ABI Research Blog

Now that we’re nearing the end of 4Q14, it is time for the annual rite of winter, i.e. , the news media picks up the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner meme and rolls out the latest gossip of who is dating whom.  This time Bloomberg (Alcatel-Lucent Advances on Report of Merger Talks With Nokia) revisits the classic surprise courtship melodrama of Nokia Networks and Alcatel-Lucent.   With cash in hand, and less baggage in tow, we may find that previous attitudes that prevented them from getting together no longer prevail.   

With the end of 2014 fast approaching, I wanted to provide some of ABI Research’s top level findings and success stories within the three primary smart card market verticals, whilst presenting a preview into our market expectations and makeup for 2015.

I attended Cartes Secure Connexions last month in Paris for the first time, alongside my ABI colleague Phil Sealy, a veteran to this event. The conference is one of the largest events for security in smart card technologies. While the primary focus was around the payment industry, there was a growing scope for application at the internet of things (IoT) level as well.

Ford recently announced the 3^rd generation of its SYNC solution, first launched in 2007. While most observers are focusing on the Windows (Microsoft) to QNX (Blackberry) operating system software switch, some other major hardware changes were introduced by Ford to boost the lackluster performance of the abandoned MyFord Touch:

Many consumers are making the decision to purchase 4K / UltraHD TVs in screen sizes from 55 inches and up; sale prices for a number of 4K sets fell between $1000 and $1500 this holiday season, representing a premium of $200-$500 on otherwise comparable 1080p HD displays. What will their experience be like?  Most of the content they watch will be up-sampled from 1080p; most manufacturers have relatively good up-sampling hardware – this is a case of “you get what you pay for” with higher end sets including better up-sampling algorithms.  For native 4K UltraHD Content, most of the content is currently being streamed at bitrates from 10-15 mbps, with only Sony and DirecTV opting for a download-based media player that will eliminate buffering and transition to lower bitrate as a concern. 

I was at the oneM2M Showcase event in Sophia Antipolis, southern France, this week. It was something of a release party for oneM2M – a standards body dedicated to M2M and IoT, set up in 2012 – including the first set of demos that the involved companies have come up with. It was a productive visit, since it allowed me to get a fairly good hunch of what oneM2M is actually trying to achieve and what the leadership's priorities are. If you would like to view the slides of my keynote – or any other presentation – you can get them from here. Mine is the document 1, but I must concede that the interesting stuff is in the others.

 AWS-3 had some aggressive bidding – perhaps just to run up the price and extract revenge for previous M&A grievances, but who knows.  Below is a view of the provisional bids shortly before the auction closed.  As expected, the 2x10 MHz spectrum carries about a 10% premium over 2x5 MHz spectrum.  1x10 TD-LTE is worth less, and there are some real bottom feeders for the 1x5 MHz TD-LTE.   Given the low valuation placed on the 1x5 MHz TD spectrum, one wonders why the FCC didn’t bundle that to make a 1x15 MHz block, as that would certainly be worth more than the current yields. 

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced final approval of G.fast broadband standard on 5^th December. 

Microsoft announced an update to their Bing Pulse product which brings a second screen interactivity and analytics toolkit to broadcasters.  

In case you didn’t see it yet, we published our latest Internet of Things Application Enablement Platform Middleware Market Research Report recently. You can check the key findings from here, after you have recovered from the inevitable awe of witnessing a total of eight upper-case nouns in a row. I’ve understood that I can finally call myself a proper industry analyst when I pull off a full ten without batting an eyelid. This time round it was within my reach, but that humble “of” in there disqualified me.