The auto industry is getting fired up about wireless technology in cars and trucks, but it's not just for connecting passengers' laptops or streaming Internet radio stations. At an assembly plant outside Toronto, Ford Motor Co. is using Wi-Fi transmitters to load customized phone and entertainment features into its Edge and Lincoln MKX crossovers as the vehicles chug down the production line.
This week Audi has been demonstrating its Travolution technology on a fleet of test vehicles near its headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany. The Travolution package incorporates a number of different technologies, including vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure communications and SmartACC. The vehicle-to-infrastructure component allows vehicles to communicate with traffic signals over a combination of WiFi and 3G mobile.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a three year, $7.5 million grant to a Rutgers led research team to develop a future Internet design optimized for mobile networking and communication. The team of nine universities and several industrial partners has dubbed its project “MobilityFirst,” reflecting the Internet’s evolution away from traditional wired connections between desktop PCs and servers toward wireless data services on mobile platforms.
Although they won’t attain field readiness in time to help workers trapped by the mine collapse in Chile, a number of new technologies will enter service in the next few years that could drastically increase mine collapse survival rates. These technologies differ in their use, but all use advanced sensors to help miners locate fallen colleagues, alert rescue teams and flee to safety.
The convergence of personal health records and mobile communication devices may provide the mechanism to engage consumers to use technology to enhance self-care, taking cost out of the health care system, according to a new Deloitte Issue Brief released today by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.
An ABI report indicates renewed interest from mobile operators in the M2M space, coupled with the widespread deployment of 3G, led it to predict the M2M market will be worth $3.8 billion by 2015.
Intel's $1.4 billion acquisition of Infineon's wireless chipset unit is now official and may boost Intel's prospects in wireless a great deal, especially in smartphones and embedded wireless products.
Eurotech, a supplier of embedded technologies has announced the Eurotech TurboXb computer on module has been deployed in GE Healthcare's EView ventilator data capture device.
Telefonica will launch a new business area in September as the company looks to beef up its data technology services and expand revenue. The Madrid based telecommunications company said that besides the video content delivery network the company will expand in the segments of eHealth, applications, security and financial services, cloud computing and M2M Internet communications.
Mobile payment is slowly gaining traction in China, with systems already in place in top-tier cities for subways, supermarkets, convenience stories, cafes, and fast food chains. China's mobile payment market size is estimated at USD 417 million in 2010, up 45 percent from 2009. Users are expected to nearly double to 150 million. These numbers mostly reflect niche forms of mobile payment, from IC embedded traffic cards to online payments made from a handset.
The number of mobile connected M2M and embedded devices will ramp up to nearly 412 million globally by 2014, according to analyst firm Juniper Research. But the main market drivers won't be the oft-hyped e-readers or netbooks. Rather, they will be several enterprise verticals led by healthcare monitoring, a small market today, but one poised to achieve significant revenues.
Wireless operators have decided to stake their claim in the mobile telematics market. The market is growing rapidly, as module prices fall and the cost and time of developing and integrating new M2M solutions drops. The industry is no longer dominated by a few verticals, such as security and fleet tracking. Broad new fields such as telemedicine, home automation, agriculture — even the insurance industry — are investing in M2M.
The world of M2M communications is no longer just about vehicle tracking applications, Kore Telematics is fond of saying. But according to its own numbers, 70.7 percent of the M2M device connections Kore manages still connect GPS devices in vehicles and other assets.
