It’s a short week here at M2M Evolution, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been exciting. We had lead stories on some amazing battery technology, a sweet IoT DIY Kickstarter campaign, bionic ants and an update on IBM’s $3 billion bet on M2M, to name just a few.
Let’s start with the big dollar figure. This week, IBM announced a huge $3 billion investment in IoT development and research, and its first partner will be The Weather Company, parent of The Weather Channel. The two will work together to use weather sensor monitoring to reduce enterprise waste from weather events. Should be a … stormy relationship.
In a sweet burst of futuretech news, there were some very promising developments in battery life from a San Jose-based developer, and some bonkers Bond villain has created bionic worker ants to do his bidding and help him take over the world. First the batteries: Atmal is a microcontroller manufacturer and it announced this week that it has made a group of M2M devices that operate at such low power that it will extend battery life through years, perhaps even a decade.
Now for the ants. German robotics firm Festo has revealed a prototype ant army that the developer says will eventually be used for manufacturing, sensor duties and even construction. They are 3D printed and extremely scary. “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”
In much less apocalyptic news, a recent Harris poll seems to indicate that although many Americans still have concerns about driverless cars, more than half of all respondents (more than 2,000 across all age groups and demographics) said they’d be willing to consider owning a driverless car. It was a sliding scale by age groups, naturally, but the numbers seemed to show that only the oldest folks (69+) were having much trouble at all accepting the idea.
Finally, wireless M2M signal broker Konekt launched a Kickstarter campaign for its proposed $50 Konekt Dash tool kit, designed to make it easy to deploy cellular-enabled M2M devices for little investment. We hope it gets funded, so check it out.
Source: http://www.m2mevolution.com/topics/m2mevolution/articles/400959-m2m-evolution-week-review-ibm-harris-poll-konekt.htm
