Due to Apple’s reluctance to divulge any Apple Watch numbers speculation around revenue, ASPs and therefore volume of sales and shipments has been feverish and a wide spectrum of estimates from 2 million to 4 million units sold has emerged. ABI Research believes that 2.3 million units were sold and just over 2.8 million units were shipped into the channel.
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Are Eddystone APIs a Huge Threat to Indoor Location Start-Ups?
Jul 27, 2015 12:00:00 AM / by Admin
With the release of Google’s new Nearby and Proximity APIs in conjunction with the Eddystone BLE Beacon standard, many have questioned the viability of start-ups and developers looking to create a business model around proximity apps and a services such as navigation, analytics and advertising. While the market has certainly become much more democratized and Google now becomes a major provider of these services in itself, this is neither a surprise nor the end for the many start-ups that have had initial success in this space.
At the end of June 2015, smart home SaaS player Alarm.com launched its IPO. Priced at US$14 a share, by the end of the first day’s trading, the stock had reached up to US$17.88, or 27.7% above the offer valuation.
In early July, Splunk announced the acquisition of Palo Alto startup Caspida for US$190 million. Caspida specializes in real-time cybersecurity and advanced persistent threat (APT) detection in corporate and cloud environments, using behavioral and security analytics. The next day, Splunk stock rose 4%, from US$69 to US$72 a share. The acquisition comes a few weeks after Splunk acquired another cybersecurity company, Vancouver-based Metafor Software, a provider of anomaly detection technology.
So very quickly, Eddystone is Google’s new BLE Beacon standard that essentially broadcasts three distinct signal types; UUID( as per iBeacon standard), URL (as per URIBeacon standard) and TLM a new telemetry signal.
As the EU “Grexit” scenario reaches a firm deadline on Sunday, the financial world is starting to wake up to a much larger headache in the shape of the Chinese Stock Market. While the bubble is across the board, the tech space has seen some incredible funding in the past 12 months, something that had this analyst a little worried as much as 3 years ago. Let’s take a look at one example in the location-based services market that illustrates some of the problems here.
Much of the excitement and success around the IPO was fueled by the details that Fitbit shared about its operations ahead of the IPO. In a market where most players are either private or so large that their sports, fitness, and wellness operations are too small to present in quarterly results, Fitbit’s S-1 filing provided detail where little was previously publically available. Financial metrics widely noted elsewhere but there was another key metric that received less attention. The number of active users among the Fitbit customer base has continued to grow. Given as a percentage of total Fitbit devices shipped, Fitbit’s active user base grew to 88.6% by the end of 2014, up from 71.2% at the end of 2012. The company defines a paid active user as a registered Fitbit user who, within the three months prior to the period, has at minimum paired or has logged a reading into their Fitbit account. It should be note that Fitbit accounts can be used without Fitbit devices, either using smartphone sensors to collect mHealth data or through importing data from rival vendor devices; however, this is likely to be an option for only a minority of users and still speaks at least to the appeal of the company’s app. This active user metric is key, not just for Fitbit but for the mHealth industry as a whole. Perceived wisdom has suggested for a while that activity tracker devices lay unused after an initial six months use. We have noted before that while that may be the case for specific devices, it doesn’t reflect on the appeal of activity tracking itself fading. Instead, in line with many other consumer electronics markets, these devices are replaced with upgraded alternatives. When a company such as Fitbit can show that over its lifespan, active accounts continue to rise as a percentage of lifetime sales, it speaks not just to the longevity of the appeal of tracking but of the stickiness of a preferred vendor’s offering. Fitbit has benefitted from ensuring that its devices support connectivity to a host of smartphone and other operating systems across a range of platforms. Now however, those key platform partners such as Apple, Google, and Samsung are increasingly moving into Fitbit's mHealth device and / or data collection market. Fitbits active user metrics suggest it has a keen ability to hold onto its user base. As mHealth data increasingly becomes the key value for end users, it will be important for all device players to maintain a strong relationship between devices and mHealth data if they want to not only get the device sales but to have those user remain active by holding onto those customers as devices are upgraded. |
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Augmented World Expo, E3, and the Future of Augmented and Virtual Reality
Jun 18, 2015 12:00:00 AM / by Admin
I have said many times in the past, that the mobile broadband network of the future will be a giant, distributed Super-Computer (a label that was shamelessly stolen, but as Picasso says: good artists copy, great artists steal!). Plug in the radios, Super-Size the system solution to telecom grade, and voila, we have the mobile broadband network of tomorrow. The network core intelligence is x86 inside, though exceptions made for high-performance core routers. With the distributed Super-Computer, operators have more choices for network architecture. Virtualize it with SDN/NFV to scale up and down, and the Web Scale business model is available to all operators regardless of size.
Dali Wireless just released a press release outlining the successful completion of a dynamic capacity allocation field trial with NCS, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Telecom and a leading ICT solutions provider for governments and enterprises with a presence in more than 20 countries.