A friend told me about a recently submitted review of a restaurant that based entirely on the fact that the owner (or at least a person driving a car heavily labelled with said restaurant’s logo) stole their car parking space. In reality, the personality of the owner doesn’t necessarily impact the quality of the food or experience as shown by any number of famous chefs, yet she felt that by behaving that way, the owner/driver was there to be shot at for not obeying the general laws of not being a crap human, I quote “If only there was a yelp for all of us”. 

Have you ever wondered how that thing looks like in practice? Now you have a prime example of it in Apple's reported $3.2-billion purchase of Beats. You've got a stagnating company whose cash pile is north of $100 billion, and an acquisition target that is thin on intellectual property but impressively thick on brand and storytelling, and this what you get.

One thing that I’m hearing in many briefings and research interviews is that smart agriculture is becoming one of the most fast-moving verticals for the Internet of Things. Hyper-local soil and climate analysis is being used to optimize planting, and more recently also irrigation has started attracting similar problem-solving attention. For instance, Orange’s M2M/IoT folks announced this week a solution they’ve deployed with Dacom to enhance, among other things, tulip farming in the Netherlands. It reminded me of this study from Chile I saw a while ago. In that, researchers of a Chilean university reported that in blueberry farming a sensor-based approach to irrigation could cut water consumption by 70%, which does sound like a lot.

London’s premier cybersecurity conference took place this week at Earl’s Court and I was happy to attend once again to get some face time with some of the people behind the security firms. There’s a definite trend this year that is moving quickly towards the offensive side of security. ‘Intelligence’ has featured much more prominently than last year. It’s a nice catch-all because it covers a growing area of solutions that fit nicely under this umbrella term without necessarily competing in the same space. In a way, it is indicative of the saturation of the current security vision that is ‘defend and react’. Intelligence is being applied both outwardly into hostile attack territory and inwardly on a proactive, preemptive basis.

It has been a couple of weeks since MobileIron filed for an IPO. Writers, analysts, and anyone else interested have moved on to something else. Surprisingly, while searching on Google for any missed articles or discussions regarding the subject matter, it appears this filing was somewhat low-key compared to prior industry activity. When IBM acquired Fiberlink MaaS 360 and VMware acquired AirWatch, the Internet was abuzz with speculation about the future of enterprise mobility. Specifically, what the future had in store for MobileIron and Good Technology.

Today, Motorola Solutions announced that it has invested an undisclosed sum in Recon Instruments. This follows a similar investment by Intel in late 2013 and gives the company a warchest to expand into a variety of markets, having already achieved a lot of initial success in the skiing arena, forming partnerships with eyewear market leaders such as Oakley. In fact, in last year’s report (AN-1332)ABI Research called on others in the fitness/wearables space, such as TomTom and Garmin to look at investing/acquiring companies like Recon Instruments, given what a suitable platform it can be for many applications.

News broke last week that security researchers from SR Labs had been able to hack the fingerprint sensor on Samsung's Galaxy S5, allowing them to conduct PayPal transactions from the device.  Whilst this may be alarming to some, it should not be seen as a major security flaw for several issues.

The FCC Is Mandated with Supporting the Public Interest Regarding Spectrum

Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR is big news on many fronts. My fellow analysts are deconstructing it as we speak, whereas in this post I want to share a few words on what the purchase tells us about the future of innovation. Its symbolic significance is quite striking, and I’m not only talking about how symbolically it will bring together two innovator generations from different decades under one roof in a new decade. For someone who experienced entertainment being reshaped by the 1990s PC games and social life being redefined by the 2000s social networks, the fact that John Carmack and Mark Zuckerberg will be now working together is significant by its own merit. But it’s not as significant as that other thing I’m referring to.