Car customers increasingly want connectivity in vehicles. That desire is driving change in the auto industry. A report published on Tuesday, Sep. 15, by global consultancy McKinsey, “Competing for the Connected Customer: Perspectives on the Opportunities Created by Car Connectivity and Automation,” finds that 37% of car customers in the China, Germany, and the US…
Environmental sensor firm Aclima has partnered with Google to test air quality in urban areas. InWhen Google inadvertently allowed its Street View cars to gather the data exhaust emanating from WiFi networks in 2006, the company's use of sensors represented a privacy violation. Lawsuits, fines, and apologies followed. InMore recently, Google's Street View cars have…
SAN FRANCISCO — Sidewalk Labs will help lay the foundation for real-time oversight of civic activities and resources through sensors, software, and ubiquitous connectivity. It will be Google's path to smart city projects. The Internet of Things turns out to be more than merely connecting things to the Internet. Politics, economics, and technology must be…
(Image: Thomas Claburn) At the beginning of his keynote speech at Internet of Things (IoT) World in San Francisco on Tuesday, Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics, played a video. “What if everything had a voice?” the video's narrator asked. “Plants, buildings, cars, devices, your body.” My chair would ask me…
(Image: Succo via PixaBay) The Boston Athletic Association declared that the entire route of the 2015 Boston Marathon would be a “No Drone Zone.” It advised the public not to operate “any type of drone (unmanned aerial vehicle), including remotely controlled model aircraft, over or near the course, or anywhere within sight of runners or…
Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge is a lovely, powerful smartphone. Sweetened with Android 5.0 Lollipop, it's a pleasure to use. Samsung sent me a review model and I took the device with me for a test drive to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on March 26 to try out the…
Apple plans to enter the automotive industry. According to Bloomberg, Apple aims to start selling cars in 2020. The company is said to have hundreds of people working to develop a car, many of whom have deep automotive engineering expertise. The company also has reportedly made aggressive hiring offers to employees at Tesla Motors. Apple…
BlackBerry CEO John Chen is aiming to ride the net neutrality bandwagon to a more open mobile app ecosystem that, theoretically, would serve to aid his company's products and services. In the process, he's making a bid to expand the definition of what is protected under any potential net neutrality legislation. Chen asked US lawmakers…
At the Designer of Things conference in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to chat with Chris Goodine, developer evangelist for Thalmic Labs, about the company's innovative wearable control device, Myo. Myo is an armband that monitors electrical signals in the wearer's arm muscles and converts them into roll, pitch, and yaw (movement along the…