The Bluetooth SIG, the engineering group that controls the Bluetooth standard, today introduced Bluetooth 5, which the group says quadruples Bluetooth's previous range and doubles its speed. More than that, though, an 8-fold increase in Bluetooth 5's data capacity will put an end to the intrusive pairing process that Bluetooth's users are all too familiar with. The SIG says … [Read more...]
IoS: The Internet of Sheep
The kind of connectivity that makes wearable tech happy is easy to get in urban centers. It's harder in rural areas, although agriculture is certainly an industry that could (and does) benefit from being connected. In that vein, we saw an article the other day proposing that sheep not only be tagged, but be equipped as actual wireless hotspots. There's a lot of good … [Read more...]
A Taxonomy for the Internet of Things
The wearables market is a subset of the Internet of Things, and we here do try to stay away from talking about IoT because it's such a huge topic. But the Energy Harvesting Journal has made an interesting attempt to illustrate the IoT ecosystem -- and, as a result, find a place in it for wearables. The publication separates the IoT world generally into three groups: a … [Read more...]
Top IoT Vendors to Collaborate on Standards
We sometimes forget how miraculous it is that our technology talks to each other. The ability to hook a computer to a network, or Skype to a landline, is not preordained. It takes interested parties to sit together and set standards. The "Internet of Things" is a great idea, but suffers mostly from being an endless series of data islands. A dishwasher can talk to the … [Read more...]
Cisco starts Internet of Things Division
We've written before about Cisco's interest in wearables. Now they've gone and built it into their bureaucracy. Cisco announced the other day that it's launched a division devoted to the Internet of Things -- the idea that everything (everything) will be connected to the Net and will communicate with each other. Cisco, being a leading vendor of devices that route bits around … [Read more...]