Hey folks. It’s a rainy day in IoT Evolution World Town (that didn’t quite work did it? Well, the song is great, so I stand by it). It’s time for our Week in Review, so let’s not be a wet blanket about this.
In our lead stories this week, it is Smart Cities Week here in the U.S. and to kick it off, the White House announced $80 million new federal dollars to go toward its Smart Cities Initiative, which launched a year ago. The Initiative was designed to make it easier to research, develop, deploy, and test new technologies like the IoT. The Administration has now expanded the initiative, with the additional investments and a doubling of the number of participating cities and communities.
Meanwhile, we saw the announcement of the biggest mass IoT investment we can remember, and it’s coming from SAP (News - Alert). The data giant will spend more than $2.2 billion over the next five years to help business and government entities benefit from IoT and Big Data, the company said. It plans to accelerate innovation in its IoT solution portfolio, increase sales and marketing, scale service, support and co-innovation, and grow its ecosystem of partners and startups in the IoT market.
In a great guest post from Y.K. Chen, IEEE (News - Alert) Fellow, IEEE IoT Volunteer, and Panelist in the IEEE IoT Session at Upcoming IEEE Technology Time Machine Conference, he tells us that current trends point to the emergence of a fantastic future in less than a decade because advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence will enable pervasive intelligence in everyday devices to learn and dynamically support our preferences and lifestyles at home, at work and on the move. And it's all thanks to IoT.
And now, the news:
AT&T (News - Alert) this week, in two announcements, has reaffirmed its commitment to Smart City development. First, it is providing wireless connectivity for use in a new flashing school zone traffic system for deployment in cities and counties across the U.S. In addition, the company is teaming with Spruce Finance to bring smart grid solutions to the residential solar industry.
In some M&A news, Akamai Technologies has announced that it has acquired Concord Systems, a provider of technology for the high performance processing of data at scale, in an all cash transaction, and PLAT.ONE, an enterprise-grade IoT solutions platform developer, has been acquired by SAP SE.
IBM has unveiled what it is calling “Project DataWorks,” a Watson initiative that the company said is the industry's first cloud-based data and analytics platform to integrate all types of data and enable AI-powered decision-making.
The Government of South Australia, the Adelaide Gig City Initiative and US Ignite announced September 26 that Adelaide is to be the first international city to join the growing US Ignite Smart Gigabit Communities program.
According to a new research report from M2M/IoT analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of shipped cellular M2M terminals were 2.7 million worldwide during 2015, and the firm predicts that that number will more than double to reach 5.7 million in 2020.
This week on the IoT Time Podcast, I sat down with Carl Ford (News - Alert), CEO, Crossfire Media, and Marc Josephson, CEO Coris EC, to talk about the Edge, Fog Computing and why I’m probably wrong as usual. To sponsor IoT Time, please email kbriodagh@tmcnet.com or tweet @KenBriodagh.
There’s plenty more to read, listen to and watch, so visit us on IoT Evolution World for all the IoT news, my friends. Now is the time to put into your calendar the next IoT Evolution Expo, to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Also, please get in touch with us when you have stories. As always, if you have questions, comments, complaints or compliments, please send them to me, editorial director Ken Briodagh at kbriodagh@tmcnet.com or on Twitter (News - Alert) @KenBriodagh.