ABI Research has been covering 802.11ac and 802.11ad (WiGig) for about 6 or 7 years now.  These standards started to take off commercially a few years ago.  802.11ac is much more complex than previous standards, so it was broken up into two waves of certification by the Wi-Fi Alliance.  This made sense to ease the Wi-Fi ecosystem into 802.11ac.  802.11n had introduced the option to use the 5 GHz band in addition to the 2.4 GHz band, and introduced MIMO.  MIMO allows Wi-Fi to use the way radio waves naturally bounce around to add more data streams that increase speed and range.  802.11ac only uses the 5 GHz band, and Wave 1 pushed the Wi-Fi ecosystem much faster into the 5 GHz band.  We are already past the point where most of the shipping products with Wi-Fi support both bands.

I’ll be attending SCTE this year, and there are a few topics that we expect will be heavily covered at the event, reflecting some of the more influential trends in the TV markets today. The standard topics will be covered as usual, including B2B Solutions, Next-generation services (i.e. cloud), Wireless networks, and Wired networks, and how the many facets of video delivery and consumption factor in. More specifically, some of the biggest topics of the show we expect will be:

Today, it’s clear that video service providers have a few key requirements in any new technology rollouts.  Among the top criteria, they are looking at:

On August 3^rd, Nokia announced the long rumored sale of its digital mapping division HERE to a consortium of car brands consisting of Audi, BMW, and Daimler for $2.8 billion Euro. When all is said and done, it seems HERE has finally found a suitable home, after a long journey of being independent (NAVTEQ), failed integration attempts into Nokia’s location consumer business, and finally as a somewhat orphaned Nokia business unit representing few synergies with its much bigger network infrastructure business.

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.

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.