It's February, love is in the air, and this is This Month in Things. Every month, we try to bring you the most interesting, important information you need on IoT. It's always quick, useful, and informative. Make sure you subscribe to stay tuned in to IoT.
We all know Uber collects tons of data on us as we are driving around. But, until now, they have kept it all private. Last year, Uber announced Uber Movement, which is an initiative to help use Uber’s data to make cities smarter.
This month, Uber announced a three-year partnership with the City of Cincinnati called the Cincinnati Mobility Lab. With this partnership, Uber and Cincinnati will obviously expand Uber’s presence throughout the region, but they will also research and study new ways to improve the commuting experience throughout the city.
With this type of data, Uber will be able to put systems in place to make sure it doesn’t interfere with public transit, it could even integrate with it some day.
Whether we like it or not, smart glasses are coming. With so many companies trying to push Artificial Reality, smart glasses are an obvious next step. This month, The Verge got an inside look at a new project Intel is working on. The project is called Vaunt, and it is Intel’s take on the smart glasses.
These glasses are designed to be lightweight and look normal, unlike some of their competitors, which this has been the main criticism for smart glasses thus far.
They work by projecting the information to display directly to your eyes using a low-powered and harmless laser. Intel custom made just about every piece of hardware that’s in this device. Intel will launch an early access program for developers who’d like to explore the possibilities of the device later this year.
IoT is huge and keeping track of every thing is hard. This is one of the reasons we created This Month in Things. To help represent the complexity and depth of field, Matt Turck, a venture capitalist at First Mark, published his fourth IoT Landscape.
This landscape illustrates all of the companies in the IoT Ecosystem. The diagram shows the different IoT application verticals, like Enterprise, Smart Home and Consumer applications. It covers all of the major platforms and sorts them by use case. Lastly it covers all of the building blocks of IoT, like networks and infrastructure providers. This is a helpful guide and tool for anyone trying to make sense of the massive IoT space.
IoT and Blockchain technologies are in the beginning stages of high-level adoption. We are still trying to prove use-cases for both that could add the most value to our lives and to our enterprises. Filament released a product that makes use of both of these technologies.
They announced a new chip called Blocklet. This chip allows a device to talk to and interact with blockchain technology. By being able to send sensor data directly to a blockchain, this could significantly improve supply chain and shipping practices where there are always multiple parties who need to be kept up to date.
I’m excited to see where IoT and Blockchain can go.
There are major efforts to make smaller, cheaper, and more low-powered hardware in the IoT ecosystem. A semiconductor startup called Wiliot has created a Bluetooth beacon that is as thin as a sheet of paper and requires no battery.
Between Bluetooth traffic and Wi-Fi signals, our environment is filled with radio frequency signals that this new device can use for power. So much so that they expect this hardware will never need batteries. They want to begin selling this device in 2019, and it should cost less than one dollar.
A battery-free Bluetooth beacon would be a massive win for IoT and have tons of possibilities.
That’s all for this month! Until next time, Stay Connected.