IBM And ARM Team Up For IoT

IBM is teaming up with ARM to offer device and risk management for the internet of things.

Will ARM’s Mbed OS Help The IoT?

ARM has announced a software tool to make Internet of Things (IoT) deployment faster and easier and thus speed up the creation of IoT devices.

Called the Mbed IoT Device Platform, the software is primarily an operating system (OS) built around open standards that claims to “bring Internet protocols, security and standards-based manageability into one integrated tool” in order to save money and energy in making IoT devices.

The Mbed IoT Device Platform is made up chiefly of the Mbed OS, a free operating system for Cortex-M processor based devices that “consolidates the building blocks of the IoT in one integrated set of software components” and contains security, communication and device management features to enable the development of lower power IoT devices.

The OS will be available to Mbed partners in the fourth quarter for early development, with the first production devices due in 2015 to allow companies to focus on innovation, reducing development costs and time to market.

It will also support standards such as Bluetooth Smart, 2G, 3G, LTE and CDMA cellular technologies, Thread, WiFi, and 802.15.4/6LoWPAN along with TLS/DTLS, CoAP, HTTP, MQTT and Lightweight M2M, ARM said.

The Mbed OS will also feature the Mbed Device Server, a licensable software product that provides the required server-side technologies to connect and manage devices in a more secure way. It also provides a bridge between the protocols designed for use on IoT devices and the APIs that are used by web developers.

“This simplifies the integration of IoT devices that provide ‘little data’ into cloud frameworks that deploy big data analytics on the aggregated information,” said ARM. “Built around open standards, the product scales to handle the connections and management of millions of devices.”

Mbed Device Server is available now, with an aim to improve efficiency, security and manageability for devices using a “standards-based and IoT approach”, ARM said.

The software also comes with its own community, Mbed.org, which is the focus point for a more than 70,000 developers around the platform. The website provides a database of hardware development kits, a repository for reusable software components, reference applications, documentation and web-based development tools. It is already up and running, ARM said.

“Deploying IoT-enabled products and services requires a diverse set of technologies and skills to be coordinated across an organization,” said ARM CEO Simon Segars. “ARM Mbed will make this easier by offering the necessary building blocks to enable our expanding set of ecosystem partners to focus on the problems they need to solve to differentiate their products, instead of common infrastructure technologies. This will accelerate the growth and adoption of the IoT in all sectors of the global economy.”

ARM is launching Mbed with a number of partners, including Atmel, CSR, Ericsson, Farnell, Freescale, IBM, KDDI, Marvell, Megachips, Multitech, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Renesas, Seecontrol, Semtech, Silicon Labs, Stream Technologies, ST, Telenor Connexion, Telefonica, Thundersoft, u-blox, wot.io and Zebra.

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Is Google Diverse?

Google Inc  shared the gender and ethnic makeup of its 50,000-strong workforce on Wednesday, disclosing a significantly below-average proportion of minorities and women employees that it said was “miles from where we want to be.”

Google’s disclosure of its workforce demographics represented a rare move for a U.S. company, even if the figures came as no surprise to those familiar with Silicon Valley, an industry long scrutinized for its lack of diversity. Blacks and Hispanics made up just 2 and 3 percent of overall employees at Google, respectively, while women accounted for 30 percent, the company said in a detailed blogpost.

That compares with the U.S. workforce average of about 47 percent women in 2012, according to the Department of Labor. For blacks and people of Hispanic descent, it was 12 and 16 percent, respectively.

“Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations,said in the blog posting.

The employment gaps for women and minorities in the tech sector may stem from education, Bock said. Women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States; blacks and Hispanics make up less than 10 percent of U.S. college grads and collect fewer than 5 percent of degrees in computer science majors, respectively, he argued.

But Bock, who added that Google has donated more than $40 million to organizations promoting computer science education among women, said Google recognized the extent of the internal problem and was open to discussion about possible solutions.

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Will IBM Realize Growth In 2015?

International Business Machines Corp said it is projecting growth in its hardware sector next year as the company invests in research and development and abandons low-performing ventures.

The comments come less than one month after the world’s largest technology service company reported its lowest quarterly revenue in five years, weighed by sluggish global demand for its hardware, which plunged 23 percent in the first quarter of 2014.

The company added that growth in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa remain strong, and blamed falling revenue in China on government reforms affecting state-owned clients, and on the country’s hardware-heavy portfolio.

“We move on and we spread ourselves out, more industries, more clients, cloud, data, et cetera, around there,” said IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty at an investor briefing on Wednesday.

Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter said to stabilize the hardware sector IBM would continue to “refresh” hardware and further invest in research and development.

“Quite frankly, we are seeing very good growth out of software, good growth out of services, but challenges in hardware,” said Schroeter. “We will stabilize that hardware base and I am comfortable we will make that happen in 2014,” he said.

He reiterated the company’s EPS target for 2015 of at least $20. He expects a shift to higher-value business to bring in $3.25 and share repurchases to add $2 in earnings per share by 2015.

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Venture Capaitalist Going Internet Again

Venture capitalists invested more money into Internet companies last year than they have since the dot-com bust, according to a survey published last Friday.

Internet companies in the U.S. took in $7.1 billion from VCs in 1,059 deals in 2013, the highest level of Internet investment in terms of dollars and deals since 2001, according to The MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters. In comparison, VC investment in Internet companies totaled $6.7 billion in 995 deals in 2012, another strong year, according to the MoneyTree report.

In addition, VCs invested $110 billion in 1,523 software industry deals last year, the highest level in both dollars and number of deals for the sector since 2000, according to the MoneyTree report. VC dollars going into software rose 27 percent year over year, while the number of deals increased 10 percent.

The amount of money invested in the software industry accounted for 37 percent of total VC investments in 2013, the highest percentage since the MoneyTree report was initiated in 1995.

All this is taking place against a backdrop of a generally strong VC environment, as VCs invested $29.4 billion in 3,995 deals across all sectors in 2013, a year-over-year increase of 7 percent in dollars and 4 percent in deals, according to the report.

Companies involved in big data, mobile apps, security, digital marketing, and medical and health software are among those that are especially interesting to VCs, according to Mark McCaffrey, PwC’s U.S. and global software leader.

Top deals in the fourth quarter of 2013 included a $225,000 investment in Pinterest, a site for sharing photos, recipes and other items of personal interest, and a $177,514 investment in Palantir Technologies, a government contractor in the systems integration business, according to MoneyTree data.

Going into 2014 a sense of optimism prevails, but this does not mean that the tech industry is going through a bubble of the sort that arose in 1999 and 2000, McCaffrey said.

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HTC To Have Many Tablets

Smartphone maker HTC plans to introduce a range of different tablet computers to gain a its share in the fast-growing market, a company executive said on Tuesday.

The global market for tablets, started only last year with Apple’s iPad, will likely grow to 108 million devices next year, compared with just 17.6 million in 2010, according to research firm Gartner.

“I really believe that the tablet market is really going to be a big market in the future and this is just the start,” HTC Europe head Florian Seiche told the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

“In five years’ time, schools will have tablets probably instead of physical notebooks. I think that’s going to be such a massive wave of additional penetration in society… I think we can’t even guess the potential.”

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