In the internet of things, the Federal Trade Commission sees the possibility of flourishing new markets. But it also sees a prologue to Black Mirror: in a new report that probes the privacy implications of connected devices, the commission surveys a landscape of possible dystopian futures. Get ready for invasive marketing, unending consumer surveillance, invisible nudging, and new potential for government spying and novel forms of hacking. The report seeks to identify the dangers to consumers presented by the internet of things. How might information gleaned from a car GPS, fitness tracker or smart refrigerator lead to negative effects on your creditworthiness, employability, or insurance premiums? As a prelude to the development of best practices, and perhaps new legislation, the FTC aims to establish industry standards for data gathering and use. See more at : theverge.com
Tim O’Reilly has been at the cutting edge of the Internet since it went commercial. In fact, he helped take it there: In August 1993 he released the Global Network Navigator, a web page containing information, catalogs and a marketplace, which may have been the first site with advertising. The IoT is really about human augmentation. The applications are profoundly different when you have sensors and data driving the decision-making. Uber is a company built around location awareness. An Uber driver is an augmented taxi driver, with real-time location awareness. An Uber passenger is an augmented passenger, who knows when the cab will show up. Uber is about eliminating slack time and worry. People would call it “IoT” if there was a driverless car, but it already is part of the IoT. You can measure, test and change things dynamically. The IoT is about the interpolation of computer hardware and software into all sorts of things. Reed more at: nytimes.com
When it comes to building up clout in an emerging industry, Google pulls out all the stops. And doing that usually involves spending lots of money. Google Research, Google’s portal to the academic world, is making major investments right now, building up an innovation and research program dedicated to the nascent collection of products and technologies collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT). It's created a research grant program called Open Web of Things to attract talent to the company, as well as to fund and give technical support to promising research groups in academia. The application process is now closed, and Google will choose the recipients by this spring. Reed more at : fastcompany.com
I did not attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show two weeks ago, but I eagerly read about the prototypes for new consumer gadgets and services that debuted there. From all accounts, the Internet of Things was a major theme of the show. Yet, to my dismay, the coverage I saw coming out of the event was decidedly ambivalent, even dismissive, when it came to the potential of the Internet of Things. How can this be? The Internet of Things (IoT) has been heralded far and wide as the next great revolution in technology. Gartner is predicting that the Internet of Things will include 26 billion connected devices by 2020, and Cisco forecasts $19 trillion in economic value over the next decade. Yet when top tech companies put their most exciting ideas for IoT devices in front of the savviest tech writers and consumers, the reaction is lukewarm. See more at: venturebeat.com
The Internet of Things is not a ways down the road, it’s banging on the door. According to Gartner, there will be about 4.9 billion connected units in use this year; by 2020, that number will grow to 26 billion. Another study said that nearly 20 percent of the planet’s developers are working in some capacity on projects related to the Internet of Things. That kind of far-reaching, fast-growing technology has a lot of people seriously worried about privacy and security. Eugene Kaspersky even calls IoT the Internet of Threats because of the potentially catastrophic danger of the ever increasing number of smart devices connected to the Internet. See more at: gcn.com
The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, together with Microsoft Israel R&D center, launched a special initiative in a lab for developing software and systems at the Technion’s computer science faculty. The initiative will focus on the field of Internet of Things and will be used by students for developing innovative technologies during their computer science studies. The physical appearance and technology infrastructure at the lab are designed to resemble the work environment of a startup company, with all the latest computer equipment, including smartphones and tablets for running applications during their development. The clean design lines of lab simulate those of a real high-tech company, and give the students the feel of an authentic development environment of an R&D center or a startup company. See more at jewishbusinessnews.com
The Internet of Things (IoT) is heralded as one of the biggest technological advances of our age. The idea that literally billions of devices and sensors will be connected to the network and that we’ll be able to derive meaningful and valuable insights from the data those devices transmit is an exciting one. But the reality of building IoT applications is pretty complex – there are no standards, little consistency in terms of how things are done and few solid case studies to go by. There’s also a plethora of startups aimed at making IoT development easier. But in the race to capture mindshare, there is lots of movement in the startup space. Witness the case of IoT platform Octoblu which was acquired by Citrix only months after launching. See more at: forbes.com
