Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Zebra Technologies has signed a deal with SAP, to combine its Zatar IoT platform with SAP’s HANA cloud, allowing the Zebra sensor data to be managed by the SAP database tech. Relayr has announced its Relayr Powered Partner Program for those using its protocol-agnostic enterprise IoT middleware, with names including AWS, ARM, Bosch, Cisco, Dell the LoRa Alliance, NXP, Sigfox, and Wirepas. The Hyperledger project is close to consolidating the codebase of its three founding members, into a single enterprise-grade blockchain solution. A lone dissenting committee member could prove a spanner in the works, however. Software Kyocera has updated its Software Laboratory, launched in October, with new code to help combine hardware tools with the software that…
The main focus of Apple’s announcement last week was the new iPhone SE – which stands for Special Edition. A more fitting term might be the Small Edition, as the new iPhone essentially has the internals of the new 6s, but housed inside the old 4-inch form factor that Apple dropped with the launch of the iPhone 6. At $399 for the 16GB model ($499 for the 64GB version), the SE is a pretty significant shake-up in Apple’s low end offerings. Debuting at a price some $50 cheaper than the old 5s was recently being sold for, the new smartphone offers significantly more bang for the buck – and is also still noticeably cheaper than the 5c, which was initially…
The US incentive auction of 600 MHz broadcast spectrum is set to start on Tuesday, though the intense attention of last year has been partly diverted to other future sources of mobile spectrum, including the millimeter wave bands, which will prove as controversial as the TV airwaves – and, in a capacity-obsessed world, more important to the future expansion of wireless services. The impact of the 600 MHz winners and losers will be diluted by the growing attention to high frequency, ‘5G’ bands, and by the time it will take to activate the spectrum commercially. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler this week acknowledged, to the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, that the 600 MHz spectrum would take years to repurpose…
The European Commission has two months to decide whether to allow the takeover of Telefonica’s O2 UK arm by CK Hutchison, owner of 3UK, and if it does, what conditions will be imposed. One of the most likely demands will be for the merged entity to divest some of its infrastructure for a new entrant, or at least to earmark a large proportion of its capacity for new MVNOs – these kind of remedies have already been seen in other markets where a merger led to a reduction in the number of MNOs, such as Germany, Ireland and Austria. CK Hutchison, for its part, is offering increasingly big concessions – as well guarantees to open up wholesale access, freeze consumer…
Business software giant SAP has announced two significant deals, securing a bundled offering with Vodafone’s IoT offering and an integration deal with Zebra Technologies Zatar IoT platform. Both deals will see SAP’s HANA in-memory database pushed to customers, which should help SAP sell through to emerging IoT businesses that may not have the scale typically associated with SAP customers. HANA is run on a server, increasingly hosted in the cloud – be that a public or private instance. It can be used on a monthly or hourly rate, which is a popular option for companies that don’t want to pay for the dedicated hardware needed to run it in-house. Because of this shift to the cloud, more and more companies…
German fashion retailer Gerry Weber is dismantling its current RFID inventory system after just five years, citing its failure to keep up with business requirements. It is a cautionary tale for any business considering using IoT technology to improve efficiency, but it appears that Gerry Weber can afford to swallow the bitter pill. The crux of the problem is that the retailer cannot integrate its current RFID inventory management system into its new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, which was commissioned two years ago from SAP – a German business software specialist. Gerry Weber believes that the time is right to use a standard software implementation, rather than the customized one used to launch the RFID platform in 2009. For…
Deutsche Telekom has announced that its Qivicon smart home platform is being rolled out in the Netherlands by KPN. Following a successful trial, KPN Smartlife is now available to customer in Holland, in the first of what DT hopes will be many operator wins. This follows the launch of its new cloud computing platform, and a smart city deployment in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Qivicon was launched in 2013, in Deutsche Telekom’s home market, as a white label offering. To date, Austrian utility EWW has used the platform, and now KPN will be launching its Smartlife offering in the Netherlands. Inside Germany, the Qivicon platform has been adopted by a number of utilities, including Entega, ENBW, Rheinenergie, and Vattenfall. The Qivicon platform…
The latest OTT video news, deals, launches and products from the team at Faultline. What appears to be a temporary website has launched this week, running behind the slogan “end the cable Boxology” – which seeks to support the FCCs attempt to open up the cable TV set top box in the US. The site walks visitors through the process of how to make a comment to the FCC about backing the DSTAC security recommendations for an open set top. It is backed by consumer advocate groups such as Common Cause, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Incompass, Open Technology Institute, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Consumer Action, Consumer Video Choice and Public Knowledge. TiVo subsidiary and recommendation software…
A new startup called Screening Room is aiming to breathe some life into the idea of offering new release movies in-home while disrupting the film distribution market in the process. The idea behind Screening Room is that the company would charge $150 for access to a set top that would transmit the new movie for 48 hours with each viewing of the film costing $50. And the company will be sporting some serious secure anti-piracy technology to put those worried about piracy of the content at ease. The company is making the deal interesting, and much more enticing by proposing that exhibitors get a big cut of the revenue. Possibly up to $20 of the $50 per-view fee. Plus, Screening…
Had British regulator Ofcom decided to separate BT’s wholesale infrastructure arm, Openreach, it would have been the first incident of its kind in Europe. Now as part of Ofcom’s demands, BT must instead allow its competitors access to its dark fiber network – something that other European operators would surely fight to the death to avoid. BT must now allow competing operators such as Vodafone, Sky, and TalkTalk access to its optical fiber network for enterprises, Ofcom says this is referred to as dark fiber because “the cables would not be ‘lit’ using BT’s electronic equipment. Instead, they would be ‘lit’ by the competitor installing its own equipment at either end of the optical fiber” – essentially optical fiber assets…
German regional operator M-net has announced this week that its newly launched IPTV platform, M-net TVplus, is based on the IPTV solution from Swiss internet TV provider and B2B technology vendor Zattoo, as well as choosing a set top OS from German cloud TV specialist ABox42. Faultline has repeatedly mentioned Zattoo over the past several months, as the company seems to announce a new deal every few weeks, mainly bagging new content deals to bulk up its offering. While Zattoo’s own live and VoD offerings are available in Germany, the service isn’t a direct competitor of M-net TVplus, but rather acts as a complementary service. The TVplus platform, hosted and managed by Zattoo from the head end to the apps,…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Google is putting its Boston Dynamics up for sale, with Amazon and Toyota apparently interested in acquiring the makers of Big Dog – the unnerving quadruped. Maersk is running trials for drone-based deliveries to its container ships, for delivering smaller items to its ships from barges. Analog Devices is acquiring SNAP Sensor, to expand its IoT sensing portfolio. Bosch has announced a partnership project with the IIC, to pair its Industrie 4.0 platform with the IIC’s reference architecture, for managing Industrial IoT (IIoT). Binmaster has announced a partnership with Device Solutions, to use the latter’s Cellio IIoT platform to connect its BinCom waste management systems to cloud dashboards. Hardware Cypress Semiconductor has unveiled a Bluetooth Low Energy…
The Bluetooth SIG is bracing itself for a bumper year, in which it will unleash its mesh networking update, as well as significant performance increases – if all goes to plan. This week, the SIG is unveiling the Transport Discovery Service (TDS) – a way for Bluetooth to act as a network coordinator so that power-hungry protocols can prolong battery life. Essentially, the TDS allows a developer to use Bluetooth hardware as a way of conserving battery power, by moving the small tasks into the low-power protocol so that the more power-intensive protocols spend less time on the air. This means, in theory, that a WiFi device can keep tabs on other WiFi devices in its local network by using…
Autonomous vehicles represent the death of the traditional automotive industry. They are not the single contributing factor, but they will be the deathblow. Increasing urbanization, the rise of ride-sharing, increased remote working, improvements in mass transit systems, environmental regulatory pressures, the decline in oil supply – all of these factors are straws piling up on the camel’s back. But the auto industry can count on regulatory inertia to act as a saving grace, in the short term at least. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has warned US stakeholders that there are hurdles ahead. The US Transport Secretary, Anthony Foxx, said that “self-driving cars are a revolution in auto technology that has the potential to save thousands of lives,”…
NXP has announced that it will make its Kinetis family of microcontrollers (MCUs) Apple HomeKit compatible, in a move that will appeal to developers looking to build connected devices for Apple’s looming smart home platform. NXP is also providing an SDK for developers to use. It’s a sensible move from NXP, which recently acquired Freescale for around $12bn, as Apple holds a very influential position in the nascent smart home market. Apple’s iPhone users tend to spend more on content and apps, and the logical extension is that iOS users on the whole would spend more on smart home devices. The current list of compatible products is still pretty small. It includes connected outlets from ConnectSense, iDevices, iHome, and Parce,…
Asian tech giants Samsung, Huawei and ZTE have all announced updates to their smart city lighting products this week. While all these solutions enable cities to cut down on their electricity expenses, which are typically the most expensive item on the bill after wages, what is perhaps the most important feature that smart lighting brings to cities is the access to data. Big Data analytics can be leveraged in a variety of sectors; traffic and energy management, health and crime trends, targeted advertising, generating new businesses, as well as allowing citizens to interact with the city in new ways. By using the correct tools in handling and analyzing data collected from street lamps, it can open the door to…
Two very different standards efforts are in the Internet of Things (IoT) spotlight, but they have one thing in common – they will allow different systems to interwork regardless of the connectivity protocol they support. OneM2M, which seeks to create an overarching ‘standard of standards’ to connect the Internet of Things (IoT), has expanded the first release of its specifications. The updated standards span requirements, architecture, APIs and security, said the group, which now has over 200 members. It has also increased the range of protocols to which it can map, adding HTTP, CoAP, and MQTT. Dr. Omar Elloumi, oneM2M’s technical plenary chair, said in a statement: “oneM2M enables interoperability across IoT applications regardless of the underlying technology used. This…
Intel and Qualcomm are increasingly extending their reach beyond their core chip technologies and into surrounding technologies and even applications. Both seek to enhance their revenues and account control with end-to-end offerings in key emerging areas of technology such as virtual reality. In the past week, Intel has acquired Replay Technologies, a 3D video start-up, to boost its growing activities in this area and move up the stack into the applications layer. And Qualcomm has unveiled a software developers’ kit (SDK) for virtual reality for its ever-expanding Snapdragon platform. Intel’s latest acquisition is an Israeli firm which specializes in 3D video for sporting events. Founded in 2011, it has a proprietary video format, called freeD, which uses high-resolution cameras and…
The French telecoms market is now dominated by a tussle between two groups, struggling to eat into the market share of incumbent Orange with disruptive tactics and radical new cost models. In the most recent financial quarters, the pair had different fortunes however. Altice – owner of cableco Numericable and France’s second MNO, SFR – lost subscribers and revenues in 2015, though it boosted profits with its aggressive cost cutting. Meanwhile Iliad, which owns the Free broadband and mobile providers, continues to increase its subscribers and market share. Altice has put intense pressure on its suppliers to reduce their prices, but the downside has been damage to its reputation for service quality, and a fall in customer numbers. Its full…
The automotive industry is waking up to the value that connectivity can create in its vehicles, and the MNOs are seizing the opportunity to add more SIMs to their portfolios. But the interior of the car is also becoming a battleground for the smartphone ecosystems, as the automakers work with Apple and Android, but also chase the greater control that an inhouse platform would provide. The acquisition of Nokia’s Here mapping division by a group of German carmakers was one sign of the auto sector’s desire to be in charge of its own connected car destiny. And this week, traffic data specialist Inrix has acquired OpenCar, a connected car platform that allows automakers to build their own in-vehicle infotainment (IVI)…