Hey folks, welcome back to another week in review. This week, we had some interesting stuff come down the pike. The battle of the LPWAN platforms is in full swing, some of the gloss might be coming off of connected homes, for consumers, and IoT healthcare solutions are making people feel better. Let's get into it.
Let's start with some good news, shall we? At the recent Cloud Expo, Vodafone’s President of M2M Americas Andrew Morawski spent some time to talk about healthcare, IoT and cloud. He said that when it comes to the IoT and M2M, many people are developing apps like pet trackers, smoke detectors and smart thermostats—which may make life easier—but, they do not truly make a difference in people’s lives. That's why Vodafone is looking to make a real difference by investing in healthcare technology. As Morawski put it, “This is where the rubber has met the road for us.”
In connected home, however, things seem to be a bit more complex. A new report from Argus Insights popped this week, and it points to a drop in the market from just a year ago and cites things like frustration with setting up IoT devices as reasons for consumers to start losing interest. Nest and Dropcam have done well to excite the market, the study said, but all developers will need to do more plug-and-play and ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ solutions, it seems.
Another study, this time from Frost & Sullivan, called for Connected Home improvements. This time, security was the concern. It seems that this report found that users felt that, despite the benefits that establishing connected homes can bring, risks of cyber threats have the potential to compromise the industry as a whole. The potential for critical threats to connected homes, including compromised personal data, exists not only for home owners, but technology vendors and service providers.
It looks like LPWAN networks SIGFOX, which is proprietary, and Weightless-N, which is open source, are in a bottle for dominance of Europe. SIGFOX recently announced new deals in Denmark and Belgium, while this week, the city of London and Nwave, which installs networks on the Weightless-N standard, announced a deal to place the network all over the city from Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament in the south to Emirates Stadium in the north. Only time will tell how this game will play out.
That's just a taste of the evolutions that we covered this week. Visit us on IoT Evolution World for all the IoT news, my friends. Remember to register for the IoT Evolution Expo while the early bird discounts are still in effect. Only a little early bird time left. Also, please get in touch with us when you have stories. As always, if you have questions, comments, input or abuse, please send it to our editorial director, Ken Briodagh at [email protected] or on Twitter @KenBriodagh.
Catch you next time.
