This week around the web, EE Times looks at Marvell’s Kinoma gateway and Smart Home Cloud Center, and HTC has set up a Connected Products business, targeting the smart home and mHealth. We Got Served walks you through how to install a Nest, which shows the ease that consumers can adopt smart home tech, ST&T has chosen the Ikanos Vx500 chipset for its next-gen smart home gateway platform.
Sengled has revealed a trio of smart bulbs that can add a speaker, WiFi range extender or monitoring unit to any standard light socket. Most interesting is the Snap, which combines a webcam, motion sensor, microphone and speaker into the bulb form factor. TechHive recaps 10 of the best and worst smart home devices it saw at CES, and EE Times looks back at the Bosch CES keynote, where the industrial giant warns “disrupt or be disrupted.”
Gigaom argues that upcoming US legislation is a good thing for privacy in the IoT, as data collection is inevitable and consumers should be able to have a say in how their data is used once the ship has sailed. After both companies deny the rumored Samsung-BlackBerry acquisition, The Verge ponders the potential of the Internet of QNX powered Samsung things.
Pocket Lint lists 10 fitness wearables to look forward to this year, and The Verge looks at several wireless ear buds, which provide an information link to a smartphone that consumers may be more receptive to than a pair of smart glasses, with some incorporating fitness tracking too. Google has also ended its Google Glass explorer program, and appointed Nest’s Tony Faddell to oversee development of the new version of the smart glasses.
Stream and its IoT-X global communication platform has joined the Open Mobile Alliance and now supports OMA’s Lightweight M2M (LWM2M) protocol, alongside ZigBee, Z-Wave, LoRa, BLE, cellular, satellite and WiFi. Dutch telco KPN will launch LoRa M2M services in 2015, Eurotech has released v3.0 of its Everyware software stack for its Java OSGi gateways, and here’s a look at how enterprise IT can get ready for the IoT with 10 Steps to Success.
Semtech has acquired Enverv, adding its power line communication and smart grid portfolio to its LoRa communications platform, Accenture has acquired Structure, a Houston-based utility systems integrator, for its smart grid expertise, and the technology behind Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system is being put to use in a Canadian smart grid partnership.
GM has said it is open to working with Google on self-driving cars, but is cautious about the partner dynamic with the tech giant, but a survey finds that UK consumers are horrified by self-driving cars, suggesting that a heavy-dose of marketing will be needed before pushing these to the populace. Verizon has launched a connected car service to compete against GM’s OnStar, and Weaved is pushing its software and design production service to people with an idea, promising to design and build a company’s ideas, leveraging the power of Gemtek, the ODM behind Belkin and Linksys.
Recombu argues that the current state of automation simply time-shifts your work, putting all the effort you save in the future to waste in a lengthy set-up service, and is therefore a waste of time. In a similar vein, InfoWorld argues against the fallacy of the headless device in the IoT, pointing out that not everyone can or will interact with connected objects via smartphones and will still depend on physical control.