Internet of Things Applications

Two of tech’s more venerable names—Nokia and Microsoft—acquired Internet of Things startups recently. Nokia bought French wearables company Withings for $191 million, while the price of Microsoft’s purchase of Italian cloud specialist Solair was undisclosed. But both these tech giants, once at the top of their industries, might be expecting too much from the much ballyhooed Internet of Things.



Take the acrimonious shutdown of Nest’s smart home hub by parent company Alphabet. It sparked an angry blog post from user Arlo Gilbert, the CEO of a healthcare app company, who pointed out that the “thing” in the Internet of Things could be shut down arbitrarily by its manufacturer:

Is the era of IoT bringing an end to the concept of ownership? Are we just buying intentionally temporary hardware? It feels like it.

What drove Gilbert’s outrage is the notion that he could be left with a non-functioning object if the manufacturer decided to brick it. He had no recourse, and Nest didn’t even send him an email to warn him, he wrote. There was a sense that his rights as a consumer were being trampled in the IoT industry’s rush to dream up a network of devices that are always on and always interconnected. (Until they aren’t.)

[...]

It looks like the Microsoft deal couldn’t have come at a better time for Solair. Its struggles resemble those faced by other IoT players, like Revolv, the company that made the ill-fated hub for Nest. “Nobody right now is making money at the hub level,” Revolv founder Mike Soucie told Forbes before his company was acquired by Nest in 2014. “There’s a lot of betting on the long-term future and willingness to take losses. That’s where the market is—placing bets on the future.”

Unlike consumer-facing Revolv, Solair’s software is squarely aimed at companies: helping factories monitor their assembly lines more efficiently, for example. Nokia’s acquisition of Withings is more of a consumer play, given the French firm’s line of smart scales and air-quality monitors. But Revolv’s travails and Solair’s weak financials suggest that neither approach is particularly lucrative at the moment.

Just as Nokia and Microsoft are linked by a disastrous smartphone deal (Microsoft acquired Nokia’s phone-making business in 2014), they’re now both betting that constantly connected devices will take off, whether in factories or in homes. And that’s looking like an increasingly tough sell, for companies or households.

See more at: qz.com

Cisco Systems and IBM have announced that the two companies will partner up on Internet of Things (IoT) analytics with the hopes of using IBM's Watson technology in collaboration with Cisco's massive networking web.



The companies said that they will target multiple industries, including oil & gas, manufacturing, shipping, and mining to provide instantaneous data and insight. Using Watson tech and Cisco's labyrinth of edge devices and end points, the two companies can supply a whole new level of feedback for businesses that would otherwise not have access to this type of information.

"The way we experience and interact with the physical world is being transformed by the power of cloud computing and the Internet of Things. For an oil rig in a remote location or a factory where critical decisions have to be taken immediately, uploading all data to the cloud is not always the best option… [IBM and Cisco are] helping to make these strong analytics capabilities available virtually everywhere, always," said Harriet Green, IBM's GM of Watson IoT.

[...]

In the household, the IoT typically manifests itself in home-automation devices like Amazon's (AMZN) Echo speaker, which can control appliances, heating and cooling systems, and security alarms. Commercially, the IoT can transform inanimate machinery into powerful devices that provide feedback and performance data.

See more at: nasdaq.com

Internet of Things devices are cropping up in schools everywhere. IT is taking note — and so are students After being introduced to the Internet of Things (IoT) by a local software company, Tiffany Davis’ first instinct was to consider what the concept would look like in the K-12 setting. “It was appealing to me because [IoT] is the direction that most products are taking in the business world,” said Davis, who is the instructional technology specialist at John R. Briggs Elementary School in Ashburnham, Mass.



Davis’ re-imagining of IoT for a new context is nothing new. In recent years, the IoT has touched nearly every piece of technology we interact with.

Defined by Gartner as “the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment,” IoT is a somewhat nebulous concept that promises to change the way we use objects, products, and technology in general. In A Simple Explanation Of ‘The Internet Of Things,” Forbes’ Jacob Morgan defines IoT as the act of connecting any device with an on and off switch to the internet (and/or to each other). In the consumer world, these devices include mobile phones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices like Fitbits, and even heavy equipment like jet engines.

[...]

Students create

Students at Davis’ school regularly learn about sensors and how these components detect, measure, and/or respond to physical properties. These days, however, they’re learning it with an IoT-meets-maker movement twist.

“We focus on getting pupils to look at sensor inputs and outputs, and just understand the basics of how these components work,” Davis explained. “Then, we have them take an everyday object like a lunchbox and try to turn it into a smart, connected product.”

[...]

Getting over the humps

In assessing the Internet of Things’ potential in the K-12 space, Nilsson says, “To some extent, it’s quite unpredictable right now.” Some of that uncertainty is based on the sheer number of new devices being introduced every year—a fact that makes it difficult to predict IoT’s future.

“Teachers and administrators will begin to see how all of this [technology] works together, and then use that knowledge to create interactive dashboards and sensors that are spread throughout the schools,” Nilsson said. “The next step will include student wearables that can be monitored via dashboard and used to send reminders (i.e., to exercise more) and alerts.”

[...]

3 key success factors for IoT in education

In How Ubiquitous Connectedness Can Help Transform Pedagogy, Cisco outlines three main factors that must be addressed to ensure widespread and successful adoption of the “Internet of Everything” (IoE) in education. They are:

Security: Cisco says IoE security will become an “enormous issue across all markets,” and particularly in education. “Without assurances, pervasive development of IoE will not take place across educational institutions. Information must be available—yet confidential—when needed, with the owner of the information deciding which people, groups, or organizations may have access to it,” the company states.

Data Integrity: Integrity of data must also be assured, as well as its accuracy, authenticity, timelines, and completeness, according to Cisco. Success will be predicated on an “open platform” that allows all partners working together to use the same baseline technologies.

Education Policies: Policies that encourage adoption of technology in the classroom and its effective integration into curricula are crucial. “Such policies must include sound change management practices among educational institutions to reduce the barriers to technology adoption and increase its scale,” according to the whitepaper.

See more at: eschoolnews.com

With the number of IoT devices reported to hit billions in the next couple of years, households will become fully automated and interconnected, and wearables will become vital in tracking and optimizing our daily activities.



However, recent security research has shown many of these smart devices are prone to security vulnerabilities that might compromise users’ privacy, and even the entire network security of their household. Most have been deemed bot only privacy hazards, but they’ve also been tagged as inherently insecure by design.

How easy is it to hack an IoT device?

Depending on the nature of the smart device, most can usually be breached because of open ports or poorly configured default passwords that can be easily guessed or brute-forced. While sometimes the manufacturer is to blame for these settings, end users share some responsibility as they’re usually not aware of these configurations.

[...]

Who’s to blame?

Both end users and IoT manufactures share security responsibilities. While the manufacturer’s main goal is to sell devices that address a specific need, they don’t always adhere to security best practices or guidelines, nor do they plan for future software or security patches.

[...]

What can you do about it?

Changing default configuration settings for any home network IoT device and even connecting them to a secondary network would be a good approach to avoid any potential full network problems. It’s also recommended that you learn everything you can about an IoT device before you buy it to make sure it comes with built-in security features that can be customized according to your own specifications.

[...]

See more at: macworld.com

How will you interact with the Internet of Things in your smart home of the future? Perhaps by looking your connected air conditioning unit in the lens from the comfort of your sofa and fanning your face with your hand to tell it to crank up its cooling jets.



At least that’s the vision of Italian startup Cogisen, which is hoping to help drive a new generation of richer interface technology that will combine different forms of interaction, such as voice commands and gestures, all made less error prone and/or abstract by adding “eye contact” into the mix. (If no less creepy… Look into the machine and the machine looks into you, right?)

The startup has built an image processing platform, called Sencogi, which has a first focus on gaze-tracking — with plenty of potential being glimpsed by the team beyond that, whether it’s helping to power vision systems for autonomous vehicles by detecting pedestrians, or performing other specific object-tracking tasks for niche applications as industry needs demand.

[...]

“Vehicles will never be 100 percent autonomous. They’ll be decreased degrees of autonomy. It’s easy for a car to decide to take away control from you — but it’s very hard for the car to decide when to give you back control. For that they need to understand your attention, so you need gaze tracking,” adds Rijnders, discussing one potential use-case in the automotive domain.

[...]

Rijnders’ background is in aerospace engineering. He previously worked for Ferrari developing simulators for Formula 1, which is where he says the germ of the idea to approach the hard problem of image processing from another angle occurred to him.

“There you have to do very non-linear, transient, dynamic multi-physics modeling, so very, very complex modeling, and I realized what the next generation of algorithms would need to be able to do for engineering. And at a certain point I realized that there was a need in image processing for such algorithms,” he says, of his time at Ferrari.

“If you think about the infinity of light conditions and different types of faces and points of view relative to the camera and camera quality for following sub-pixel movement of the irises — very, very difficult image processing problem to solve… We can basically detect signal signatures in image processing which are far more sparse and far more difficult than what has been possible up to now in the state of the art of image processing.”

See more at: techcrunch.com

Internet of Things is so hot right now that “poser companies” abound, said one local expert at this week’s Philly IoT Meetup. But a definition is a little harder to come by.



Now might be a good time to come clean if you don’t totally understand what the Internet of Things (IoT) means.

Turns out it’s nearly impossible to define. That’s what two experts said at this week’s Philly IoT Meetup, which brought around 75 people to product firm Bresslergroup’s offices at 12th and Arch. But Rick Bullotta, former CTO of ThingWorx, gave it a shot anyway.

[...]

On the flip side, quickly growing awareness of IoT among Chief Experience Officers provides opportunities for entrepreneurs.

“These companies are saying, ‘We have to get ourselves some of that IoT stuff. How do we do that?'” said Bullotta.

They’ll need to look to external sources to make up for a lack of internal R&D, technical maturity and digital transformation mindset. (Bulotta knows this from experience. His company, ThingWorx, got acquired by PTC, a Boston-area company that badly wanted to get into the IoT space and was willing to pay for $112 million for it.

See more at: technical.ly

It’s been almost 10 years since Apple unveiled the iPhone. Since that day, the smartphone has been the overwhelming driver of innovation in the technology industry. Cameras, Wi-Fi, batteries, touch sensors, baseband processors and memory chips — in less than a decade, these components have made stunning advances to keep up with consumer demand to have sleeker, more powerful devices every year.



For chip makers, the pressure has been to produce smaller, more powerful components for each generation of phones. Denser, faster, cheaper — these mantras have driven our industry for as long as most people can remember.

But there’s a new game in town. The smartphone era is not over, but the growth rate is slowing. The key growth driver in hardware could soon be the Internet of Things. Over the next decade, this industry will churn out tens of billions of connected sensor devices. These will be used in every corner of the world — from highways to arteries — to gather new insights to help us live and work better.

This chapter will reshape the technology hardware industry in profound ways, and even reverse many of the changes brought about by the smartphone era. To understand how profound this shift could be, it’s important to know how past markets have shaped the way computers are built.

[...]

New rules in the era of “things”

Let’s look at the Internet of Things. This is the hardware industry of the future, and it will run on billions of sensor devices. But the problem is, these devices will exist in all sorts of environments. Some will live in factories; some will be outside; some will collect data underwater. The basic functionality of these smart nodes is very similar (sense data, collect data, store data, communicate data); however, the deployment requirements vary greatly.

A sensor node in a car engine, for example, will need to withstand high temperatures. Sensor nodes spread across farmland might require powerful radio components to send data over long distances. Most sensors will need to operate at very low power consumption (because they won’t be plugged in), but for some, this will be even more important than others.

Even more confusing, at this point we simply don’t know the exact requirements for most IoT applications. It’s just too early in the process. But we have to start building hardware for it anyway! This presents all kinds of challenges to existing models of chip production.

See more at: techcrunch.com