Ericsson Mobility Report 2015.

The November 2015 edition of the Mobility Report provides updated trends and forecasts for mobile data traffic. From the addition of 87 million new mobile broadband subscriptions in Q3 2015 to the estimate that video will account for 70 percent of total mobile traffic by 2021. See more at...

Download the Report

Is There a Role for Citizens in India’s Smart Cities Challenge?

Technology is helping India overcome its wide range of urban problems.

India faces a wide range of urban challenges—from serious air pollution and poor local governance, to badly planned cities and a lack of decent housing. India’s Smart Cities Challenge, which has now selected 98 of the 100 cities that will receive funding, could go a long way in addressing these issues.

According to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there are five key instruments that make a “smart” city: the use of clean technologies, the use of information and communications technology (ICT), private sector involvement, citizen participation and smart governance. There are good examples of new practices for each of these pillars.

For example, New Delhi recently launched a program to replace streetlights with energy efficient LEDs. The Digital India program is designed to upgrade the country’s IT infrastructure and includes plans to build “broadband highways” across the country. As for private sector participation, the Indian government is trying to encourage it by listing sectors and opportunities for public-private partnerships.

Citizen participation is one of Modi’s five key instruments, but this is an area where smart city pilots around the world have tended to perform least well on. While people are the implied beneficiaries of programs that aim to improve efficiency and reduce waste, they are rarely given a chance to participate in the design or delivery of smart city projects, which are usually implemented and managed by experts who have only a vague idea of the challenges that local communities face.

Citizen Participation

Engaging citizens is especially important in an Indian context because there have already been several striking examples of failed urban redevelopments that have blatantly lacked any type of community consultation or participation.

- See more at: 

Public participation is the key to success of the smart city project.

AGRA (India) : The city's municipal corporation is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that citizens get to have their say in the smart city project. The civic agency will use various communication tools to encourage public participation. Opening Twitter and Facebook accounts, setting up a hotline, use of radio and organizing essay competitions in schools and colleges, are but a few examples of the administration's public outreach, officials said. Further, a van will go to various parts of the city, seeking feedback and suggestions from the public. They have also prepared a questionnaire to gather information. Mayor of Agra Indrajeet Arya said people will be asked to give their suggestions on several components that are a part of the smart city project. He said public participation was key to success of the smart city project. Some of the key aspects of the project are health care, safety, security and disaster management, education, tourism and heritage, housing, waste management, sanitation and environment, water, transport, employment and infrastructure convenience in the city. Agra is bidding with 87 other cities in the country to be developed into a smart city in the first lot through a competition. Twenty cities will be shortlisted in the first phase. Rules state that a city will be selected on the basis of on its present status (30%) and on the detailed project report (70%) prepared by local authorities.

IoETalks Roma 2015

Standards for the Internet of Things (IoT)

TOP TEN TECH PREDICTIONS FOR 2016

Virtual Reality and Consumer Robots head this year’s List

As 2015 draws to a close Juniper Research has drawn up a list of predictions for the coming year, all neatly wrapped up as the top trends for the technologies industries for 2016. A free report detailing the findings is available to download from the Juniper website.

2016 – A Watershed Year for Virtual Reality (VR)

Juniper has identified 2016 as the watershed year for VR headsets, both in terms of product launches and consumer roll outs. Oculus, Sony, and HTC are amongst the leading players expected to launch key VR products over the next 12 months. The recent attention to and investment into virtual reality is helping to revitalise the industry and with major brand commercial launches imminent, there is huge potential for rapid market expansion.

As a result, Juniper expects significant VR uptake over the next 5 years as consumers benefit from a combination of improved VR technology allied to immersive applications, as well as reduced prices. Consequently, the technology is now poised to transform the entertainment industry, including gaming and video, over coming years whilst offering the potential to quickly expand into other markets such as industrial and healthcare.

Top Ten Tech Predictions for 2016

The full list of the top ten tech predictions follow below. Further details are available in the free report, Top Ten Tech Predictions for 2016 available to download from the Juniper Research website.

1. Virtual Reality - a watershed year.
2. Consumer robotics becomes a reality
3. Wearables go to work
4. The race for 5G begins
5. Many devices, one platform
6. Blockchain technology embraced by financial institutions
7. Hybrid console & cloud gaming gathers pace
8. eSports delivers significant new revenues for the games market
9. New security models emerge
10. Crowdfunding Fires StartUp Growth


Source: Juniper Research

The connected car from threat to opportunity.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the connected car look to become a catalyst and disruptor in the property and casualty insurance business model, and may prove to be the impetus P&C insurers need to evolve into a new way of serving customers.

The growth in the number of connected devices has been truly breathtaking—in the next five years, the number of connected devices will increase more than tenfold, from less than 3 billion worldwide today to 30 billion by 2020.

Three domains—telematics, automotive safety and infotainment—to drive more than 15% year-over-year growth in the connected car market over the next decade. Examples of all three are already appearing. Connected sensors are appearing in vehicles—from telematics devices such as Progressive’s Snapshot, to safety sensors that automatically apply the brakes before a collision. These safety technologies will improve in number and sophistication, and they will also continue to spread beyond premium vehicles into mass-market brands. Some automotive manufacturers (OEMs), such as Ford with its Sync platform, have embedded ways for customers to user their own devices for a personalized in-vehicle experience. Most 2015 GM vehicles in the United States are equipped with advanced 4G LTE connectivity and a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot. The Tesla goes much further, with software features that are updated over-the-air, allowing the cars to get “faster, smarter, and better … while you sleep,” as the carmaker puts it.

see more at

Source:AT Kearney

Standards for Connected Cars

Cars are no longer stand-alone moving objects. They are connected to other vehicles (V2V), the infrastructure (V2I), portable devices, and the electric grid. These vehicle communications provide infinite opportunities to improve public safety through the application of advanced technologies such as collision avoidance and intelligent speed adaption. The technology for connected cars is available today and already being tested. Regulations and standards governing how vehicle connectivity will work are under development and the implementation of autonomous vehicle technologies will come in phases. 
SAE International is deeply involved in developing standards for this new technology. But Jack Pokrzywa, Director of Global Ground Vehicle Standards, notes that the next step is government rulemaking to establish which aspects of connectivity will be regulated.

The Internet of Everything in the Public Sector.

The Internet of Everything is improving the lives of citizens around the world.
See more at ...

Telcos provide one-fifth of pay-TV subscriptions.

A new report finds that operations owned or controlled by telcos accounted for 140 million retail pay-TV customer connections globally at the end of 2014 and this total soared to 177 million during 2015 – equivalent to 19 percent of the total pay-TV subscriber base (up from 14 percent year-on-year).

Telco TV Forecast: 2015–20, the ‘Telco TV’ subscriber base is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of four percent to 2020 (compared with two percent across the wider pay-TV market), reaching 210.4 million. 

While IPTV will remain the dominant means of delivering Telco TV, traditional cable and satellite platforms will also continue to play a big role, the analysis says.

See more at

Source:tmforum

The privacy issues in the future Smart Cities

All over the world, cities are being reborn. By one estimate, about 80% of global GDP is generated in cities – driven by a mixture of urbanisation, geographic sprawl and concentrated zones of innovation. As a result, a whole new market has opened up for so-called “smart cities”.

The engineering consultancy Arup defines the smart city as one where “the seams and structures of the various urban systems are made clear, simple, responsive and even malleable” through technology and design. Specifically, a smart city happens when three specific networks interact: the communications grid, the energy system and the so-called “logistics internet” – which can track people and things through transport and supply systems.

But there’s a problem: who controls the project and who owns the data it generates? We live in an age when your supermarket’s software knows who you are from your buying choices; where your email provider can send you advertisements matched to key words in your supposedly private messages. But issues raised by smart cities go beyond privacy – they raise problems for democracy and control.

More than 2.5 billion people, mostly urban dwellers, voluntarily wear a tracking device – their smartphone. It can tell you the nearest coffee shop, order you a taxi and even find you a nearby potential sex partner because it knows where you are. Hire a bike and the city transport system knows where you start and finish. The privacy issues here are dealt with by limiting the flow of data between public and private sectors, and by making the individual the centre of the information flow.

Read more at 

Source: theguardian

M2M Benefit Radar

LPWAN in IoT

We heard that all roads lead to Rome. In LPWAN unfortunately the roads lead in different directions: one path leads to Sigfox; The next way leads to LoRa and further divides into LoRaWAN and other directions; another path leads to LTE-M with a junction to NB-LTE; yet another way leads to Weightless where the road forks to Weightless-N, Weightless-P and Weightless-W.
It is not so easy to take the right path. With the press release of Huawei and Deutsche Telekom the LPWAN map comes even more confusing:

Deutsche Telekom and Huawei fudge truth, claim first 3GPP NB-IoT demo:

Having forced the different proponents to work together in the NB-IoT working group, the 3GPP’s attempt at uniting the cellular-led LPWAN alternative to the likes of Sigfox and LoRa is beginning to bear (politically-charged) fruit. Huawei and Deutsche Telekom have announced the first installation of the NB-IoT (narrowband IoT) technology on a commercial European network – and they aren’t being completely honest.

Which path will you choose? What way should you recommend to your clients? Will you recommend SigFox, LoRa, Weightless, LTE M, NB-LTE or the new direction signalled by the NB-IoT Working Group?
Currently neither Sigfox, Weightless, NB-LTE, LTE-M or NB-IoT can deliver radio modules plus base stations for a private network. So if you want to cover a city or a larger region with a private network then your path ends at LoRa. If you are interested in a private LPWAN, then I’ll show you the best way and make you an commercial proposal.

See more at

Source:Harald Naumann

Urban Innovations for the Future Cities.

Humanity faces the mammoth task of adding over 2 billion people to the urban population before 2050. This is the equivalent of creating a city the size of London or San Francisco every month for the next two decades. In order to house, feed and employ these people, cities will have to do more with less; they’ll have to be smarter, greener and more efficient. They will have to innovate.

A list of 10 of the best urban innovations from around the globe that are already having a positive effect on quality of life and economic development can be read and download Here 

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will add $14,2 Trillion to the Global Economy by 2030

The Industrial Internet of Things is a network of physical objects, systems platforms and applications that contain embedded technology to communicate and share intelligence with each other, the external environment and with people.

In manufacturing, connected sensor networks already monitor logistics movements and machines such as mining equipment and entire utility plants, helping organizations reduce costs through more efficient operations. 

In agriculture, similar networks deployed across farmlands are improving the use of natural resources and contributing to better harvests. Our analysis also
includes some consumer applications such as digital health and “connected lifestyle” products.

Accenture estimates the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) could add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

Source: Accenture