With summer now officially in full swing, places are buzzing with activity, and the M2M sector is no exception. It was a busy week for the industry, so let’s take a few minutes to look back at some of the highlights.
Kicking off the week, ThingWorx announced the availability of its ThingWorx Platform v5.0, which supports higher-level scaling, more efficient power consumption and bandwidth use, new developer tools, and the new MatrixMultitenancy security model. The platform also has the ability to do federated deployment, which makes the company’s solution unique, according to John Canosa, chief strategist at ThingWorx. That means ThingWorx customers can run its server in the cloud, on premises, or run a version of the server on a device.
“The highlight of the ThingWorx platform itself is we enable companies to build connected applications 10 times faster than using traditional development tools,” said Canosa. “That has been validated by our customers.”
A survey released this week, conducted by cloud testing solutions provider SOASTA, finds that—despite all of the buzz around the term “Internet of Things” (IoT)—most Americans still have no idea what that really means. However, we’re still climbing the Gartner hype curve, so there is plenty of headroom for the upward trajectory of the industry and its public acceptance. This leaves the industry the opportunity to explain itself and set reasonable expectations as to when consumers will be seeing IoT as a major blip on their radar. In the industry, 67 percent of survey respondents said they are excited about the possibilities of IoT coming to consumer technology.
Also this week, Carl Ford from Crossfire Media discussed the trials and tribulations faced by Elon Musk of Tesla. “First, there is the technological issue of attacking fuel cells,” Ford wrote. “Elon Musk sees the world as being in need of better batteries, and to him fuel cells are not a part of the mix but a distraction.” Unfortunately for him, the world of batteries grown fairly stagnant, and government-funded battery projects have fallen apart. So Musk has begun gathering troops to refresh the work on battery research. But, as Ford suggests, this could be a fool’s errand, like so many of his other projects. As a result, he has opened his patent portfolio.
Another report released this week by the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Devices Tracker projects that smart connected device (SCD) shipments will grow to 2.4 billion units by 2018. IDC believes smartphones will become the first and primary computing device for many, “to outpace total PC shipments by more than 6 to 1 in 2018.” The research firm is also forecasting strong double-digit growth with smartphones, consequently, creating a strong growth of smart connected devices in 2014 and beyond.
This week in M2M was packed with news, and this is just the tip of the iceberg, so be sure to check back regularly to
M2M Evolution for all the latest happenings in the space.