Davemichels

Salesforce plays the collaboration and document game with the purchase of Quip. There are a few lingering questions.

 Twilio, exceeded revenue expectations in Q2 earnings released today after the bell. Immediately share prices increased in after-hours trading before falling back to the market closing price. The cloud-communications company reported revenue of $64.5 million and a loss per share of $0.08. Twilio beat revenue by over 10 percent. Analysts had expected a loss of $0.14 per share on revenue… Read More

On Friday, more than 60,000 people packed into Rio’s Maracanã stadium for the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games — but above their heads, something disconcerting was happening. Observers reported as many as three drones hovering above the stadium, triggering a security panic that reached all the way to the teams providing protection for visiting heads of state. It was the exact scenario Brazilian security had hoped to avoid — but despite the latest equipment and months of preparation, keeping drones out of an open-air stadium is still an extremely difficult job.

Behind the scenes, Brazilian authorities have taken bold new steps to keep drones away from designated Olympic areas, but not all of the new measures are effective. The...

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Playing football in a 3,000 square foot room is not easy. That’s less than 10 percent the size of a football field, and considerably smaller than a backyard or a driveway. But that was entirely the point when Wilson Sporting Goods picked Lightbox, a swanky event space on Manhattan’s west side, to preview the company’s newest product, the Wilson X Connected Football. The company was trying to say that with this ball — which goes on sale September 8th for $199 — and the accompanying app experience, the "stadium is everywhere."

The point of this de facto tagline is that you can use the Wilson X football in the smallest of spaces and still be able to recreate those big game moments. You may be stuck at the office, but that doesn’t mean you...

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Amazon is the king of retail and now Walmart is reeling. 

In a deal announced Monday, Walmart acquired e-commerce startup Jet.com for $3 billion in cash plus an additional $300 million in Walmart stock. 

This deal is clearly part of Walmart's bid to take on Amazon, which currently brings in about $100 billion in annual e-commerce sales against Walmart's roughly $15 billion. Walmart's total revenue, we'd note, is nearly $500 billion. 

But as the retail business shifts online, the acquisition of Jet.com not only gives Walmart an existing customer base to build its e-commerce business but the technical and logistical know-how of an online-first retailer. 

The urgency for Walmart to do something — anything — to make serious inroads on building out its online operations, however, is clearly outlined in this chart showing the rise of Amazon's market cap against Walmart. 

And while market cap isn't everything, the shift here very obviously shows that investors are betting big on the future of Amazon while mostly sitting tight on what Walmart is worth, both now and in the future. 

SEE ALSO: Why Walmart's new $3 billion weapon could pose a huge threat to Amazon

Join the conversation about this story »

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You sign up for a TV deal. Your bill skyrockets after the deal ends. You call and complain.

Cable and satellite TV customers know the drill.

Playing that game is the second biggest complaint Dish Network gets from customers. The first? Paying for too many channels they don’t watch.

“I think we reached a tipping point,” said Warren Schlichting, Dish’s executive vice president of marketing, programming and media sales. “The consumer’s appetite has changed for having hundreds of channels. If you take a step back, you’ll see programmers and distributors (like Dish) have incentive to grow the pay TV industry. And we better find a way to meet consumer demand or people are going to watch Netflix all day.”

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On Thursday, the Douglas County satellite TV provider, reeling from its largest loss of quarterly subscribers ever, introduced a novel approach to address both issues. The Flex Plan offers 50 popular channels — including Food Network, CNN and USA — but no local networks for $29.99 a month.

Local networks, kids channels and sports packs cost extra. But that means if you’re not a sports fan, you don’t pay for sports. You can cancel or add packs without a fee. Dish even offers this how-to suggestion: “For example, if you want access to additional coverage of the presidential race, you can subscribe to the ‘News’ channel pack and then remove it once the election is over.”

The Flex Plan isn’t quite a la carte, but allowing consumers to pay only for the channels they want, Dish is redefining the pay TV industry in a way that few other of his cohorts dare do, said Jimmy Schaeffler, chairman of The Carmel Group, a video-industry research consultant. Cable rivals, including Comcast, have stripped-down plans. For about $73 here in Denver, Comcast customers can get internet and only local TV channels.

Dish CEO Charlie Ergen has “now established himself as the leader among traditional players — and as such, he is going to be the one who takes the arrows in the back,” Schaeffler said. “But at the same time, if there is success to be had here, he will discover it earlier than his peers.”

Dish Flex Plan details

Includes: AMC, TNT, USA, HGTV, E!, Cartoon Network, History, A&E, CNN, Discovery, TBS, Food Network, FX, TV Land and others. See dish.com/packages for details.   Also includes installation of satellite dish and TV equipment.

Extra: For $4 to $10 more per month, users can add channel packs for kids, national sports, regional sports, news, heartland and outdoors. Premium channels such as HBO cost $15 per month. Hopper DVRs start at $10 extra.

Price: $29.99 per month for the base plan if user opts for autopay.

Caveat: A two-year commitment is required, with an early-termination fee of $20 per unused month.

Fine print: Protection plan is included for six months, but then Dish starts charging $8 per month unless subscribers calls to cancel.

Ergen has railed against cheapskate customers who aren’t worth the added revenues. He recently said Dish no longer has $19.99 plans. But with Flex plans just $10 more per month? Dish is still making money on Flex, apparently.

“We’re not a charitable organization, that’s for sure,” Schlichting said. “Video margins are being compressed. And we’re well aware of that. As a pure-play video provider, we don’t have mobile phones or broadband to subsidize us. We have to make money on video.”

Flex takes a cue from Sling TV, the internet service Dish started last year. Sling’s base plan, which offers 25 channels for $20 per month, has no local channels or long-term commitments.

A big difference with Dish’s Flex is the two-year commitment. Break that contract early and the termination fee is $20 a month. Dish said it’s because it invests in a satellite dish and TV equipment, unlike Sling.

Dish is also focusing its marketing on the $44.99 plan, which drops to $39.99 for customers on autopay. That price includes the $10 local TV channels pack. So if you don’t want the local channels, the base plan is $29.99. And Dish intends to keep that price the same even after two years, so customers don’t have to keep calling in for a better deal, Schlichting said.

Flex Plan was created to stem the loss of subscribers and is available for existing Dish customers, Schlichting said.

When a customer calls to cancel, “it’s a limited conversation,” he said. “But now when we have the conversation, it can be, ‘Hey, maybe you don’t have kids. Maybe you want this other pack.’ It’s definitely built on some of the learnings we’ve had from Sling.”

Dish needs the boost. In the second quarter, which ended June 30, the company lost 281,000 subscribers, its worst-ever drop. But that figure includes any growth of Sling TV subscribers.

According to his calculations, analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson believes Dish lost 330,000 customers in the quarter. Sling, meanwhile, added a mere 49,000 customers, which as a new business is even more alarming than Dish’s heavy satellite TV losses.

Moffett said some losses were probably customers who canceled after losing a channel, like the current dispute Dish has with Tribune Media that has taken local channels Fox 31 and The CW2 off the air for two months.

“But there is obviously more here than just programming disputes,” wrote Moffett in a report. He had downgraded Dish’s stock to “Sell” in June. “Dish’s second-quarter subscriber loss makes clear that the satellite TV business is losing its currency. Rapidly.”

But, added Schaeffler, “The world is changing around them quickly, and they know it, so they’re trying lots of other ways to avoid what many may call the inevitable. … If anybody is going to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the satellite TV business, it’s going to be Charlie.”

Live on stage during Samsung’s introduction event for the Galaxy Note 7:

You want to know what else it comes with? An audio jack. (Audience laughs.) I’m just saying.

You have to watch it to see just how smug he is about it. Merits of the decision to remove the headphone jack from next month’s new iPhones aside, think about how extraordinary it is that a Samsung executive can make a joke about an iPhone rumor and the entire audience gets it.

Also, how much says Samsung has new phones with no audio jack on the market by this time next year?

Walmart's e-commerce business has long been overshadowed by Amazon's.

On a dollar-for-dollar basis, it's easy to understand why: Walmart's online sales were $13.7 billion in 2015, compared to Amazon's $107 billion.

But if Walmart buys Jet.com, which it's reportedly considering, it could become Amazon's worst nightmare.

Here's why:

1. Walmart has a massive customer base

The retailer is far behind Amazon in terms of online sales, but overall, the picture looks much different.

Walmart's revenue in 2015 was $482 billion, which is more than four times Amazon's revenue last year.

All that revenue for Walmart represents untapped potential for online sales from customers who are currently shopping at Walmart's physical stores.

2. Walmart has a massive network of stores that can serve as distribution centers for products sold online

Walmart has more than 4.500 stores in the US and 102 distribution facilities. By comparison, Amazon has roughly 180 fulfillment centers in the US.

For Walmart, "This combination of a massive brick-and-mortar footprint with [an] emerging ecommerce player would put both companies in a better position for battle," said Stephan Schilbach, who founded e-commerce companies NewStore and Demandware.

He said he's skeptical however that Walmart will ever overtake Amazon in online sales.

"I still don’t think they’ll be able to beat out Amazon, but it will be interesting to watch them try," he said.

Neil Saunders, CEO of retail consulting firm Conlumino, is more bullish on Walmart's potential.

"We have always said that this is a major advantage for Walmart over a player like Amazon in that Walmart can distribute products far more cheaply and quickly, if it finds a way to fully integrate stores into its systems," Saunders wrote in a note to clients.

3. What Walmart lacks in e-commerce logistics, Jet.com can offer

Jet.com is growing rapidly and stealing some customers from Amazon by offering cheaper prices than the e-commerce giant. It's only a year old and it has already generated more than $1 billion in sales from more than 4 million shoppers, according to Euromonitor.

According to Slice Intelligence, another industry-data firm, Jet's sales in July 2016 have grown 168% relative to August 2015. Wal-Mart’s online sales, meanwhile, have grown only 30%

Jet.com is also quickly mastering fast and free shipping.

While Walmart only recently began offering two-day delivery to members of its ShippingPass program — which is meant to rival Amazon Prime — Jet.com has figured out how to achieve one-day delivery for half of US households free of cost, according to Euromonitor International.

"Wal-Mart will gain significantly from Jet’s logistics and delivery expertise," Michelle Malison, retail analyst for Euromonitor. "By strategically locating its distribution centers and streamlining its logistics, Jet has doubled its one-day delivery (of its own first-party products) penetration rate from 25% to 50% of US households since launch, and is approaching 99% of US households for two-day delivery. In select high-density regions such as New York City, Jet often is able to offer same-day delivery at no additional cost to both Jet and its shoppers."

SEE ALSO: Macy's is officially becoming the new Sears

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Netflix has gone full throttle into producing its own original shows and movies, which the company has characterized as the most important part of its future.

Netflix will put out a staggering 600 hours of original content in 2016, and it's showing no signs of slowing production in 2017 and beyond.

Indeed, analysts at UBS think that Netflix's spending on original content will climb up and up, adding billions upon billions, even as its spending on licensed content remains flat.

Just how drastically will that affect Netflix's catalog in the next few years?

Take a look at this chart UBS sent in a recent analyst note:

Here you can see that as the spending on licensed content flatlines below $4 billion, while the spending on original continues to climb past $9 billion. Netflix has said it will spend about $5 billion total on content in 2016 (as the chart shows).

So expect much more "House of Cards," "Stranger Things," "Making a Murderer," and whatever else Netflix has cooking up.

SEE ALSO: How to make millions as a YouTube star

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NOW WATCH: Harvard and Oxford astrophysicists have an unsettling revelation for why we haven’t found aliens

Internet of Things platform provider Particle announced its enterprise deployment platform, Particle Cloud, on Tuesday.

The platform has been in beta for a few months and Particle claims it has already been used by Fortune 500 companies.

See Also: Will connected tech shake up the jobs market even more?

Particle Cloud makes IoT deployment a faster and less cumbersome experience. In a press release, the firm said it aims to ship “secure, reliable, and easy to use” IoT products in under six months.

“IoT is a new industry with huge potential. However, the unfortunate reality is that many businesses’ IoT initiatives flounder or fail,” said Zach Supalla, Particle co-founder and CEO. “The strongest business case for building an IoT product is irrelevant if you can’t execute. Companies who work with Particle actually ship their products.”

That’s evidenced by the company’s work with Keurig, which used the Particle Cloud to start collecting data on thousands of brewers.

“We made more progress on our first day with Particle than we had in months without them,” said Michael Cunningham, chief information officer of Keurig. “Within six months we began collecting data from thousands of connected brewers in the hands of consumers.”

Particle Cloud has a passel of projects

Particle has also worked with Briggs Healthcare and French utility giant Engie. It cites more than 20 crowdfunded projects it has worked on, which have raised “millions of dollars.”

Companies working on the Particle Cloud platform are able to prototype devices for under $20 and have a working model in a few weeks. From there, developers can choose to launch the product or scale it to meet demand. Large firms can take advantage of Particle’s Device Management Console, to manage an entire fleet of IoT devices.

Particle has partnered with a wide range of companies to make the enterprise platform inclusive. Google, Microsoft, and IFTTT provide customer insights to Particle customers, Broadcom, Cypress, u-blox, and ST deliver hardware solutions, and T-Mobile, Twilio, and Telefonica provide networking for IoT devices.

The post Particle brings IoT cloud to enterprise users appeared first on ReadWrite.

China is well positioned to become a global leader in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market, as industrial use of connected devices eclipses consumer gadgets.

A recent article by the Economist magazine extolled the virtues of China that positions it to capture a significant share of the global IIoT marketplace.

It says China’s current role as the world’s largest manufacturing power gives it the basis of becoming a global IIoT powerhouse.

Many of the IIoT technology products will be developed in China as the country makes most of the planet’s electronics. These electronics include sensors and other components that comprise IIoT networks and enable industrial products and factory machines to communicate data.

As well, much of this China-made IIoT technology will targeted for sale to the millions of factories in the country, which house billions of machines. The Economist notes that this syncs up ideally for the Chinese government which has shown itself keen to encourage the upgrading of the country’s manufacturing base.

China currently has more connected devices than any other nation on earth. IDC’s research predicts that the overall IoT market in China will rise to $361 billion in 2020 from $193 billion in 2015.

Add to this Accenture’s estimates that China’s IoT related industry could add up to $736 billion to the country’s GDP by the year 2030.

GE already working in China IIoT space

The huge potential of the Chinese IIoT market is attracting significant investment to its shores.

The Economist cites General Electric’s move to open a “digital foundry” in Shanghai as a prime example of this shift. GE’s center will enable Chinese firms to develop and commercialize IIoT products,

The GE foundry in China and another to be launched in Paris are part of the company’s strategy to encourage use of its proprietary Predix software for IIoT. It has so far attracted the business of China Telecom, China Eastern Airlines and Chinese tech giant Huawei.

Meanwhile, other players looking to capture segments of the IIoT market include China Mobile and other offshore giants like Cisco, HP, Honeywell and Siemens.

However, the article cites some pitfalls that could hamper China’s IoT potential. Factories in China are not as technologically advanced as those in Europe or the U.S., which could create difficulties when transitioning to advanced new systems that deeply integrate IIoT technology. As well, such a transition may prove too expensive for many companies that are suffering from both a flagging global economy and weak local fortunes.

However, recent news of poor wearables sales hints that the future for connected devices may be much rosier among industrial clientele than consumers.

IDC reported that smartwatch shipments tumbled 32% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year. The report claims that Apple Watch sales fell to 1.6 million in the second quarter of 2016, a 55% fall from the 3.6 million sales recorded in the same quarter last year.

The post China IIoT efforts will dominate global market: Economist appeared first on ReadWrite.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is coming to the agriculture industry, but a new report suggests that service costs and niche products are slowing adoption of the new technologies.

Benefits of IoT in agriculture include better yield rates and reductions in the amount of water, soil, and seed needed. The worry, for farmers, is the implementation of IoT systems and cost of service surpasses the costs saved from using the technology.

See Also: When will robots finally take farmers’ jobs?

It is not the first industry to be on the fence on IoT benefits. Retailers have had a wealth of IoT startups to choose from, offering data analytics on shopper behaviors, but most have skipped the services, possibly due to the service charges outweighing the added revenue per customer.

In agriculture, there are a few suppliers that offer services at an annual cost. One of those is OnFarm Systems, which provides its Grower Dashboard, a platform to manage farm sensors, monitor temperature, cloud, and water irrigation, schedule tasks, and view analytics.

That comes alongside SMS alerts, maps, weather data, storage and backup and a messaging service. For a single user, the cost is $100 a year, but OnFarm limits the user to three data streams and one property, whereas the $500 a year package gives unlimited integrated data, acres, and data feeds. On top of that, an additional $100 is added for every virtual weather station the customer purchases.

Agriculture margins make tech investment tough

Others mentioned in the Lux Research report don’t provide costs on their website. Semios, for example, shows five different parts of its IoT platform for orchard and soil-based farming, but doesn’t say if the five features come separate or are available in one annual package.

See Also: Can Arable’s IoT tech end world hunger?

Phytech is even more expensive than OnFarm, costing $500 per acre. In case studies, Phytech says it can reduce water usage by 10 percent in two weeks, but is that reduction enough to cover the costs? All depends on the produce cost and how much a farmer can fit onto an acre of land.

The agriculture industry is not seeing large profits and service providers need to be able to show their value if they want customers that send payment every year. If 10 percent reduction in water usage or 20 percent increase in yield rate is worth it, we are bound to see more of these IoT startups enter the market, but if its not, we might see farmers firmly reject these emerging technologies for a few more years.

The post IoT grows crops best, but still too pricy for farmers appeared first on ReadWrite.

Earlier this week, Apple made waves with the revelation that in iOS 10, the forthcoming operating system update for iPhones and iPads, the existing revolver emoji would be replaced with a water gun. 

Well, it turns out that with Microsoft actually went the exact other direction by changing its existing ray gun emoji to a revolver in the brand-new Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

Here's Windows 10's old, cartoonish gun emoji (left), and the new revolver emoji (right):

It's tempting to call it some kind of political stand on Microsoft's part. While Apple hasn't commented, it's generally accepted that the change was made as a statement on America's gun violence epidemic. But, taking a step back, it's actually another example of how Apple is forging its own path relative to the rest of the industry.

Basically, the way any emoji come into existence is that an industry body called the Unicode Consortium agrees, after much back-and-forth, on a standard list of emoji that every participating vendor — including Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much everybody else — has to support.

That list is just a bunch of words, though, describing what the emoji should look like, for instance "FACE WITHOUT MOUTH" or "MOBILE PHONE WITH RIGHTWARDS ARROW AT LEFT," or, in this case, "PISTOL." Then, it's up to each company to independently design their emoji, but hewing to that agreed-upon definition. 

As of this week, this is how the "PISTOL" emoji is being interpreted across popular platforms:

Aside from Apple, Microsoft's new pistol emoji looks roughly similar to all the other pistol emojis across all platforms. Indeed, a Microsoft spokesperson says that the pistol update was about making sure Windows 10 hemmed closer to the common standard than anything else.

Quoth that spokesperson:

“Our intent with every glyph is to align with the global Unicode standard, and the previous design did not map to industry designs or our customers’ expectations of the emoji definition. We will continue to work with the Unicode Consortium to refine and update glyphs that reflects customer needs, feedback and supports a consistent system that works across the digital world.”

It's actually not the first time Microsoft has performed this kind of maneuver. Windows 10's poop emoji doesn't smile, as Apple's does, because while it may be cute, it doesn't hold to the spirit of the official Unicode definition, which is literally "a pile of feces." Seriously.

On a final note, it's kind of funny. If you told someone in the nineties that Microsoft would be worrying so much about standards and fitting in with the rest of the tech community, they would have called you crazy.

SEE ALSO: Why Microsoft decided that its poop emoji shouldn't smile

SEE ALSO: There's a huge problem with Apple's plan to combat gun violence by changing an emoji

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The flurry of activity surrounding bots strongly resembles the rush by mobile app developers as IPhones and Android based devices achieved primacy and ubiquity. With messaging apps on hundreds of millions of phones, the question arises “Why should I have to leave the messaging app to order an Uber, book a table for dinner or make a payment.” Just as the glass displays of most iPhone 6s or Samsung Galaxies are littered with over a dozen icons (most of which are never invoked), users of Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp and other messaging apps are about to find a gaggle of bots listening in on conversations poised to suggest a movie, hail an Uber or schedule an event on their calendars.

In the age of bots, apps, interactive text response and other Conversational Commerce vehicles, a top challenge for customer service professionals has been anticipating and serving each customer’s fast-changing expectations for self-service. To a large degree, customer expectations have kept pace with, and assimilated each new approach that technology advancements have made possible. While individuals can add new devices, apps (passwords for that matter), each entails incremental investment in development costs and staff time that tends to span multiple business units among brands and businesses.

Let’s take a closer look. Ten years ago customers craved robust search. Google had set their expectations that something akin to a natural language query should bring instant, satisfying results. Whether shopping online or looking for details about their insurance policy, customers wanted at least a “google like” search experience or better. The expectation was that they could go to a brand’s website and use a search function to quickly locate relevant information to answer their questions.

Making this experience possible required a joint effort on the part of IT departments, customer service organizations, product and marketing groups, and possibly other divisions within a company. Someone had to write “knowledge articles” or other content that encapsulated relevant information about the company’s products, services, and applications. Another group had to categorize this information in a way that made it searchable. Maybe a third group worried about the overall customer experience.

None of this work was easy. It underscored the difficulties and limitations of enterprise knowledge management. It put a spotlight on the inefficiencies resulting from the way most businesses separated IT functions from other areas of the business.

Where Intelligent Assistance Began
Fast forward five years. Apple launched Siri, which opened up a new world of self-service possibilities. Even though the actual experience was often disappointing, people quickly grasped the possibilities of using natural language to ask for and get answers to lots of questions. Around the same time, Google was on the way to implementing their Knowledge Graph technology. They’d acquired Freebase, a metadata repository, in 2010 and were using it to understand relationships between real world entities and to quickly find reliable answers to lots of natural language questions.

The age of intelligent assistance was born. Brands who had committed to staying ahead of customer self-service expectations were early adopters of virtual agents, typically including them on their websites alongside of, or even in place of, traditional search boxes. These brands leveraged existing investments in knowledge bases and taxonomies. Those that truly excelled at exceeding customer expectations included predictive technologies that could even anticipate the customer’s need.

In 2016 we’ve seen the eruption of hype around the “conversational interface.” Though it’s still unclear whether the hype outstrips customer expectations, there’s no doubt that a huge shift has occurred away from desktops towards mobile. Natural language in the form of messaging and texting has proven to be the dominant form of communication on mobile devices. At the same time, Amazon Echo and its Alexa assistant are showing customer acceptance of voice input, at least in the right environment.

Once again forward-thinking brands are jumping into the world of conversational interfaces, whether it means experimenting with customer-facing bots, launching voice-based “skills” for customers with an Amazon Alexa device or adding natural language understanding to Web chat or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems.

In conjunction with the shift toward natural language, machine learning technologies have matured to a point where they are not only improving speech recognition, but also enabling better predictive capabilities, more reliable answers, and even transaction completion. The most innovative brands are experimenting with all of these capabilities.

Keeping pace with customer self-service expectations requires vision, commitment, and probably a bit of daring. When customers get even a glimpse of a technology that makes their lives easier, they quickly embrace it and want even more. Self-service is now the preferred type of customer service. Brands that have stayed ahead of expectations are well positioned to meet and exceed customer expectations.

A robot tattooist might have steadier "hands" than its human counterpart, but how do you know it's not going to accidentally tattoo you all the way down to the bone? That's all I could think of watching this video of what's been billed as the "world's first tattoo by an industrial robot." At around two and a half minutes in you can see how tightly the tattoo recipient has been strapped to a chair and you think: "Ah, if he moves, then things are going to get nasty."

That aside, it's wonderful to see an industrial robot being put to this use. The project was engineered by French designers Pierre Emm and Johan da Silveira (otherwise known as Appropriate Audiences), who have prior form in this department. Back in 2014, along with fellow...

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By Bernhard Albler
Your creativity has no limits when it comes to integrating Internet of Things into business processes, including collaboration.

No place on land or sea is safe from being connected. And now it seems the marine industry is at last diving into Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with both feet.

RCR Wireless News reports shipping companies are increasingly harnessing the data produced by their vessels.
However, technology giant Ericsson says the marine industry lags behind alternative modes of commercial transport in its deployment of this connected communications and information technology. This is despite the fact that around 80% of global trade by volume is transported by ships compared to other transportation modes.

Though ships have routinely used data collecting sensors for some time, Ericsson feels that the industry has been slow to take full advantage of the technology’s benefits until now.

But shipping companies are increasingly looking to make up lost ground, or nautical miles in this case. They are increasing connectivity aboard ships to allow the sharing of insights in real time and using the data to optimize shipping ecosystems.

“There may be no direct commercial gain to increasing crew connectivity on board,” maritime executive Douglas Watson said to RCR. “But executives tell us they get far more information back about their vessels than they ever got before establishing reliable contact with crew. When the crew has better access to communication, they exchange more operational info about the state of the vessel, adding more data to what’s gathered from sensors to inform operational decision making.”

One area where IIoT is having a significant impact on shipping is to track the state vessels to optimize marine maintenance and repairs.

And keeping commercial vessels in ship-shape condition is crucial to the bottom line of shipping firms. It is estimated that having an offshore supply vessel offline for repairs can cost between $58,000 and $116,000 per day, with a five-week dry docking operation costing nearly $3 million.

Ericsson has ideas for shippers

One IIoT platform used by shipping companies is Ericsson’s Maritime ICT Cloud solution. The platform connects bridge communications with embedded sensors that monitor the status of the ship engines and hull to allow vessel owners to address repair problems early on.

This follows news that the world’s largest shipping container firm, Maersk Line, has brought two thirds of its vessels online in a partnership with Ericsson.

Not only does IIoT at sea allow ships to be tracked, but also can provide the status and temperature of cargo containers on board. This allows the crew to look into any storage malfunctions that could cause cargo to spoil.

As well real-time cargo tracking technology allows various stakeholders in a supply chain to monitor goods in their journey from production warehouses to the final customers.

The post Shippers setting sail via Internet of (Floating) Things appeared first on ReadWrite.

I’ve heard from lots of parents that their kids love the Amazon Echo because they can tell it do things without having to interact with a screen, and when Amazon opened up Alexa to developers, it gave other gadget makers the chance to put the digital assistant inside. Nucleus, a new intercom launching on Lowe’s today, comes with Alexa installed and can call any phone number, so long as the device has the iOS / Android companion app installed. The owner of the Nucleus just has to pre-approve the phone number, so not just anyone can start a video call. It's being billed as a new age intercom system, but in reality, it's just a tablet with extra privacy features and simplified design so kids can make calls.

It’s also reminiscent of the Ily,...

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Qualcomm, Intel and Dell are among the companies moving toward enabling vertical-specific IoT solutions.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry.

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A nearly existential search for meaning and direction is hitting the tech industry and its major players in a way that they’ve never truly experienced before. Why? It’s a combination of factors, including market maturity, flattened growth in key categories, and the lack of a clear picture about where things are headed.

One of the few directions most seem to agree on is the growing importance of the Internet of Things (IoT). Even here, however, the general fuzziness about what IoT really is, how to best approach it, and what the real opportunities are is leading to a lot of head-scratching and strategic adjustments.

Many companies, for example, initially tried to approach IoT with a more horizontal perspective, hoping to find solutions that worked across multiple industries and applications.

Many companies, for example, initially tried to approach IoT with a more horizontal perspective, hoping to find solutions that worked across multiple industries and applications. Fairly quickly, however, most have found that they need to refine and focus their efforts across many separate vertical applications in order to find success.

In addition, while many companies see IoT as an opportunity to expand beyond their core strengths, most are discovering those efforts will likely take much longer than they first thought. Instead, they’re finding that creative applications of what they already do offer the shortest path to success.

For example, while connectivity and compute are clearly common characteristics across most all IoT applications, smartphone-component leader Qualcomm is starting to find traction in IoT by creating an extended range of reference platforms using its components across nearly 25 different applications. From drones, to wearables, from smart meters to connected cars, the company has built and shared an impressive range of specialized designs, leveraging various members of its Snapdragon CPU and modem family of SOCs.

Qualcomm has found that many of the smaller (and even some larger) players entering specific IoT markets don’t have the in-house expertise to design the circuit boards they need to drive their creations. As a result, they’re starting to attract attention, thanks to the extra effort of creating these vertical-specific solutions.

The IoT opportunity is so large that there isn’t a single answer about how to best address it.

Data analytics is another shared characteristic of IoT, and much of that happens in the cloud or corporate data centers. Intel has recognized this opportunity, and is leveraging its strength in servers and data center infrastructure to become more relevant in IoT. Rather than generically throwing x86 hardware at the problem, however, Intel is increasingly focused on more specialized solutions. In particular, it is focused on the growing use of its new FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) assets (a result of the recent Altera acquisition), which allows Intel to create programmable chips that can be ideally matched to the different types of analytics needs from different IoT markets.

In a related fashion, the people at Dell have started to create a line of IoT gateways, which are essentially industrial PCs with additional types of connectors that allow them to easily integrate into many types of IoT environments. Their goal is to build a range of different solutions that allow them to create the kind of distributed computing architectures and "fog-based" computing components (closer to the ground than "cloud") which IoT deployments are starting to use.

Companies like HPE are leveraging their strength in big data and analytics software and services to meet the unique needs of different IoT applications. In addition, HPE has built ruggedized edge-based servers like the EdgeLine series, which incorporate data acquisition hardware from National Instruments (NI) for industrial IoT applications.

Speaking of which, NI, best known for its test and measurement equipment, is also enabling specific IoT solutions. The company’s latest version of LabView offers a modular software platform design that incorporates a number of new elements, including some designed for data analytics. In addition, LabView Communications puts an emphasis on building and connecting together blocks of application-specific code for the radio and communications-level elements that are so essential to IoT.

Of course, these companies (and many others) also compete directly with one another in other aspects of the IoT market. But the IoT opportunity is so large that there isn’t a single answer about how to best address it. Eventually, companies can (and undoubtedly will) work to broaden their offerings across a wider range of the IoT market. In the short term, however, leveraging existing strengths across a range of different verticals seems to be the way to go.

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Bob O’Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of Technalysis Research LLC, a technology consulting and market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. Reach him @bobodtech.

I made a terrible mistake. After years of exclusively posting pics of kids and vacation spots on Facebook, I decided to engage my “friends” in a little political debate over the last few weeks. I don’t know what I expected to achieve. Deep down I guess I assumed that well reasoned arguments supported by facts and historical analogies would prevail, especially if presented in a respectful manner. All I knew was that the thought of letting the absurdities in my timeline go unchallenged left me feeling complicit, as if my silence would be mistaken for tacit agreement. There’s too much at stake with the US presidential election this year. I had to speak out.

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By Marty Parker
Which of today's UC vendors will own the future? It's anybody's guess.

Australia might not be as far away as it used to be because the entire continent has moved 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) since 1994, according to Reuters.

How did this happen? Tectonic shifts are the reason. The Australian tectonic plate is the fastest moving continental plate on Earth. Scientists believe that it split from the Indo-Australian plate approximately three million years ago, and today, it is moving 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) northwards and slightly eastwards every year, colliding into the Pacific Plate on its journey. This drags the landmass of the continent just a little bit closer to the equator every year.

As the pressure between the Pacific and Australian plates builds and builds, earthquakes will most likely result.

While five feet doesn’t seem like a whole lot, it is still enough to disrupt global navigation satellite systems — which were and still are based on Australia’s position in 1994 — putting the continent out of sync. This affects not only the GPS maps on smartphones, but also delivery drones, farmers, meteorologists, and even automated cars.

This happens because modern satellite systems provide location data based on global lines of longitude and latitude, and these, unlike continents, are fixed.  Many countries — including Australia — produce maps and measurements with the lines of longitude and latitude fixed to their continent. But as the plates move, this means that over time, local coordinates become out of sync with the global coordinates.

So now, scientists are planning to revamp all of Australia’s coordinates by January 2017. They intend to plot new points at a longitude and latitude scaled 5.9 feet to the north, which is actually an overcompensation —but just wait, the country’s mapped coordinates should align with the rest of the planets by 2020.

After 2020, a new system will take over and it will continually adjust with the shifts in the plates over time.

“We used the old plate fixed system to make life simple, but we don’t want to do this adjustment every so often,” Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia told the BBC. “Once we have a system that can deal with changes over time, then everybody in the world could be on that same system.”

SEE ALSO: Earth's tides can trigger earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault

DON'T MISS: Scientists say we’ll only get one year to prepare if a super-volcano erupts

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NOW WATCH: The most powerful physics machine on Earth may have found something that breaks the laws of physics as we know them

Microsoft is opening up sales of its HoloLens augmented reality headset. In a blog post today, project head Alex Kipman said that all "developers and business customers" in the US and Canada can now order up to five HoloLens development kits apiece, instead of going through an application process. It’s taking orders through the HoloLens website, requiring only a Microsoft account — and, of course, $3,000 per headset.

Microsoft kept HoloLens under wraps for a long time, and it carefully vetted would-be buyers for the first wave of headsets, which started shipping in March. Kipman said that all of these early orders have been filled, although we don’t know how many HoloLens kits are actually in the wild right now. While Microsoft is still...

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Provided by RootMetrics

Denver came in last place in the latest RootMetrics mobile speed report for the 125 most populated U.S. markets.

That means Denver did worse than Flint, Mich. (which was No. 54), McAllen, Texas (No. 122), and even Colorado Springs (No. 121).

Compared to first-place Atlanta’s 94.1 data score, Denver’s 78.4 showing was pretty awful.

All four major carriers in Denver saw their mobile network speeds drop below 10 mbps during the test period from Feb. 11-18. During that period, RootMetrics sent people to the Denver area to conduct 20,419 tests of mobile network reliability, data speeds and data, voice and text performance.

“All four carriers recorded median download speeds below 10.0 Mbps in Denver, and median upload speeds were even slower. Due in part to the slow speeds, Denver also ranked just No. 124 in data performance. Unfortunately, this isn’t unfamiliar territory for Denver, as the Mile High City was No. 122 in speed No. 121 in data during our previous round of testing,” according to the report.

Provided by RootMetrics

Being last is a bit of a shock. But we should have expected the low rank after coming in in the bottom five markets for mobile performance earlier this year. At the time, RootMetrics spokeswoman Annette Hamilton said it could be because of Denver’s growing population.

“In general, as carriers add customers, we have seen that networks slow down until the network catches up again. We can’t say for certain that this is or will be happening in Denver, but it is something we have seen in the past,” she said in April.

On Wednesday, Hamilton offered additional insight into how the scores are tabulated. RootMetrics, which buys its own phones at the store to use during tests, looks at a mobile user’s ability to connect and stay connected.

In Denver’s case, she said, two things are happening: network congestion or interference, and mobile carriers performed worse compared to that of other regions.

“But you are not alone,” she said. “In our experience other cities in the Rockies area tend to have challenges when it comes to data performance, and we have yet to be able to pinpoint exactly why this happens. We can note that when it comes to LTE service, the Denver area is fairly saturated, showing that carriers are making efforts to improve their overall network performance in the area. This, in part, could be why we are seeing a slow climb for the city, moving from (overall rank) No. 122 to No. 119.”

While Denver’s overall score for each carrier in the first half of the year was in the low- to mid-90s, RootMetrics found that download speeds dropped from August. Sprint’s median download speed slowed nearly 25 percent to 9.8 mbps. T-Mobile’s dropped to 4.4 mbps, down 35 percent from August’s 6.8 mbps.

By comparison, the speediest city was Atlanta, where Verizon topped median download speeds at 33.3 mbps. Even there T-Mobile saw a decline as well — down to 16.5 mbps from 26.2 mbps in August.

Out of the 125 slots, Denver ranked 84 for reliability, 87 for calls and 64 for texts and a lowly 124 for data performance.

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Updated Aug. 3, 2016: This story has been updated to include comments from RootMetrics’ Annette Hamilton.

Researchers who attempted to unlock a murder victim's phone using a 3D printed replica of one of his fingers were forced to use an alternative method last week, after the models produced were found not to be accurate enough to gain access. The team from Michigan State University was asked by police to gain access to the phone, which was eventually unlocked with a 2D image of the dead man's fingerprints, enhanced manually to fill in gaps in the original image, and rendered on conductive paper.

Both 2D and 3D versions of the dead man's fingerprints were produced, but the poor quality of the original image kept in police files stymied the efforts of the team, led by professor Anil Jain. After a failed first attempt, the team used an image...

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Samsung's goal with the Internet of Things is to connect literally everything, and apparently one of the first things up is your shoes. A Samsung spinoff company, called Salted Venture, announced a pair of smart golfing shoes and smart fitness sneakers back in February, and now it's preparing to launch the first of them. The Iofit golf shoes are now available to preorder on Kickstarter, where they're selling for around $200, with plans to begin shipping in February.

The shoes, which need to be synced with a smartphone, are meant to track a golfer's swing and posture and then provide them with immediate feedback. The intention is to quickly inform golfers of what they're doing wrong and how they can improve, without requiring a trainer...

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LinkedIn is late to the party.

For the past two years, social sites like Facebook and Snapchat and Twitter have been pushing aggressively to get their respective user bases to create and watch as much video content as possible. LinkedIn has not.

But that may soon change. On Tuesday, the professional network — now owned by Microsoft — launched a new app so that its hand-selected group of Influencers can create and share short videos directly to the app’s news feed. It’s the first time LinkedIn has ever let users upload video directly to the service, something that’s been standard on other social sites for years.

This isn’t a full-blown video push, though. If you are not one of the company’s Influencers, you won’t be able to use the new app. (Don’t worry, you’re in the majority; LinkedIn has just over 500 Influencers out of 433 million registered users.)

LinkedIn videos are also limited to just 30 seconds, and autoplay on desktop but not in LinkedIn’s mobile app. And unlike Facebook, LinkedIn will not use its algorithm to boost videos higher into people’s feeds than other kinds of posts.

Which means all of this is just a baby step into video, although the company eventually plans to move the feature inside its core app and open it to other users, a spokesperson said. It’s still unclear what kind of video people will feel comfortable sharing to their professional profile, and whether or not anyone will want to watch whatever that is.

Oh snap!

Instagram is taking a page out of Snapchat’s playbook. Okay, more like a chapter or two.

On Tuesday, Instagram announced Stories, a “new” feature that is — with the exception of a few minor design elements — a replica of Snapchat’s Stories feature, which lets users share photos and videos to their followers, and which expire 24 hours after they are posted.

The similarities are striking, even outside of the main concept. Both Stories products limit videos to 10 seconds, feature Stories in a row of small circles inside the app, and let you draw or add stickers to photos and videos you share. Oh, and the name is the same, too.

Depending on where you work, Instagram’s Stories feature is either the most sincere form of flattery or the most blatant form of plagiarism. Instagram doesn’t seem concerned. New product VP Kevin Weil, who joined the company earlier this year from the same position at Twitter, likened Snapchat’s creation of Stories to the way the hashtag started on Twitter.

“When people first started using a hashtag outside of Twitter, it was a big deal,” Weil said. “It’s become universal as a result. I think ‘the story’ is a fantastic format for sharing in the moment and giving people a picture of your daily life, and I think a lot of apps are going to adopt it.”

The new product could help Instagram in two big ways:

1. It addresses Instagram’s sharing problem, as detailed in a report from The Information saying that people aren’t sharing as many posts to Instagram as they used to. Because Stories disappear, they’re typically more casual and less curated than a traditional Instagram post, which is often used as the highlight of a recent vacation or a night out with friends. “Instagram Stories turns Instagram into the best place to share your highlights, but also the everyday moments that make up your life between those highlights,” Weil said.
2. It addresses Instagram’s Snapchat problem — specifically, that people love Snapchat. The app is far and away the greatest threat Facebook and Instagram have come across in their effort to own every minute we spend on our mobile devices, especially if you’re a young person.

The thinking inside Instagram is that if people are already opening its app to share the photos they want to keep, maybe they’ll also stick around to share the more fleeting memories, too. Stories are super popular on Snapchat, so it stands to reason they’ll also be super popular on Instagram, which has a similar, albeit much larger, audience.

It’s never quite that simple, of course, but it’s a legitimate argument. It’s also an idea that has already caught Snapchat’s attention. When it noticed that people were finding more permanent ways to share their Snaps to other networks (like, say, Instagram), it rolled out a new feature called Memories so users could save photos and videos inside the Snapchat app instead. It still doesn’t offer a profile or photo album feature like you might find on Instagram or Facebook, but the idea that everything on Snapchat disappears is quickly going away.

A quick history lesson: This is not Facebook’s first blatant attempt to copy Snapchat. After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried and failed to buy the company in late 2012, Facebook twice launched ephemeral messaging apps, both of which flopped.

Instagram also borrowed the idea for Snapchat Live Stories, collections of photos and videos around popular events, and launched its own version last October. Live Stories, too, are a big part of Snapchat’s business, but have been relatively quiet inside of Instagram (at least, we haven’t heard much about them since launch).

The new Stories feature will be available as part of a free Instagram app update on iOS and Android, beginning Tuesday. Here’s a video Instagram released along with the update.

Twilio's latest API, the Twilio Message Feedback API, aims to improve its delivery of services by collecting feedback data from its end-users. In an era when end users' skepticism regarding private data collection continues to grow, we must ask what data will Twilio collect, why is Twilio collecting it, and how will the data be used.

The newest XPrize looks for ways to turn carbon emissions into something useful, because it doesn't look like we're going to stop them any time soon.

What can you do with CO2? Other than bubble soda drinks and use it to help pump even more oil out of ground, today the answer is not very much.

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