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With a view to further cross-application interoperability and device connectivity in the connected home, the Thread Group and the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) have inked a liaison agreement.

Both organisations – which share many member companies – will collaborate to ensure compatibility of OCF's application layer with Thread's low-power, secure and scalable IPv6-based wireless mesh network layer.

Thread Group president, Grant Erickson, said: “Thread Group...

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ABI Research argues that the new 3GPP IoT standards will comprise over 50% of cellular IoT radio node unit shipments by 2021. Of the new standards, NB-IoT (NarrowBand-IoT) will account for over 70% of Release 13 shipments and more than one third of all cellular IoT shipments. This value or figure is much more than legacy M2M or the current Cat-1 standard.

Nick Marshall, Research Director at ABI Research, said: “While some in the industry view the new 3GPP standards as...

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It was a close run contest – but the Netherlands beat South Korea to announcing a nationwide network for the Internet of Things (IoT) by four days.

On June 30, KPN announced the deployment of a network based on the LoRa standard, which went live in November 2015 in Rotterdam and The Hague, with a rapid rollout beginning in early 2016, while on July 4 SK Telecom unveiled its grand plans for a nationwide LPWAN (low power wide area network) LoRa IoT network.

For the...

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The concept of the connected home and IoT (Internet of Things) has exploded into the public consciousness as few technologies have before. The number of households with some form of smart home system is set to surpass 100 million worldwide by the end of 2015 and nearly triple in the next ten years’ time to over 300 million.

Such is the speed of growth - and certainly the hype - that it is no surprise the current early adopter market is fragmented at best, with a slew of...

Picture credit: Tadiran Batteries

Advanced primary lithium batteries will support the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) by enabling remote wireless devices to operate maintenance-free for up to 40 years.

Wireless connectivity is key to permitting greater convergence and interoperability between ‘smart’ devices that will soon be connected to the burgeoning IIoT.

Closely tied to the development of low-power communications protocols such as ZigBee, WirelessHART, and LoRa, remote wireless...

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Beacons have so far been a slow-burn technology. It was back in 2009 when SIG announced Bluetooth version 4.0, which included Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), the basis of beacon technology although it took another four years to become mainstream. This came in 2013 with Apple announcing iBeacons at its developer conference. Android standardisation took longer, and it was not until July 2015 that Google released Eddystone. Google is however constantly expanding its capabilities, the most...

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IBM is collaborating with Cisco to provide customers with IBM’s Watson IoT and business analytics technologies and Cisco’s edge analytics capabilities.

Certain businesses are unable to benefit from the interconnectivity of devices and sensors, which generate real-time data, and the storage capacity of cloud computing. This is on account of their presence in remote and autonomous locations. However, the new IBM and Cisco partnership aims to change this.

Mala Anand,...

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SIGFOX is rolling out its IoT network throughout Finland by 2017 in collaboration with Connected Finland, a company created by veteran Finnish telco professionals.

The communications provider boasts more than seven million devices in its IoT network across all continents and the company has added 14 countries to its global coverage map in the past 12 months alone. The deployment will provide coverage to the country’s largest cities by the summer of 2016 and coverage for 85% of the...

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Evans Data’s Global Development Survey has revealed that the Internet of Things (IoT) was the foremost priority for developers working on artificial intelligence across a range of technologies including machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, and pattern recognition. Though targets for these technologies remain fragmented, IoT was the foremost target for all of them and in most instances the only target that gained a double digit response.

Non-computer...

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Smart beacon network developer Netclearance has launched the mBeaconSense, a BLE device that brings together five distinct sensors – temperature, vibration, accelerometer, magnetic, light – into one IC board that is smaller than a penny, opening up avenues for applications such as home care monitoring. A battery the size of a coin can last for several years, providing more possibilities and prospects – that might have not been possible before – for the...