While Internet-connected things have ranged from phones and watches to thermostats and appliances, connections are now expanding to clothing. Here comes the smart jacket. The limited edition 'BRIGHT BMBR' smart jacket is being introduced by New York fashion brand Rochambeau and comes with an NFC chip and personalized QR code inside a hidden zipper pocket on one of the sleeves.

The realities are becoming more accessible to the market. We're talking virtual and augmented realities here, of course, and there are some recent indicators that they both are on somewhat of a tear. At its Windows 10 event in New York this week, Microsoft kicked off the third-party set of VR headsets coming from Dell, HP, Acer and Asus, starting in the $299 price range.

Marketing and advertising is starting to find its way into connected cars. It's been a long time coming, but some major brands are starting to find ways to deliver new contextual, personalized content through car dashboards. General Motors and IBM just detailed a partnership to link OnStar and IBM Watson to create a new service they describe as the auto industry's first cognitive mobility platform.

Anheuser-Busch has found a use for the self-driving truck. The brewery just shipped 52,000 cans of Budweiser on a self-driving truck, which drove itself on I-25 from Fort Collins through Denver and onto Colorado Springs. Anheuser-Busch says this is the first time in history that a self-driving vehicle has shipped commercial cargo, making it a landmark achievement for self-driving technology.

One of the elements that is a critical fuel for the Internet of Things is speed. That long-awaited speed, at least from a cellular service standpoint, is 5G, as in the fifth generation of it. Any smartphone consumer paying attention likely noticed the significant performance improvement when they moved from 3G to 4G (aka LTE).

Voice recognition has been coming along for some time and much of it is quite a distance from when you had to repeat a question or command several times or dumb it down to a few simple words to receive any semblance of a useful response. Not everyone yet uses voice recognition, but most of those who do are quite happy with it, based on a new study. Almost half (40%) of smartphone owners already use voice recognition capabilities from Apple's Siri, Google Now or Microsoft Cortana.

A billion here, a billion there. The number of Internet-connected devices continues to climb. While there will be many billions of sensors of all types installed around the world, there also is a lot of activity around home applications. Within three years, there will be more than 2 billion fixed consumer entertainment devices, according to a report on IoT-connected consumers by IDC for Telus International.

34% Use Augmented Reality For Shopping; Top Items: Furniture, Clothing, Grocery Augmented reality got a major boost from the wildly popular Pokemon Go and now it looks like it could get another one at retail stores. A shopper could use augmented reality to help them picture a jacket or shoes in a variety of colors or provide a convenient way to read product information, for example.

Any consumers who go shopping specifically for a smart, connected home device this holiday season are going to face a bewildering assortment. The number of products ranging from smart appliances and home control systems to smart security systems and streaming media devices is now in the thousands at Best Buy alone, according to a new study. The study on consumer attitudes toward smart appliances is based on a nationally representative sample of 1,000 consumers each in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany, conducted by Futuresource Consulting.

Many millennials tend to replace their wearable devices, even if they're still working. Four in 10 (40%) millennials replace their wearable every six months to a year, based on a new global study. The study is based on a survey of 2,800 millennials across seven markets (U.S., U.K., Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong and Malaysia) conducted by LexisNexis.