Two Reports Survey State of Batteries in IoT
In a report titled “Powerful Medicine: Opportunities for Pairing New Bioelectronics with Innovative Energy Storage,” Lux Research says that energy demands for wearable and implantable medical devices means the battery industry is ripe for innovation. The market-research firm reports that advances in lithium-ion battery technology should begin to impact medical devices within the coming decade, and “will advance both safety and performance, besides extending life span,” doubling the energy density of currently available options, while enabling up to 25 years of useful life.
The report highlights three technology companies—EaglePicher Technologies, WiTricity and FlexEI—for their “dominant” status in energy storage, wireless charging technology, and custom battery-design services (including thin-film and cylindrical cells), respectively. Meanwhile, it says, many current lithium-ion battery developers are lagging behind the innovation curve. In order to survive, Lux’s researchers believe, these firms will need to innovate their products in terms of form factor, energy density and material selection.
In another recent report, IDTechEx says that the battery market has been suffering from a lack of efficiency and lifespan gains in battery technology throughout the past couple of decades, with the exception of thin, flexible batteries, which have shown market improvement. Because these types of batteries are so important for wearable technology, it reports, Apple, Samsung and LG Chem are among the consumer electronics companies to make recent investments in flexible battery technology. IDTechEx’s report, “Flexible, Printed and Thin Film Batteries 2015-2025,” predicts that these investments will help drive the flexible battery market from $6.9 million today to more than $400 million in 2025.
Webroot Offers Three-pronged Toolkit to Fight Hackers
Webroot, a provider of online security tools, has releases its Webroot IoT Security Toolkit, a collection of cloud-based software products designed to protect consumers, businesses and technology providers from malware and other cyber-threats to so-called edge devices, such as Internet of Things sensor gateways, laptops, tablets and smartphones. The toolkit includes software agents that scan for new and altered files or anomalous conditions. These agents collect data about these files or anomalies and issue alerts regarding them to the Webroot BrightCloud Threat Intelligence software, available via an application programming interface (API), running on IoT gateways and platforms. This software blocks malicious inbound attacks and prevents data from being pulled from these devices. The toolkit’s third element, referred to as a secure Web gateway, is a cloud-based service that inspects and filters incoming and outgoing traffic between devices in order to intercept malware before it reaches edge devices.
Webroot says it designed the toolkit to help IoT and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution designers and system integrators to integrate cloud-based, real-time threat-intelligence services, specifically to deflect malware and prevent hackers from exploiting software vulnerabilities of which an end user is unaware. The toolkit is available now. Contact Webroot for pricing information.
Retail Spending Set to Surge
Market research firm Juniper Research estimates that retailers will spend $2.5 billion on purchasing and installing IoT technologies during the coming years. This would be a fourfold increase over the $670 million that retailers allotted toward the technology this year, the organization reports in a newly published white paper, The Internet of Things: Consumer, Industrial & Public Services 2015-2020.
Bluetooth beacons and RFID tags account for a large share of retailers’ spending, according to the white paper. Retailers are drawn to the insights that Bluetooth beacons provide through traffic analysis inside stores, as well as the ability to push offers or product information to shoppers’ smartphones. RFID powers retailers’ inventory-tracking operations while decreasing costs. The technology can also be used to offer dynamic pricing in accordance with stock levels and competitors’ pricing.
But despite the positive outlook for spending on IoT technologies, the report cautions that the success of these technologies for retailers depends on their ability to prevent them from becoming another security vulnerability, joining payment system breaches. It advises that retailers design systems with robust data security protections that can respond quickly to suspected security breaches.
Digi International, Arrow Electronics, Expand Distribution Agreement
Digi International a Minnesota-based manufacturer of embedded systems, routers and machine-to-machine network devices, reports that its full line of products and services are now available through Arrow Electronics, a global electronic components distributor. This expanded global distribution agreement took effect this summer and gives design engineers, through Arrow Electronics, access to the full-range of Digi’s cellular, embedded, RF, network and wireless design services.
Sierra Wireless Offering IoT Acceleration Kit
Sierra Wireless, a provider of embedded wireless devices and gateways, as well as connectivity services for IoT deployments, is offering a starter kit to help companies deploy connected products and services. The kit, known as the IoT Acceleration Platform, combines multi-operator worldwide coverage, provided by third-party network operators’ subscriber identity modules (SIMs), with cloud, hardware and managed connectivity services, all managed from a single unified connectivity platform.
The platform includes hardware, but customers can opt to connect devices from different manufacturers and manage the entire deployment in the Acceleration Platform, which also provides connectivity to the Google BigQuery Cloud Platform and, through that, Google’s data analytics services. This also allows a customer to integrate any applications that it may already be running in the Google Cloud into its IoT deployment.
Sierra Wireless will demonstrate the IoT Acceleration Platform at the CTIA Super Mobility 2015 conference, being held this week, Sept. 9-11, in Las Vegas.