A smart car seat, an authentication platform for self-check-in at hotels and on-demand network management software were some of the "art of the possible" technologies featured at the AT&T Innovation Showcase in New York Friday. The technologies underscored AT&T's plan to shift to a 75 percent software-defined network by 2020, the company said. Product prototypes included a car seat developed by an AT&T intern that sends an alert to a phone if a loved one or pet is locked in a hot car, it said. An omnichannel analytics solution could aggregate and analyze a customer’s journey across all customer care channels, including phone calls, emails, online chats and tweets, it said. The App2Door authentication platform would let users bypass the front desk at a hotel and use a virtual mobile key to check in via Bluetooth Smart. The Pilgrim project would enable users to monitor and control all of their connected devices using a single app. A personal safety monitoring app from AT&T Digital Life would let a user connect to AT&T’s professional monitoring center when not at home and enable location services on request. A user could have the app contact the monitoring center in response to a programmed if-then scenario involving a specific situation such as walking to a car alone late at night, AT&T said.

The Thread Group announced the winner of its first quarterly Innovation Enabler Program (see 1501280033), which it launched in January to give early stage companies a quick way to develop products for the connected home. The Thread Group tapped Ubiant as winner for its cloud-based energy management platform. Thread said its networking protocol will be implemented into Ubiant’s Hemis, calling it the first real estate cloud platform to be empowered by “high-end learning abilities.” Hemis mimics the five senses and “understands its environment” by collecting and analyzing large amounts of information in real time, including a wide range of data covering temperature, humidity, brightness, carbon dioxide and human presence, said Thread. Ubiant will incorporate the Thread specification into the Hemis platform to “seamlessly and securely” connect it with other devices in the home, said Thread.

Verizon is working with a handful of the top telecom equipment firms on software defined networks, which SDN advocates have said can cut carrier costs by using hardware-controlled software. With Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Juniper Networks and Nokia Networks, the carrier said it's "transforming its network" through SDN, "laying the groundwork for new innovative services and applications." Centralized network control will lead to "network-wide service creation and near real-time service delivery," said Verizon in a news release Tuesday. It said Verizon and the vendors wrote a document with specifications and reference architecture. "Cloud technologies hold the promise for true innovation in our industry," said Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri. Cisco CEO John Chambers said his company and Verizon will work on making money from what his firm calls the Internet of Everything, which he has said could be worth a cumulative $19 trillion by 2020 (see report in the Jan. 9, 2014, issue).

The “smartphone opportunity” remains a “strong positive” for Qualcomm, which forecasts “continued healthy global demand in the near term and over the next several years” in that segment, CEO Steve Mollenkopf said on an earnings call. “We also continue to gain traction in adjacent areas where our mobile technologies and capabilities can deliver next-generation solutions.” Areas such as IoT and the connected car “are expected to represent large new opportunities for Qualcomm, with over 5 billion new non-phone connected device shipments expected in calendar year 2018,” he said. In connected car, Qualcomm has more than 40 design wins with “15-plus” OEMs, and its new two LTE modems, the Snapdragon X12 and X5, will “augment our portfolio to support connectivity across all tiers of the automotive industry,” he said.

A version of the Senate’s IoT resolution, S Res-110, was introduced in the House Tuesday by Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J. H Res-195, which calls for the creation of “a national strategy for the Internet of Things to promote economic growth and consumer empowerment,” was referred to the House Commerce Committee.

IBM will invest $3 billion over the next four years to establish a new IoT business unit, including building a cloud-based open platform “designed to help clients and ecosystem partners build IoT solutions,” the company said in a Tuesday announcement. The open platform will give manufacturers “the ability to design and produce a new generation of connected devices that are better optimized for the IoT, and to help business leaders across industries create systems that better fuse enterprise and IoT data to inform decision-making,” IBM said. IBM estimates 90 percent of all data generated by smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances “is never analyzed or acted on,” the company said. “As much as 60 percent of this data begins to lose value within milliseconds of being generated.” To address that challenge, IBM’s open platform “will provide new analytics services that clients, partners and IBM will use to design and deliver vertical industry IoT solutions,” the company said.

The Wireless IoT Forum launched to support and promote the deployment of the IoT worldwide and to drive the widespread adoption of wireless wide-area networking technologies in licensed and unlicensed spectrum, it said Tuesday. Founding members will be announced at the M2M World Congress in London April 28. The forum said it plans to promote and market IoT benefits for companies “building the ecosystem” including fixed and wireless network operators, infrastructure providers, app developers in utilities, government and specialist SMEs (small and medium enterprises), semiconductor vendors, radio technology providers, module developers, systems integrators and vertical end users. The wireless IoT "is bringing connectivity and control to an order of magnitude more devices,” said William Webb, CEO, Wireless IoT Forum, and president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Webb cited the “tremendous amount of work” in the IoT world so far and said success lies in the promotion of open standards. The forum will work with key stakeholders from across the value chain on requirements that “inform and accelerate standards development and deployments,” it said.

The Senate unanimously approved an IoT resolution to “promote economic growth and greater consumer empowerment,” said a joint news release Tuesday. The resolution was introduced by Sens. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, earlier this month (see 1503040052) after the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on IoT earlier this year (see 1502110035), and “calls for a modern framework around innovation,” recognizes the “importance of consensus-based best practices and the need for innovators to drive the future development” of IoT. The bipartisan resolution “incentives the use of new technologies and seeks to maximize consumer opportunity and economic growth,” Fischer said. “Passing this resolution underscores our strong commitment to fostering innovation, protecting consumers and finding solutions to our toughest problems through technology-driven solutions,” Booker said. “Innovation and free-market principles must drive our hands-off regulatory approach, not overregulation,” Ayotte said. “As we work to advance the Internet of Things, we must remain committed to empowering consumers, developing technological safeguards while enabling innovation, and improving the quality of life for future generations,” Schatz said. Also Tuesday, a House Commerce Subcommittee held an IoT hearing (see 1503240040).

Panasonic will provide access to its software, patents and experience royalty-free to speed development of the Internet of Things, it said Monday at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Jose. The company, a board member of the AllSeen Alliance, said it would also boost its intellectual property contributions to the alliance. Panasonic will make available mature and tested device-to-cloud software technology currently being used in home monitoring systems, solar energy and in retail applications, the company said. Chief Technology Officer Todd Rytting said Panasonic hopes its IoT initiative will “inspire other global companies to contribute intellectual property and ideas to making networks work together through this alliance.” Other premier members of the AllSeen Alliance are Electrolux, Haier, LG, Microsoft, Qeo, Qualcomm, Sharp, Sony, Silicon Image and TP-Link.

A “lack of effective methods to marry computers and networks with timing systems” could have a negative impact on a future filled with Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as driverless cars and “smart” electrical grids that depend on split-second precision to prevent highway collisions and power outages, said a new report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Computers and networks were designed to operate optimally without precise timing, not to make safety-related timed decisions such as required based on whether an item in front of a driverless car is a plastic bag or a child running, the NIST report said. “Imagine writing a letter to your friend saying it is now 2:30 p.m., and then sending it by snail mail so he can synchronize his watch with yours,” report author Marc Weiss of NIST said in a news release. “That’s the equivalent of how accurate the timing of messages are in computers and systems right now,” he said. “The transfer delay must be accounted for to do the things that are expected of the IoT” or IoT growth will be “severely hampered.”