BLE Beacon Market to More than Double in 2016
Market research firm ABI Research estimates that Bluetooth Low Energy beacons are on track to exceed 400 million shipments by 2021, with shipments in 2016 more than doubling this year over last year’s figures.
Principal analyst Patrick Connolly says some vendors’ contracts are beginning to exceed one million units, and that while retailers still comprise the main vertical deploying the technology, applications in the non-retail commercial and smart-home sectors are growing. ABI predicts that beacon-based mobile advertising will remain strong in the near term, but that the rate at which new beacon networks will be deployed will begin to slow, due to collaborations among companies deploying them.
ABI says beacon manufacturers are trending toward adding such features as improved security, large-scale deployment management, improved battery life, sensor integration and concurrent support for both Google‘s Eddystone and Apple‘s iBeacon communication protocols.
Connolly also notes that Quuppa and Bluvision are leading a “shift toward proprietary, high-accuracy technology” and that manufacturers are beginning to design beacons for specific vertical applications. The findings are part of ABI Research’s BLE Beacon Technologies and Services Research Service.
Electric Imp Rolling Out Manufacturing-Focused Product
IoT platform provider Electric Imp—which earlier this year announced it was broadening its focus beyond helping consumer goods manufacturers IoT-enable their products, in order to also focus on commercial and industrial markets—this week debuted its Connected Manufacturing solution suite. The suite features impFactory, a hardware appliance running Electric Imp’s BlinkUp software. The impFactory appliance enables users to securely configure, track and activate IoT-connected devices connected to machines used in manufacturing processes. It also collects and feeds production data directly to business systems for real-time analytics and includes multiple interfaces to attach printers, scanners and other machines used during product testing on the factory floor.
CNET Smart Home Trail Results: Mixed But Promising
Last year, a group of CNET editors took their work home with them. They relocated to a model smart home in Louisville, Ky., into which they installed a bevy of wirelessly networked products to remotely control and access everything—from the lighting to the doorbell to the fire alarm and the vacuum cleaner. The team has now begun reporting its findings. “Much more needs to be done to help educate consumers around the nuances and complexities of smart home technology,” the editors said in a statement. And CNET’s Smart Home website contains a number of video reviews of the appliances and systems that were evaluated inside the home.
For example, editor Ashlee Clark Thompson reviewed Samsung‘s Wi-Fi-connected oven, which enables such features as using a phone to start pre-heating the oven before getting home. But Thompson calls out Samsung’s “finicky” app that can be difficult to pair up with the oven. What’s more, given oven performance that is “just okay,” she found it difficult to justify the appliance’s $3,000 price tag.
While the technology and user interfaces that power smart-home products could use improvements, the editors still consider the category promising. They say many products “present significant upside potential.”
CNET teamed up with Coldwell Banker Real Estate, one of the sponsors of the living laboratory project, to co-develop a definition of the smart home. The resulting definition—the purpose of which is largely to serve as a marketing tool for the real estate and insurance industries—is: “A home that is equipped with network-connected products (aka ‘smart products,’ connected via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or similar protocols) for controlling, automating and optimizing functions such as temperature, lighting, security, safety or entertainment, either remotely by a phone, tablet, computer or a separate system within the home itself.”
Additional criteria: “In order to be categorized as a smart home, the property must have a smart security feature that either controls access or monitors the property or a smart temperature feature, in addition to a reliable Internet connection.” And it must have two additional features from a list of eight options, which include lighting, safety and appliances.
Travelers’ Insurance, another sponsor of the living laboratory experiment, recently announced that customers with qualifying smart-home devices, such as smart smoke detectors and security systems that alert homeowners through their smartphones, are eligible for a discount on their homeowners insurance.
PTC Introduces Upgrades to ThingWorx Platform
Product design software provider PTC has announced the availability of ThingWorx 7, the latest version of its IoT platform. New features include an enhanced set of tools for managing connected products, new analytics capabilities, support of public cloud computing, and simplified platform components designed to make it easier for developers to use their preferred tools to experiment with, prototype and develop new IoT solutions.
The new platform includes pre-built tools for its ThingWorx Utilities (formerly ThingWorx Converge) device-management layer. These tools are designed to help companies manage, monitor and extract data from their products. A connected device-management tool lets users define and provision device attributes into custom dashboards to visualize the status and performance of the connected products once they are deployed.
An alert-management module can be used to pool alerts from distributed connected products, making it easier for companies to identify when a product isn’t functioning as expected. Remote access and control tools enable users to troubleshoot problems, and to provide operator assistance and training. In addition, the new software content management tool enables users to distribute digital content, such as operating system updates, application upgrades and software patches, to connected devices.