In February this year CCS – formerly Cambridge Communication Systems – announced that its small cell backhaul technology is in live operation with China Mobile. CCS followed this with an announcement in May of successful completion of trials with China Telecom.

The In-Building Wireless market is hyper-competitive, and since 2012, there have been several changes to the equipment vendor ecosystem. Alvarion and Powerwave are now out of business. Axell was acquired by Cobham and InnerWireless was acquired by Blackbox. Also CSI sold its services business, the CSI Solutions Group, to Goodman Networks.

In case you missed it, Google purchased BYOD enabler Divide on Monday. Divide is a workspace management vendor, enabling enterprises to separate work and personal profiles on a personal device.

The prospect of YouTube (and by extension Google) purchasing Twitch (the “world’s leading video platform and community for gamers”) for a reported $1 billion has caused some to sound the anticompetitive alarm.  But is this really a case of a giant squashing a promising upstart?   Perhaps…but let’s put this into perspective.

Historically, the weapon of choice in reaching analog shutoff (ASO) goals set alongside digital terrestrial (DTT) programming launches has been the digital transport adapter - a relatively low cost ($20-$40) box that receives digital signals and converts it to an analog format (Coaxial or composite video) to deliver to an existing TV.

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.