Amazon is lending some of its considerable power and reach to startups. The online retail giant launched Amazon Launchpad on Tuesday, a program to help young companies with sales and distribution. After the excitement of a successful Kickstarter campaign dies down, a startup needs to get their product manufactured. They also have to find customers and ship those thousands of "Internet of Things" things, smart oven mitts, or revolutionary make-up removers.

Seven months ago, Facebook introduced Place Tips by which businesses can send contextual marketing messages to people in proximity to the store. The social media giant had been testing the Place Tip feature which uses Facebook beacons. These beacons use Bluetooth technology to send a signal to the Facebook app on a shopper’s phone which helps businesses run proximity marketing campaign.

The potential of wrist-based payments is already in evidence via radio frequency identification bands at festivals and live events, with the demand expected to double this year and cashless payments a key application.Payment transaction volume on wearables will reach $501 billion by 2020, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 177 percent and representing 20 percent of total mobile proximity transaction volume, according to a new report from Tractica.

Drone-based delivery may still be far from an everyday reality, but likely players including Google and Amazon are already thinking about traffic control. According to Bloomberg, Google, Amazon, Verizon and Harris Corp. are among 14 companies that have signed agreements with NASA to help create a drone air traffic control system.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet is holding a hearing on the Internet of Things this Wednesday. The subcommittee's jurisdiction is quite broad, including "judicial ethics, patent and trademark law, information technology, other appropriate matters as referred to by the Chairman, [Rep. Darrell Issa]." Given the breadth of its jurisdiction, it is unclear what precisely the subcommittee is looking for in its examination of the IoT but it's likely that privacy and security issues are on the list.

We just got to spend a week with an Android Auto car (our huge review is right here), and as part of our research to figure out how it works, we ran into quite a few things that are in the app but don't work yet. Android Auto houses non-functional interface mock ups for several new features, along with a whole host of sensor code that Google hasn't talked about. What Google really intends to do with these is anyone's guess, but it's rare that Google ships non-functional code that doesn't someday become functional. So while we're personally not guaranteeing anything, this could be a peek into the …

The digital advertising industry is already undergoing something of a transformation. While facing an existential threat from the ascendant ad blocker, advertisers are leading the charge to create ever more tailored advertising experiences. The proliferation of connected devices under the internet of things (IoT) promises to disrupt the industry further by increasing the number of opportunities for advertisers to learn about and sell to consumers.

A microwave that accepts voice-over-recipes, a washing machine that takes commands from a smartphone app and a Wi-Fi enabled air conditioner connected to a smartphone—Appliance makers in India plan to put these innovations together to create smart Indian homes for consumers. Internet of Things (IoT) that enables machines to interact with each other with minimal or no human intervention has spread across various consumer domains. Home appliance makers in India are keen on implementing IoT to everyday used home appliances.

Target’s Open House in a shopping center near Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco is tucked underneath the retailer’s own City Target. The space isn’t huge, but it’s effective. Interactive displays pop up when you approach to give you speech bubbles that tell you what each product can do. The Sears connected home showcase down the road in San Bruno is an even more effective display, largely because the retailer sells the kinds of appliances — stoves, ovens, washers and dryers, refrigerators, water heaters — that serve in a major way as a home’s connective tissue.

Amazon is already the largest e-commerce site in the world by overall visitors. However, the company's ambitions extend far beyond selling physical and digital products -- it wants to expand into the growing Internet of Things market. Amazon plans to tap into this booming market with "smart" devices which could boost the strength of Amazon's ecosystem.