embedded telematics deployments, especially by domestic OEM brands. Professional services revenues are similarly not as high, not only due to fewer connections in the telematics segments, with a higher proportion of tethered solutions, but also because IT and consultancy services are not as mature a market segment as in some of the more developed world markets such as Japan, South Korea and the US,” he wrote.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-china-the-fastest-growing-market-for-iot.html

IBM scientists demonstrated a new way to shrink transistor contacts in chips, thus speeding up the replacing of silicon transistors with carbon nanotubes which the firm has been working on for several years.

The company said that the breakthrough brings it closer to creating fully scaled carbon nanotube technology that will power future computing technologies while increasing performance and “opening a pathway to dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful chips”.

Carbon nanotube chips have many benefits over traditional silicon. Transistors in silicon are approaching a point of physical limitation. They have been made smaller year after year, but shrinking the size of the transistor, including the channels and contacts, without compromising performance is becoming increasingly difficult.

Carbon nanotube chips could improve the capabilities of high-performance computers because they allow these contacts to be so small that they are virtually transparent.

This means that the size of the semiconductor can decrease dramatically, while the substrate of carbon nanotubes makes the chip more energy efficient and is a soft and flexible material that could allow new device form factors.

Shu-jen Han, IBM’s manager of nanoscale science and technology, told us in an interview that wearable technology is one of the most exciting areas that this technology could transform owing to the unique property of the substrate, allowing new form factors with better performance and battery life.

However, the breakthrough isn’t about the carbon nanotube material being a better replacement for silicon, but more of an engineering innovation that addresses part of the problem in successfully rolling out better performing and more efficient chips.

“We know what the issue has been, and the limits of the technology, for years. What we solved here is a device-level issue, a one-dimensional structure. We need to make a wafer of them, a high-quality wafer, which does not exist yet,” Shu-jen said.

The next stage for IBM’s research group is to scale up the carbon nanotube technology to make reliable mass produced chips before they can make a difference to businesses and consumers.

Shu-jen said this could take five to 10 years, but could enable big data to be analysed faster and allow cloud data centres to deliver services more efficiently and economically.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/ibm-makes-carbon-nanotube-breakthrough.html

Sales are way up for little-known manufacturers that sell directly to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook, while the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, according to research company IDC.

Internet giants and service providers typically don’t use specialized storage platforms in their sprawling data centers. Instead, they buy vast amounts of capacity in the form of generic hardware that’s controlled by software. As users flock to cloud-based services, that’s a growing business.

Revenue for original design manufacturers that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew by 25.8 percent to more than US$1 billion in the second quarter, according to the latest global IDC report on enterprise storage systems. Overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 percent from last year’s second quarter, reaching $8.8 billion.

These so-called ODMs are low-profile vendors, many of them based in Taiwan, that do a lot of their business manufacturing hardware that’s sold under better known brand names. Examples include Quanta Computer and Wistron.

General enterprises aren’t buying many systems from these vendors, but the trends at work in hyperscale deployments are growing across the industry. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Sales of server-based storage rose 10 percent in the quarter to reach $2.1 billion.

Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the biggest part of the enterprise storage business, logging $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment were down 3.9 percent.

Overall demand for storage capacity continued to grow strongly, with 37 percent more capacity shipped in the quarter compared with a year earlier.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/enterprise-storage-needs-driving-cloud-sales-boom.html