TECH NEWS from 1- QORVO 2- Parks Associates, Deloitte, and Gartner 3- CABA
QORVO publishes small books for dummies about technological aspects of the IoT market. Below you will find statements from the booklet 5G RF for dummies. The three most important 5G use cases are: 1- enhancing user experiences with enhanced mobile broadband, 2- connecting machines to machines in the Internet of Things, 3- delivering lifesaving and mission-critical services. IoT means that we go from smartphones to smart everything. Smart buildings/homes/hotels/retail stores, smart cities, smart cars, smart production facilities (M2M), etc. Within this environment Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts that mobile video traffic will account for 75 % of all mobile data traffic by 2020. Ericsson predicts there will be around 28 billion connected devices by 2021. Fifteen billion of these devices will connect M2M and consumer electronic devices. Another large portion of these IoT-connected devices will reside in applications such as smart cities, industrial automation, management services, financial services, virtual reality, and even pharming. 5G technology is : 1- IoT connecting more than a trillion devices to the internet in the next ten years with extremely low data rates, battery life greater than ten years, and the longest possible communication range and 2- Low latency for real-time connections enabling autonomous vehicles and AR/VR. Smart cars with human drivers will also leverage 5G technology to improve vehicle safety and efficiency, as well as the overall driving experience. Low latency: key for AR, VR, and mission critical services. Mission critical services requiring very high reliability, global coverage, and very low latency, will become more native to support 5G infrastructure. Latency may be more important than throughput in some applications. Based on all information the conclusion that 5G will be the next step is rather riskless. But a lot of uncertainty exists about when it will be rolled out, where and how. So: still enough questions.
White papers from Parks Associates, Deloitte, and Gartner
One can find a lot of interesting free information about technical- and market developments on the IoT smart homes/buildings market. Parks Associates has a lot of and very professional white papers about the IoT smart homes market. For example: they developed for ULE Alliance "Enabling Voice in the Smart Home". It is a high quality document and we in the EU can learn from it how far we are behind with smart home and smart speakers from the US. A conclusion in the report is: "Ultimately, voice control is a smart home enabler- and future adoption of smart home products will hinge on their ability to integrate into a connected ecosystem driven by voice as the standard point of interaction. In the future voice may become ubiquitous in the home and in the consumers' everyday lives". They conclude with a sentence important in the EU: "Technologies that natively support voice communication will be in an advantageous position to serve this trend in the future". Quite a challenge on the European market with more than 20 languages. Gartner produced an interesting guide to " Building a successful strategic plan for information & technology". They recommend companies to complete their 2019 strategic plan based upon this guide. An example is to set ground rules. The roles and responsibilities of different functional stakeholders should be set at the outset. Responsibilities are defined for CIO, CEO/Executive Committee, business-unit leaders, direct reports to the CIO, IT leaders / managers, and EA or I&T strategist. Another step is: assess capabilities. The SWOT analysis with for example the question: do we have the knowledge to enter into new markets. the following step: define objectives. They should be: specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time bound. The number of new ICT Technologies is very high and Gartner wants to help to for instance to build a plan that addresses the current and anticipated performance gaps. Find free content: www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner. Deloitte published a white paper about AI (Artificial Intelligence). I will give some parts of the content. The conclusion of the first chapter, "Artificial Intelligence defined", is: the terms machine learning , cognitive analytics, robotics and smart machines are used often in relationship to AI, or sometimes as synonyms. The explain examples of machine learning: spamfilter, transform handwriting into structured text, transform speech into text, and identification of pictures of cats in photo-collections. Another example of Cognitive analytics: 80 % of all company data is unstructured and current cognitive analytics systems can search all of it to find the answer to your question. They evaluate applications of AI: speech recognition / translation. The next chapter presents five technology trends that leap-frog AI: Cloud, Big Data, API's, Open Source, and IoT. Their recommendation is: with the recent technological trends described in this article, we believe that the right time has come for organizations to start developing their first AI use cases. They close the last chapter with: we hope that the topics discussed will help the reader to get an end-to-end overview of AI in a more practical sense rather than a bullet proof complete scientific exercise.
CABA: the best website to keep in touch with all relevant global technological- and market developments
Each 2 weeks CABA sends their CABA NewsBrief to all members (a free service). The news letter from August had an article "Microsoft and Amazon start publicly testing Cortana-Alexa integration". This indicates how the US technology moves far ahead of the EU smart home market. Speech technology has an important role in the advancement of eCommerce and with > 20 languages in the EU we can't follow the speed in the US. The article states that:
"This integration will allow Cortana users to ask Alexa to shop on Amazon, manage their Amazon orders and access many of Alexa's third-party skills. Alexa users will have access to Cortana's knowledge and helpful productivity features such as calendar management, day at a glance and rich email integration. Over time, additional skills and features will be integrated," explained a Microsoft spokes person.
They also presented a market research report from Transparency Market Research. According to their TMR analysis, the global home automation market is expected to rise at a CAGR of 6.8 %. Many reports till now came up with a much higher CAGR of about 40% with the US being by far the biggest market. This report states that the EU-market is bigger. Perhaps this month or next month we will read in their NewsBrief how these differences can be explained. Nevertheless: these newsletters are great stuff.
"This integration will allow Cortana users to ask Alexa to shop on Amazon, manage their Amazon orders and access many of Alexa's third-party skills. Alexa users will have access to Cortana's knowledge and helpful productivity features such as calendar management, day at a glance and rich email integration. Over time, additional skills and features will be integrated," explained a Microsoft spokes person.
They also presented a market research report from Transparency Market Research. According to their TMR analysis, the global home automation market is expected to rise at a CAGR of 6.8 %. Many reports till now came up with a much higher CAGR of about 40% with the US being by far the biggest market. This report states that the EU-market is bigger. Perhaps this month or next month we will read in their NewsBrief how these differences can be explained. Nevertheless: these newsletters are great stuff.