IoT Evolution World Week in Review: POTUS, AT&T, Salesforce

Jiminy Christmas. What a week. Here on IoT Evolution World, we’ve had a pretty big one. A huge patent lawsuit launched this week could rock the Smart Meter market, Salesforce is likely to take over the CRM analytics market thanks to its new product and the U.S. government officially wants Smart Cities enough to spend big money. This is going to be one of the biggest Weeks in Review of the year. Let’s do it.

First: politics. Turns out, the old joke about the opposite of progress doesn’t always hold true. This week, the Obama Administration announced that it has launched a new “Smart Cities” initiative to help communities solve their challenges and be more efficient with IoT solutions. The announcement was made as part of the White House Smart Cities Forum, held September 14. The initiative will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage several technology partnerships to help U.S. cities reduce traffic congestion, fight crime, grow economies, address environmental concerns and deliver city services.

Moving on from government to the law, Smart meter manufacturer TransData on September 16 announced that it has filed patent infringement lawsuits against GE, Itron and Landis+Gyr AG (60 percent owned by Toshiba) in United States District Court in Texas. The suit alleges that the three companies are willfully infringing on the company’s U.S. Patents for Smart Meters by making, using, selling, and offering for sale the meters in the U.S., or importing into the country digital meters equipped with internal wireless communication circuits and antennae. And, if they win, it could mean big price point changes because of licensing, or supply issues if TransData doesn’t choose to issue such licenses.

Finally to the private sector, where Salesforce dropped a bomb on the IoT analytics industry with an announcement from Dreamforce about the new Thunder IoT Cloud. IoT Cloud is designed to connect billions of events within the IoT to Salesforce, enabling companies to perform analytical research on their customers. This is huge news for the IoT, because so many companies are already using Salesforce for CRM, so integrating Thunder and IoT Cloud will be (finally) a simple and easy way to get some intelligent analytics done. Look out, literally everyone else in the space.

It’s time to take a deep breath and rock some well-deserved weekend. Visit us on IoT Evolution World for all the IoT news, my friends. Keep the IoT Evolution Expo in January in Fort Lauderdale in your calendar. We’re looking for speakers now. 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.