Welcome to the IoT Evolution Week in Review, my fine feathered friends. This week, we’ve been talking about water ecology, bicycles in China, and smart intellectual property strategy. Let’s get into it, shall we?
In our lead story this week, IBM’s (News - Alert) famous Watson supercomputer has become the dominant force in machine learning across the entire IT world and the IoT. The company is also establishing its bona fides in the blockchain world at a rapid pace. At IBM Interconnect and other recent events, the company dropped a series of announcements to cement those reputations.
We had a great guest post from Matthew H. Grady and Michael J. Attisha of intellectual property law firm Wolf Greenfield in Boston. Intellectual property plays a key role in protecting innovation, especially in areas of technology that develop quickly. A strong patent portfolio is of particular importance to startups in the IoT space, as their survival depends greatly on the market success of their core technologies—and they are often in danger of having those technologies undercut by larger competitors. Within the IoT space there are unique challenges to obtaining strong patents.
And now, the news: According to a new announcement, Vodafone (News - Alert) is providing all the managed Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity for bike sharing company Mobike’s operations in Singapore, which is the company’s first outside of China.
Qualcomm (News - Alert) has announced that it, along with AT&T, CH2M and Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources (Gwinnett County) in Georgia, are collaborating to reduce the amount of drinking water lost on its way to customers. Across the pond, IBM has announced, along with the Dublin City University (DCU) Water Institute, a collaborative research pilot to leverage Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for environmental monitoring and management.
In a recent announcement, EnSync Energy Systems, a developer of distributed energy resource (DER) systems and “Internet of energy” control platforms for the utility, commercial, industrial and multi-tenant building markets, introduced its new DER Flex, a technology that is designed to enable aggregation and monetization of DERs, such as solar and energy storage, in utility and ISO markets.
Over the last few years, I have seen some major trends forming across nearly every vertical in the consumer and industrial spaces, and these trends looked like they were pointing toward a future where the IoT would indeed be improving the lives and living conditions of people all over the world, and so I decided to begin writing a book in order to look for patterns in those trends. That book, published recently, is called “IoT Time: Evolving Trends in the Internet of Things.” In a new weekly series, we’ll be previewing chapters for you to read in the hopes that you’ll like enough to read the whole thing.
On the IoT Time Podcast, I sat down with Lotan Levkowitz of Grove Ventures to discuss a VCs perspective on the Industrial Internet of Things and the upcoming IIoT Forum in Israel.
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.