In an address on day two of Microsoft’s Future Decoded event in London, Kevin Ashton showed examples of supposed IoT devices such as the wine bottle that tells you if you’re drunk and the toothbrush that tells you if you’ve brushed your teeth.

Describing Kickstarter as “where bad ideas go to get funded”, he talked about the true nature of IoT and its roots in machine-to-machine communication that’s neither accessed nor processed by humans.

“This information isn’t going on a spreadsheet or a pivot table,” he explained. “It’s a sensor on a device in the world sending data to another device which makes a decision which feeds out into the world.”

In short: “We don’t collect data. Machines collect data from sensors and we turn the world into data.”

The perfect example of this is the mobile phone. “We call a phone a phone for legacy reasons,” he said. “A phone is just an app on your device. You probably use Candy Crush or Angry Birds more than you use it for actual calls. What a smartphone actually is, is a wireless sensor platform.”

He said that historically the UK has been at the forefront of internet developments, so it’s only right that the country takes a leading role in the evolution of the IoT.

Citing self-driving cars as a good example of the IoT at work, he predicted that by 2030 such vehicles will be the norm, and that the question should not be “Are self-driving cars safe?” but “Are human-driven cars safe?”, pointing out that 3,000 people are killed on the roads every day by human-driven cars, and so far at least, there have been no serious accidents involving autonomous vehicles.

Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/are-some-iot-gadgets-pointless.html

These are devices like smart thermostats that allow users to remotely control household temperatures or LED lights that can be switched on and off from a smartphone. Basically it is the same thing as the IoT concept in the residential setting.

Navigant Research, global revenue from shipments of residential IoT devices is expected to total more than US$330 billion from 2015-2025. That is a lot of talking fridges and Internet connected underware.

Neil Strother, principal research analyst with Navigant Research said that the IoT is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without any edge pieces, with the number of pieces growing exponentially into the billions.

“Communicating devices in the IoT traverse a wide range of industries and sectors-virtually all areas of life can expect to see some form of this connected world.”

Despite the many drivers for the residential IoT market, there are at present multiple protocols and standards that are creating an interoperability barrier, he said.
Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, and others are all vying for market viability, which is creating confusion for consumers and stalling overall adoption, he said.

Courtesy-Fud

ABI has added up the numbers and divided by its shoe size and multiplied by the age of its youngest child and worked out that China’s IoT market will grow more than five times in the next five years, exceeding $41 billion by 2020.

Dan Shey, VP and IoT practice director at ABI Research said that driving China’s IoT numbers is the smart meter segment.

“It leads all other segments in both connections and revenues. In fact, by 2020, smart meter connections will exceed the next highest market segment in total connections by nearly 10 to 1.”

Other major segments driving the China IoT market are home security and automation, OEM telematics, video surveillance, home appliances, aftermarket telematics and home monitoring.
Home monitoring is expected to become an important market in China as it attempts to care for its aging population, which will reach nearly 340 million people in 2020 for citizens age 55 and older.

“Data analytics revenues will generate the most IoT revenues in China. This statistic is reflective of the sheer volume of smart meter connections,” Shey said.

This is indicative of the relative lack of revenues in both platform and professional services in the China market.

“Platform revenues are not as high due to, for example, a higher share of proprietary embedded telematics deployments, especially by domestic OEM brands. Professional services revenues are similarly not as high, not only due to fewer connections in the telematics segments, with a higher proportion of tethered solutions, but also because IT and consultancy services are not as mature a market segment as in some of the more developed world markets such as Japan, South Korea and the US,” he wrote.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/is-china-the-fastest-growing-market-for-iot.html

IBM scientists demonstrated a new way to shrink transistor contacts in chips, thus speeding up the replacing of silicon transistors with carbon nanotubes which the firm has been working on for several years.

The company said that the breakthrough brings it closer to creating fully scaled carbon nanotube technology that will power future computing technologies while increasing performance and “opening a pathway to dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful chips”.

Carbon nanotube chips have many benefits over traditional silicon. Transistors in silicon are approaching a point of physical limitation. They have been made smaller year after year, but shrinking the size of the transistor, including the channels and contacts, without compromising performance is becoming increasingly difficult.

Carbon nanotube chips could improve the capabilities of high-performance computers because they allow these contacts to be so small that they are virtually transparent.

This means that the size of the semiconductor can decrease dramatically, while the substrate of carbon nanotubes makes the chip more energy efficient and is a soft and flexible material that could allow new device form factors.

Shu-jen Han, IBM’s manager of nanoscale science and technology, told us in an interview that wearable technology is one of the most exciting areas that this technology could transform owing to the unique property of the substrate, allowing new form factors with better performance and battery life.

However, the breakthrough isn’t about the carbon nanotube material being a better replacement for silicon, but more of an engineering innovation that addresses part of the problem in successfully rolling out better performing and more efficient chips.

“We know what the issue has been, and the limits of the technology, for years. What we solved here is a device-level issue, a one-dimensional structure. We need to make a wafer of them, a high-quality wafer, which does not exist yet,” Shu-jen said.

The next stage for IBM’s research group is to scale up the carbon nanotube technology to make reliable mass produced chips before they can make a difference to businesses and consumers.

Shu-jen said this could take five to 10 years, but could enable big data to be analysed faster and allow cloud data centres to deliver services more efficiently and economically.

Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/ibm-makes-carbon-nanotube-breakthrough.html