Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Nokia has announced that joined ConectarAGRO, an industry group in Brazil that is looking to bring IoT technologies to the agriculture market. The group consists of local MNO TIM, likely Nokia’s main partner here, as well as major agribusiness vendors; AGCO, Bayer, CNH Industrial, Jacto, Solinftec, and Trimble. For Nokia, this is a sensible way to snare new business – cozy up with the local MNO (already a Nokia customer) and sell through this channel to a new vertical market or industry that needs IoT platforms and services. This tactic is replicable, in both the same country and same vertical, and can be exported to other territories too, so should drum up good numbers for its WING platform offering. ConectarAGRO…
There is no doubt Augmented Reality (AR) is going to make a big impact on TV just as it has already done in gaming and will do in various spheres including education and architecture. But the starry-eyed prophesies of Mark Zuckerberg and others tend to fall down over considerations of user comfort or experience, which is what sunk the ill-fated 3D revolution in TV around six years ago. Take Zuckerberg’s assertion that AR glasses or contact lenses were the logical end games for AR, with the conventional TV being toast. Not everyone wants to don glasses, never mind headsets, even if that avoids the need for a TV set at all, while many people baulk at wearing contact lenses and…
Two years since unveiling the audience measurement platform OpenAP, pegged as the industry’s first open platform for cross-publisher targeting, the trio of founding members – NBCUniversal, Fox and Viacom – have released version 2.0. But the three media firms will have to push wave 2 without fellow founding member WarnerMedia since AT&T pulled the unit from the alliance just 10 days before news of OpenAP 2.0 landed. Coincidence? Nope. We bet OpenAP 2.0 has been rushed to launch in the face of negative press since WarnerMedia fled the scene, a move AT&T attributed to the evolution of its own advanced advertising strategy, strongly suggesting the Xandr ad tech division has left OpenAP in the dust or potentially a conflict of…
US energy utility PacificCorp has said it will close down a number of coal fired electricity plants early by 2022. The plants are all based in Wyoming, and the reason is purely economic – keeping them open will cost too much money. This is despite local laws again coal closures, in what is a state that violently opposes renewable energy. PacificCorp has plans to replace the coal plants with a combination of wind, solar and batteries and reckon it will save the company $248 million. PacificCorp is owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and operates as Rocky Mountain Power in Wyoming, Utah and Idaho and has around 1.9 million customers. Warren Buffett continues to tie money up in fossil fuel…
We have mentioned before that the next US election is likely to be fought on climate change and naysayers have pointed out that it is only 11th on the list of priorities among voters when they are questioned in polls. One of the reasons for that fact is that no-one has dared raise it because it may prevent them finding funding from the wealthy oil, coal and gas interests that tend to privately fund US politicians in a deal to keep their government privileges. Now one of his long term political opponents, Democrat Bernie Sanders has gone on record deploring Trump’s irresponsible record on climate change, opening the way for it to become at least one of the political footballs…
The breaking of bread between Amazon and Google late last week represents much more than belatedly putting to bed a long-standing spat. With Alexa now supporting YouTube across additional Amazon hardware, and Google Assistant embracing Prime Video on Google streaming devices, the move encourages cross-collaboration across the voice technology ecosystem – hopefully nourishing the soil for vendors and services to flourish. Specifically, in the coming months, the YouTube app will launch on Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs, while Prime Video will arrive across Android TV device partners – finally receiving Chromecast compatibility. Later this year, the YouTube TV and YouTube Kids apps will land on Fire TV. Our opening sentiment is perhaps most relevant to…
The threat of more governments blocking Huawei and ZTE from bidding for 5G infrastructure contracts (see separate item) has thrown a harsh spotlight on one of the myths of 5G. There have been high hopes that the 5G network would turn out to be more open than its predecessors, making it easier for operators to mix equipment from multiple vendors in the same network zones. In fact, not only does it look as awkward as ever to deploy a multivendor RAN, but backwards compatibility – a key claim of successive 3GPP standards generations – is less than perfect too. This has been highlighted as an issue because operators which have 4G RANs supplied by Huawei or ZTE are saying it…
New York’s City Council (NYCC) has passed the Climate Mobilization Act, a set of seven bills that won a 45-2 vote to tackle climate change. The most grabbing element is a demand that buildings of over 25,000 square-feet, and there are an awful lot of those in New York, will cut carbon emissions by 40% in 2030, and later 80% in 2050. NYCC is calling on other cities to take similar action, if should some follow suit, a very large market for smart building vendors is about to be blown wide open. In the utility space, the Act is also setting the groundwork to shut down the twenty natural gas plants that keep the city running, with a feasibility study…
Less than a week after Canada’s Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) announced that it was going to raise hell to get the Google-led Sidewalk Labs smart city project in Toronto ‘reset,’ Sidewalk Labs has announced that it is planning on pushing ‘visual language’ to help be more transparent about what exactly is going on in a smart city. We very much doubt that the CCLA is going to back down now, as this vaporware doesn’t solve the organization’s main complaints – that the city, regional, and national governments have failed to protect the citizens appropriately. A change to push signage is not going to remove the suspicion that many people hold over Google’s involvement – that the advertising firm is so…
Mozilla has announced the graduation of its Project Things work from its early-stage developer program, launching it as Mozilla WebThings. Based on the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web of Things standard, in which Evrythng was quite involved, WebThings hopes to be a prime choice for anyone interested in using Web of Things for controlling connected devices out in the field – thanks to its capabilities and open source availability. Of course, this is Mozilla, which has a track record of dumping IoT-related projects. After deciding that Firefox OS wasn’t going to power smartphones, as initially intended, Mozilla refocused on smart homes and sensor networks, according to an announcement in March 2016. Not a year later, Mozilla killed off this…
In case you still had hope for Windows making some dramatic turnaround, creating a stripped-down version for low-power IoT devices, the writing should have been on the wall for you back when the firm unveiled its Azure Sphere Linux OS. So, if you needed any more convincing that Windows was not for the IoT, Microsoft’s purchase of Express Logic and its ThreadX real-time operating system (RTOS) should really drive the point home. Express Logic is a 23-year old firm, operating out of San Diego. It claims that its ThreadX RTOS has 6.2bn deployments globally, to date, which will clue you in on the type of device that requires an RTOS. Typically, these are microcontroller-powered devices, which use MCUs that have…
Despite the settlement with Apple last week, Qualcomm’s smartphone market is under pressure, and its expansion away from mobile devices continues. Having found limited demand so far for IoT devices, it is now chasing that other shiny new market – AI-based processing workloads in the data center. With its new Cloud AI 100 accelerator, a 7nm chip that claims 10 times the performance per watt of its rivals, Qualcomm is hoping to steal some thunder from Intel, Google and Nvidia. Intel has been scrambling to find a way to make up for the shortcomings of its x86 CPU architecture in the new workloads demanded by AI and ML tasks – as these tasks favor the parallel computing capabilities of GPUs…
After the big announcements about network architecture plans which dominated the talk from 5G early movers last year, now they are getting down to the nitty-gritty of pricing, and providing at least some preliminary indicators of how that might vary, if at all, from 4G. A big dilemma for operators is how to increase the revenue they can squeeze out of existing consumer bases with 5G. New applications may generate new revenue streams, especially when next generation technologies fully support critical and IoT communications. Verizon and AT&T are aiming get additional dollars from the consumer base by offering fixed 5G in some areas, though how far this is succeeding so far is open to doubt. But the first priority for…
The breaking of bread between Amazon and Google late last week represents much more than belatedly putting to bed a long-standing spat. With Alexa now supporting YouTube across additional Amazon hardware, and Google Assistant embracing Prime Video on Google streaming devices, the move encourages cross-collaboration across the voice technology ecosystem – nourishing the soil for vendors and services to flourish. Specifically, in the coming months, the YouTube app will launch on Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs, while Prime Video will arrive across Android TV device partners – finally receiving Chromecast compatibility. Later this year, the YouTube TV and YouTube Kids apps will land on Fire TV. Our opening sentiment is perhaps most relevant for Android…
AI voice platform developer Audioburst has secured a $10 million investment from Japanese advertising giant Dentsu and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Company. The cash injection comes some seven months after Faultline Online Reporter highlighted Audioburst’s somewhat exclusive position and clearly the Asia Pacific market is taking increasing notice of Audioburst’s niche technology – in anticipation of the US firm’s debut in Japan later this year. That much was clear when Audioburst inked a partnership with LG Electronics in December to jointly build in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, with Audioburst at the time in the throngs of developing its new Deep Analysis API which debuted at CES 2019. We noted at the time how 2019 would be a major year for the…
Disney, of the big media groups gunning for global streaming glory, has Netflix most clearly in its sights with its plans for an ad-free SVoD service this fall. All other contenders have advertising in the mix somewhere, while Disney has stated that even ESPN+, the streaming version of its ESPN sports channel, will only carry very limited ads. Disney has also promised an ad free bundle combining its three main streaming properties of ESPN+, Hulu and Disney+. By contrast, Comcast’s current OTT services such as Sky’s Now TV carry ads, as well its forthcoming NBCUniversal OTT SVoD service due for launch early 2020. Advertising will play an even stronger role for AT&T on the back of its Xandr analytics group…
SSIMWave – remember that name. The Canadian start-up, a specialist in perceptual video quality measurement, first drifted onto our radar in summer 2018 lauding the world’s most widely-used QoE algorithm, but still to be told SSIMWave has virtually every tier 1 North American operator either currently evaluating or already trialing its SSIMPlus technology left us atypically lost for words. The main marketing clout behind the technology is claiming to be the only software to break through the 90% correlation accuracy mark between compute objective and human subjective content. But such is the complexity of algorithms developed in its SSIMPlus Structural Similarity technology (we’re talking neuroscience level intricacy here) that it’s perhaps simplest to imagine the software as encompassing the accuracy…
After the big announcements about network architecture plans which dominated the talk from 5G early movers last year, now they are getting down to the nitty-gritty of pricing, and providing at least some preliminary indicators of how that might vary, if at all, from 4G. A big dilemma for operators is how to increase the revenue they can squeeze out of existing consumer bases with 5G. New applications may generate new revenue streams, especially when next generation technologies fully support critical and IoT communications. Verizon and AT&T are aiming get additional dollars from the consumer base by offering fixed 5G in some areas, though how far this is succeeding so far is open to doubt. But the first priority for…
Despite the settlement with Apple (see separate item), Qualcomm’s smartphone market is under pressure, and its expansion away from mobile devices continues. Having found limited demand so far for IoT devices, it is now chasing that other shiny new market – AI-based processing workloads in the data center. With its new Cloud AI 100 accelerator, a 7nm chip that claims 10 time the performance per watt of its rivals, Qualcomm is hoping to steal some thunder from Intel, Google and Nvidia. Intel has been scrambling to find a way to make up for the shortcomings of its x86 CPU architecture in the new workloads demanded by AI and ML tasks – as these tasks favor the parallel computing capabilities of…
The threat of more governments blocking Huawei and ZTE from bidding for 5G infrastructure contracts (see separate item) has thrown a harsh spotlight on one of the myths of 5G. There have been high hopes that the 5G network would turn out to be more open than its predecessors, making it easier for operators to mix equipment from multiple vendors in the same network zones. In fact, not only does it look as awkward as ever to deploy a multivendor RAN, but backwards compatibility – a key claim of successive 3GPP standards generations – is less than perfect too. This has been highlighted as an issue because operators which have 4G RANs supplied by Huawei or ZTE are saying it…