While this year’s CES may have lacked any big announcements or disasters (see Michael Bay at Samsung last year), the size (170,000+ people) and diversity of this event never ceases to amaze. The big themes included wearables, health and wellness, connected cars, drones, smart homes, virtual reality and 3D printing. Not unlike last year, in fact, exactly the same, but the lengthening long tail of hardware was very much in evidence at CES with some eccentric products on show, illustrating how the Internet of Everything really is as all encompassing as the name suggests.

The FCC's latest auction, no. 97, for Advanced Wireless Services (AWS-3) is about to conclude.

Introduction and definition:

I’m guessing most of you have already completed a significant portion of your holiday shopping right? If you are like me, then most of your shopping will be done online – no long queues, less chaos, more convenience, same bargains and many retailers even offer free home delivery. That said there is still a considerable volume of consumers who do in-store shopping and use their credit/debit cards at the point of sale terminals for purchases. The National Retail Federation estimates that sales in November and December will increase 4.1% as compared to last year and reach $617 billion.

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.