The 2015 NASCAR season got underway Sunday with the Daytona 500, and Sprint used the event to take on AT&T and Verizon. Sprint, which said in December that it would end its NASCAR sponsorship after the 2016 season, aired the same offer repeatedly during Sunday’s broadcast: “Bring us your Verizon or AT&T bill and we’ll cut your rate plan in half.”
Enterprise adoption of the Internet of Things is still "relatively low" but “starting to gain momentum,” said an ABI Research report commissioned by Verizon Enterprise Solutions. The number of business-to-business IoT connections will quadruple between 2014 and 2020, rising to 5.4 billion connections globally, said the report. Social media and mobile technology are transforming consumer and citizen expectations about IoT, and the dropping costs of sensors, connectivity and processing power are making IoT a more viable proposition to a broader set of organizations, it said. An improving economy has brought new entrants in the enterprise market that are using IoT as a “roadmap to improve their customers' experiences, accelerate growth and create new business models that are driving societal innovation,” said Mark Bartolomeo, Verizon vice president-IoT Connected Solutions. In the automotive industry, 14 car manufacturers with 80 percent of the worldwide market have a connected car strategy, Verizon said. More than 13 million health and fitness tracking devices will be introduced in the workplace by 2018 as part of employer-sponsored wellness programs to help reduce the cost of healthcare, it said, and by 2025 smart cities capabilities will become a “critical consideration” for companies deciding where to invest and open facilities, “due to their impact on operating costs and talent availability." Verizon saw 45 percent year-over-year revenue growth in its IoT business in 2014, with 4G LTE activations growing 135 percent, the company said. Verizon estimates just 10 percent of enterprises have deployed IoT technologies extensively. That indicates many organizations “are in a pilot phase or are waiting for more insights from early adopters,” said the company, including the automotive market. More than 600 million vehicles worldwide aren't connected to a network, according to Verizon data. While the core technologies powering IoT -- sensors, cloud computing and intelligent networking -- are familiar to most businesses and public sector organizations, formulating a viable strategy and developing IoT solutions can be highly complex, said Bartolomeo. "There's still a lot more work to be done” in creating and ratifying standards, he said. "As machine-to-machine technology adoption continues to move downstream with millions of endpoints connected, it will change how we see cybersecurity and privacy." Verizon’s role is to “help key decision makers tackle complexities like security head-on by encouraging a more proactive posture in order to create value for their organizations while reducing potential risk," the company said.
Lenovo and white box suppliers were the big winners and Apple a big loser in the 2014 tablets market, which saw overall global unit shipments rise 6.6 percent to 242.2 million, Strategy Analytics said Monday in two Tablet and Touchscreen Strategies reports. Lenovo’s market share last year climbed more than 1.1 percentage points to 4.7 percent on the strength of a 41 percent increase in shipments to 11.5 million tablets, Strategy Analytics said. IPad shipments fell 14.6 percent to 63.4 million, and Apple’s market share declined to 26.1 percent from 32.6 percent, it said. Shipments from Samsung, the No. 2 brand, fell 0.7 percent to 41.4 million, causing its share to drop to 17.1 percent from 18.3 percent, it said. Apple and Samsung no longer had a majority of the tablets market in 2014 as they did in 2013, it said. Their combined share for 2014 fell to 43.2 percent, and that “trajectory” is likely to continue, Strategy Analytics said. “Leading tablet vendors cannot rely on inertia alone to hold market share while smaller players compete on price on the low end and innovative new form factors on the high end.” The report singled out Lenovo as riding “innovative form factor designs” to score market share gains in tablets. It predicted Windows 10 “could be a game changer” for Windows-based tablets from Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and others as they “attempt to break into the enterprise market and gain market share” at the expense of iPads and Android-based tablets. To “reverse the recent downward trend, Samsung needs to strengthen its position in the enterprise and vertical markets, where considerable growth will be seen in coming years, while new products such as the iPad 12.9-inch Pro version cannot come quickly enough for Apple as it needs to re-ignite growth and demand” in its tablet products, said Peter King, Strategy Analytics service director-Tablet and Touchscreen Strategies. As the tablets market continues to mature, “it is also fragmenting further on price tiers and use case,” said Eric Smith, senior analyst-Tablet and Touchscreen Strategies. Smith sees “an opening” for vendors of Windows-based tablets “to more aggressively target” the enterprise business with the launch of Windows 10 later this year, as corporate chief information officers “value the control and familiarity that Windows could bring to a landscape largely ruled by the bring-your-own-device trend,” he said.
“Tremendous innovation and growth” pervaded the “nascent” smart watch market last year, with global device shipments more than doubling to 5 million units, said market research firm Tractica Monday in a report. Though several “prominent industry players” launched smart watch products in 2014, Apple’s September Apple Watch announcement was the year’s “defining moment” for smart watch, even though the Apple Watch isn’t scheduled to begin shipping until April, Tractica said. “Since Apple’s announcement, there has been a flurry of activity among competitors trying to position and reposition themselves, and we expect a high degree of experimentation in terms of form factor, functionality, and operating system, offering consumers a wide range of options.” Tractica sees Apple Watch as Apple’s “biggest new product introduction since the iPad,” because it’s expected “to stimulate a surge in consumer awareness and adoption of smart watches,” the researchers said. They predict global shipments will grow nearly fivefold to 24.4 million, of which more than two-thirds -- 16.7 million units -- will be Apple Watches. It’s forecasting that the smart watch sector will continue to experience strong growth for the next five years. It sees 94.9 million smart watches shipping annually by 2020, based on a compound annual growth rate of 71 percent.
Silicon Labs announced a Bluetooth Smart portfolio including system-on-chip (SoC) devices, embedded modules, and a Bluegiga Bluetooth Smart software stack and software development kit. Called Blue Gecko, the items are targeted to the connected home, health and fitness, wearables, automotive, CE, audio and industrial automation markets, said the company Monday. Silicon Labs' recent acquisition of Bluegiga brought a scripting language and protocol stack said to facilitate bringing Bluetooth Smart connectivity to IoT applications. Samples of Bluegiga modules based on Blue Gecko SoCs are scheduled for late Q2 availability. Samples of Blue Gecko wireless SoCs are slated for early Q3 delivery. The Bluegiga SDK and Bluetooth Smart software stack will be available to Silicon Labs’ customers at no charge, the company said.
Zayo completed its $675 million acquisition of Latisys's operating units Monday, said the acquirer in a news release. The deal adds eight facilities to Zayo’s data center strategic product group, zColo, and gives it presence in four new markets in Ashburn, Virginia; Denver; Orange County, California; and London.
Verizon invested $17.2 billion in network infrastructure in 2014, putting the company near the top of the list of private investors in U.S. technology, said the carrier in a news release Monday. Over the past three years, the company made more than $50 billion in such investments, and information on these and other figures is in the company's latest 10-K SEC form.
The newly formed LoRa Alliance is accepting membership applications and will formally debut during Mobile World Congress next month, it said. The group's mission is to standardize the low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) being deployed around the world to enable Internet of Things, M2M (machine-to-machine), smart-city and industrial applications, it said in a news release. The LoRaWAN protocol is said to offer bi-directionality, security, mobility for asset tracking, and accurate localization. The LoRaWAN protocol enables new business models and makes the IoT more attractive to both developers and end users, the group said, and satisfies the requirements of many applications that need to go beyond the reach of cellphone towers and Wi-Fi networks. Potential use cases include vending machines that alert distributors when a product is sold out or when the machine requires maintenance; cities that offer smart meters and apps to help drivers find open parking spaces; pet tracking/migration patterns for animal lovers; and cargo tracking for logistics providers. Semtech developed the LoRa platform.
Bluetooth’s recent move toward IP connectivity via IPv6 -- coupled with the implementation of mesh functionality -- could make it a serious threat to ZigBee and Thread in the connected home, said ABI Research. The recently announced Bluetooth 4.2 specification offers improvements in speed, connectivity and security over the previous version, said ABI. Its report said that makes Bluetooth "more viable than ever” in connecting low-power devices such as smart light bulbs and thermostats, wearables and sensors that will be part of the smart home of the future. The most significant Internet of Things-related update from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group is the ability for Bluetooth Smart devices to connect directly to the Internet via IPv6/6LoWPAN (over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) using the new Internet Protocol Support Profile (IPSP), said ABI. A barrier to the adoption of home automation systems has been the cost and complexity of gateways required to connect each device to the Internet, it said, citing the Philips Hue smart LED bulbs. Bluetooth 4.2 offers up to 2.5 times faster data throughput along with packet sizes up to 10 times larger than earlier versions. By shortening the time needed to transfer data, a device can return to the idle state more quickly, said the report, resulting in lower energy usage and longer battery life. Higher data rates result in fewer transmission errors, too, which also contributes to lower energy consumption, making Bluetooth well suited to low-power applications, said ABI. A critical omission from the latest Bluetooth spec is mesh networking capability, which ABI called critical to extending the home network's range, ensuring reliability, boosting performance and raising the network's “overall intelligence.” Competing technologies including ZigBee and Thread offer mesh networking over 802.15.4 chipsets, and while the Bluetooth SIG is working on mesh networking capabilities, a release date hasn’t been set. “In a short-range connectivity solution such as Bluetooth Smart, mesh topologies are necessary to ensure reliable whole-house coverage,” said the industry research firm. With Thread and now Bluetooth offering IPv6 connectivity, “significant momentum” appears to be gathering around IP connectivity for low-power devices in the smart home, along with an expectation for devices to consolidate around 6LoWPAN/IPv6-based solutions for vertical markets in the future, said ABI. The move toward IP-based standards will help ensure interoperability across connectivity technology and device types that make up the IoT, it said.