This time last year Gartner said that by 2022 a typical family home, in a mature affluent market, could contain several hundred smart objects by 2022. Several hundred. Thinking over this for a moment you can pinpoint a few of the usual suspects and brands already that may grace a home in 2015; for example a couple of smart TVs, a smattering of Sonos speakers for multi-room musical enjoyment, a Nest thermostat, consoles, tablets, and so forth. But if we examine the market as it is today apathy is rife because the current trend by OEM companies is to “stick a chip in it” in order to connect it …

Electrical giant Emerson, a pilot customer of the Internet of things cloud, is exploring the use of the service to contact customers who may have problems with their connected thermostats. Instead of waiting for customers to call when something goes wrong, Salesforce’s cloud helps Emerson learn about their problems proactively so that it can lend a hand before the phone rings.

As summer wanes, many parts of the country will be still balmy enough to enjoy any number of outdoor leisure activities. But if you plan to enjoy some fresh air as you toil away on your laptop, you'll likely be seeking the shade. This is because most LCDs—the displays on virtually all laptops and many tablets and smartphones—are notoriously prone to being washed out by the sun. Companies routinely make trade-offs between display size, brightness, and resolution, so it's bizarre that nobody has solved this problem. But with wearables, the tide may be starting to turn.

Apple executives have discussed their plans for an “autonomous vehicle” with officials at California’s department of motor vehicles (DMV), the Guardian has learned. According to documents obtained by the Guardian, Mike Maletic, a senior legal counsel at Apple, had an hour-long meeting on 17 August with the department’s self-driving car experts Bernard Soriano, DMV deputy director, and Stephanie Dougherty, chief of strategic planning, who are co-sponsors of California’s autonomous vehicle regulation project, and Brian Soublet, the department’s deputy director and chief counsel. …

You love basketball. You love it so much you play every day. Maybe you play in a city league, are trying to make the school team, or want to be better than all your teammates. That means you have to practice all the time. You have to shoot hundreds of free throws and hundreds more shots from inside and outside the paint. You shoot until you’re tired, and then keep shooting — because nothing will make you better at basketball than muscle memory. But once you commit, how do you know whether or not all that work is actually paying …

A Swiss health insurer is exploring setting premiums partly by customers' fitness as gauged by personal activity monitors, according to reports. The news, from Swiss German-language daily Blick, was picked up in The Local, an English-language site covering European news, under the headline "Health insurers eye higher costs for the 'lazy'": Peter Ohnemus of Dacadoo, a company specializing in collecting health data, agrees that digital tools could be useful to insurers and push people to take responsibility for their health.

At first glance, it might seem a little underwhelming to the vacuumers of the world that the latest product from iRobot, the Roomba 980, boasts internal mapping as a key new feature. But it's such a leap forward that CEO and cofounder Colin Angle evokes Lewis and Clark when discussing the achievement. It's a problem iRobot has been trying to solve for a decade, and Angle said this model is the biggest leap forward for them since the first Roomba, which was introduced in 2002. The ability to map allows the Roomba 980 to avoid more obstacles, clean a home more efficiently—think …

Retailers must always think about customers and data security when developing their IoT strategy to reach out to new billion dollar revenue streams. Experts gathered in London at the 'Retailing to the Customer of One in the IoT Age' conference to discuss the challenges and opportunities of smarting the retail industry. In a keynote, David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP in EMEA and Asia, and Joe Jensen, GM for retail solutions at Intel, made clear that IoT is as much daunting as it is an enabler, and that not all will survive this new age. Jensen said: "Companies that stick to …

First you needed a desktop strategy. Then you needed a mobile strategy. Then it was a digital strategy. Then it was a data and content strategy. Then it was digital transformation. In the meantime, as an industry we are looking at over $1bn of media reviews, and brands are looking for a new breed of advertising partners. Consumers are flocking to mobile devices, and the IoT has gone from something confined within the walls of tech conferences to a fast-growing phenomenon.

Over the past couple of years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been making waves across the world. While many Indian companies have been doing pilots over the last 18 months, till quite recently, there was not much of an impact within the country. That lethargy has been replaced by an intense drive now thanks to the government’s Digital India plan which is working on three planks - building a robust infrastructure, creates skills and innovation.