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Are Some IoT Gadgets Pointless?
November 30, 2015 by admin
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The man who first coined the term “Internet of Things” (IoT) has hit out at the bastardisation of the concept, calling on UK developers to lead the charge on making it a reality.
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
Will The IoT Market Value Reach 330 Billion By 2025?
November 25, 2015 by admin
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Beancounters working for analysts Navigant Research have added up some numbers and divided by their shoe size and decided that global revenues from residential IoT devices expected to total more than $330 billion by 2025.
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
Is China The Fastest Growing Market For IoT?
November 5, 2015 by admin
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China’s Internet of Things (IoT) services revenues will grow faster than anywhere else in the world, according to beancounters working at ABI Research.
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 Makes Carbon Nanotube Breakthrough
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IBM’S research and development department has announced “a major engineering breakthrough” in transistor technology that could transform the mobile device space as we know it, especially wearables.
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
IBM And ARM Team Up For IoT
IBM is teaming up with ARM to offer device and risk management for the internet of things.
For those who came in late, IBM has an IoT Foundation cloud platform. Under the deal it will be linked to ARM’s mbed-enabled devices to deliver analytics services.
It is a little odd given that both of them make and design chipsets, but they think that the fusion will enable far more data produced by autonomous IoT devices to be gathered, analysed and acted on.
Products powered by ARM’s mbed chips will automatically register with the IoT Foundation on the SoftLayer infrastructure is built and connect with IBM’s cloud analytics services.
IoT Foundation already includes analytics tools designed to cope with the big data explosion, access to IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service, and security systems.
ARM said that connecting the two would enable delivery of actionable events to control equipment, or alerts and information to users, such as alarm messages on domestic appliances.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/ibm-and-arm-are-teaming-up-for-iot.html
Will ARM’s Mbed OS Help The IoT?
October 13, 2014 by admin
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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.
Africa To Lead Global Bandwidth Demand
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Africa’s demand for Internet access to the rest of the world will grow by an average of 51 percent every year until 2019, ahead of all other regions, according to a forecast by research company Telegeography.
Rapid economic growth and wider Internet use will drive the increase in demand, which will be met mostly by turning on unused capacity in existing cables, according to Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt. Terrestrial links are in demand partly because much of Africa still relies on satellite, which is far more expensive per bit than wired broadband, he said.
Most Internet bandwidth between continents is provided by undersea cables built and financed by groups of service providers. From Africa, most of those links go to Europe. Other carriers pay to tap into those cables and link their customers to the Internet. In some parts of Africa, running cables from coastal areas to the interior is a challenge so satellite remains the major Internet source, Kreifeldt said.
The capacity of international cables landing on African shores is just a fraction of the bandwidth available between Europe, the U.S. and Asia. After seven years of the growth that Telegeography forecasts, from 2012 through 2019, Africa will have 17.2Tbps (bits per second) of links to the outside world. That’s up from just 957Gbps in 2012 but will still be only about one-quarter of the international capacity of Latin America and less than that of Canada, according to Telegeography.
The hunger for the Internet varies among African countries. Through 2019, bandwidth demand is expected to grow fastest in Angola, at 71 percent per year; Tanzania, at 68 percent; and Gabon, at 67 percent.
Many new cables have been built to Africa and around the continent in the past several years, giving service providers excess fiber capacity that can be turned on when needed, Kreifeldt said. As that fiber gets lit up and supply rises, prices should fall for enterprises and other users in African countries, he said. However, due to relative scarcity, a given amount of bandwidth between Africa and Europe costs about 10 times as much as the same size connection between Europe and North America, he said. Africa’s bandwidth gains aren’t expected to shrink that gap.
at&t Partners With China Telecom
AT&T Inc and China Telecom have agreed to broaden the range of their partnership in China and the United States and will look into supporting each other in other regions.
AT&T said the agreement would expand its services for business customers in China and that the companies would consider jointly developing services, including video conferencing and managed hosting.
China’s Supercomputer Uses Homegrown Chips
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China has built its latest supercomputer based entirely on homegrown microprocessors, a major move towards breaking the country’s reliance on Western technology for high-performance computing.
China’s National Supercomputer Center in Jinan debuted the computer last Thursday, according to a report from the country’s state-run press. The supercomputer uses 8,704 “Shenwei 1600″ microprocessors, which were developed by a design center in Shanghai, called the National High Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center.
Details of the microprocessors and the design center were not immediately available.
The supercomputer has a theoretical peak speed of 1.07 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), and a sustained performance of 0.79 petaflops when measured with the Linpack benchmark. This could place it at number 13 in the world’s top 500 supercomputing list. Photos of the chips used and the supercomputer’s data center can be found here.
China’s Shandong Academy of Sciences built the computer. Officials of the academy could not be immediately reached for comment on Monday.
A report from The New York Times said the supercomputer’s name in English was the Sunway BlueLight MPP.
Android To Control Smartphone Market By 2016
April 1, 2011 by admin
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Android will be the operating system of choice for 45% of smartphones shipped by the year 2016. It will take up most of the market share vacated by the soon-to-be exiting of Nokia’s Symbian operating system, according to figures released today by ABI Research.
Although Android will come to be the dominant player in the smartphone market, this doesn’t mean that OSes will necessarily see a big cut in their own market shares, ABI said.
In fact, the firm projects that Apple’s iOS will see its market share rise from 16% in 2010 to 19% in 2016, while Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS is expected to fall slightly from 16% in 2010 to 14% in 2016. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and Samsung’s Bada will also be players in the 2016 smartphone market, as ABI projects those two operating systems to take 10% and 7%, respectively.
ABI vice president Kevin Burden says that although RIM stands to lose a bit between now and 2016, the company will carve a comfortable niche for itself in the enterprise market, as enterprise users will still need the security provided by RIM’s network operations center.
“RIM’s slight loss of share doesn’t mean falling shipments,” he says. “RIM has found its niche, but the consumer market will grow faster than its portion of it.”