Another IoT initiative by a national government, this time the UK’s, has once again highlighted the Australian Government’s lack of any significant IoT initiatives. On 6 January the UK’s Minister of State for Culture and the Digital Economy, Ed Vaizey, announced the PETRAS Consortium, describing it as “a new interdisciplinary research hub to drive forward […]
Cellular vs LPWAN: the battle heats up
Several announcements and reports coinciding with the CES show in Las Vegas have thrown the spotlight on the intensifying competition between cellular and low powered wide area network technologies for the IoT market. These include: Announcement for Ericsson of “the ICT industry’s first complete cellular low-power wide-area offering, with backing from leading operator AT&T.” A […]
Wanted: a smart minister for smart cities
The conduct of Australia’s erstwhile, and first ever, minister for cities, Jamie Briggs has been anything but smart. Of more concern to the Australian public than the unsmartness of his personal conduct should be his lack of any focus on the smartness of Australia’s cities. When prime minister Malcolm Turnbull announced Briggs’ appointment in September, […]
Why asset efficiency isn’t an IoT mirage
In this guest blog Sudip Singh highlights the challenges of integrating multiple monitoring and control systems, and makes a case for test beds that can demonstrate the improvements in asset utilisation efficiency that can be gained from doing so. The evolution of smart, connected and autonomous products is reshaping the manufacturing industry. The convergence of […]
IoT World Forum, Dubai, and the making of a smart city
It’s easy to see why Cisco chose Dubai as the location of its third IoT World Forum, following Chicago and Barcelona in 2014 and 2013 respectively. The city has a goal to be the world’s smartest city by 2020, and is under time pressure to make significant progress towards that goal. (Interestingly, and rather confusingly […]
LPWAN v cellular: the jury is still out
French mobile operator, Orange, has fleshed out its plans for a nationwide LoRaWAN network, first revealed in September, provoking a bit of a put-down from Mobile World Live, the news organ of the GSMA. That was not such a good idea: it serves only to flag the fact that the mobile industry sees LPWAN as […]
Hard hats and hard rides monitored by Azure IoT
With the presentation of a couple of interesting use cases at its Ignite conference on the Gold Coast last week, Microsoft is putting out some solid messages to support the capabilities of its recently released Azure IoT Suite. Construction company, Laing O’Rourke, is using the suite to gather and present data from an experimental ‘Smart […]
Beware of vendors spruiking IoT standards
Nokia has issued a press release claiming some initiative in promoting IoT standards. Close scrutiny reveals just what Nokia is on about. The press release is headed “Nokia Networks kick-starts industry collaboration to enable the programmable world.” In reality, when you drill down, there’s not a lot of kicking happening, but it’s very goal-directed. The […]
The black art of IoT forecasting
I’ve long been suspicious of IoT forecasting, especially value-related forecasts. For one thing, forecasters rarely define what they are forecasting with sufficient precision for those forecasts to be meaningful, and they never reveal the underlying assumptions of their methodology. Now one organisation, Beacham Research, is doing a “The Emperor Has No Clothes” thing and casting […]
The connected bottle – Let’s drink to the agency of things
The marketing and advertising industry has always been quick to exploit new technologies, to find new ways to promote clients’ wares to the public. So it should come as no surprise that the rise of IoT has spawned an “agency of things” that promises to “connect to your customers using the Internet of Things.” London […]
