Everybody devotes a lot of ink and pixels to horizontal transportation, to planes, cars, transit and bikes, and surprisingly little to vertical. Yet the numbers of people moved that way is astonishing; There are 12 million semi- automated vertical transportation systems in the world carrying a billion passengers per day. These vertical pods don’t always work either; 190 million hours are lost every year to downtime for maintenance and repairs, and in New York City, a cumulative 16.6 million years is spent waiting for them. These are of course elevators, which have been carrying people with a surprising degree of …

Julian Bleecker and his Near Future Laboratory have followed up on their amazing Skymall-of-the-future catalog with an imaginary near-future Ikea catalog that jam an insane amount of witty futuristic speculation into elegantly presented, arresting images. The whole catalog is a brilliant exploration of the way that the Internet of Things will change our economic and social relationships, a thousand times better than any written pieces of powerpoints. Even more interesting and useful is Bleecker's commentary on the Near Future Lab process, and how they applied it here:

Social media lit up after a Fortinet security researcher demonstrated she could use Bluetooth to inject code onto a Fitbit Flex — a method criminals could use to spread malware. A USA Today story was shared on LinkedIn more than 200 times. Facebookblew up. Tweets abounded, all with people wondering: Could someone compromise my computer or phone through my Fitbit? It didn’t take long for the San Francisco company to answer. This is a “theoretical scenario and is not possible,” a spokeswoman e-mailed the Chronicle. “Fitbit trackers cannot be used to infect users’ devices with malware. We want to reassure our users that it remains …

Tucked away in a mews in central London is Cornflake's smart apartment, a luxury pad rigged up with smart speakers, a home cinema and a connected kitchen. The apartment was built to showcase the latest in smart audio, lighting and other home technology to Cornflake's super wealthy clientele - think the 1%. But now the tech company has partnered with agency SharpEnd to bring the Internet of Things to life for brands.

A wireless network planned for San Francisco could once again make the local library the best place to go for information. The data collected there won’t be much fun to read, but it may help consumers, businesses and local agencies take advantage of connected objects. The city agreed to install antennas at its libraries as part of a pilot project by French vendor SigFox to build a network for the Internet of Things. Each antenna will cover a broad swath of the city, and it could allow San Francisco to expand the IoT services it offers today.

Test driving a new car can be fun. Dealing with leasing paperwork not so much. Just as technology has made everything from toilet paper delivery to ride hailing app-tastically easy, it now promises to transform the once onerous dealership slog with a few swipes of a touchscreen. Visa and DocuSign are expected to announced a prototype app Monday at Money20/20, a payments industry conference in Las Vegas, that would allow consumers to walk into a dealership, ask for a car ordered up on an automaker's website, and drive away after the driver fingertip-signs documents that appear on an in-dash screen. In this scenario, the car …

Start your engine with a keyfob, sure, but what about to pay for gas? MasterCard wants to enable payments on devices — part of a growing movement loosely called Internet of Things — so that you can transact a purchase of everything from the ring on your finger to the key fob for your car. On Monday, MasterCard announced the program to make it happen, with an assist from a variety of industry partners. There’s Qualcomm and NXP on the tech side,Capital One as the first banking issuer, and 

Retailers are leading the pack when it comes to awareness of the Internet of Things (IoT), according to new research. An IDC survey of global decision-makers found that 56% in retail were “familiar” with the IoT, against 53% in manufacturing, 45% in professional services, and even fewer in other sectors – with healthcare, often mentioned as a prime potential application area for IoT, scoring surprisingly low. Retail’s pre-eminence in the emerging field is confirmed as tech heavyweights reiterate the importance of customer experience and the role it will play in implementation of IoT, as well as IoT’s potential for effecting sweeping …

Last week, the Abu Dhabi Court of Cassation gave its final verdict in the sad death of a four-year-old Indian school girl after she was forgotten on the bus. Human negligence remains the primary reason behind such tragedies, and in today’s technology-driven age, there ought to be checks and balances to avoid such recurrences. One such solution was unveiled last week at Gitex by Chinese firm Huawei, which announced the launch of its Agile Internet of Things (IoT) solution for vehicles to help make public transportation safer for residents.

Jim Saber stood in the space between the kitchen and living room and cradled a computer tablet that showed how everything using power in the 399-square-foot residence was interconnected. Americans have been imagining what the home of the future looks like for decades, exploring how they will look and work, and building exhibits for World's Fairs and theme parks. But here in this small house, sitting on the NextEnergy campus in Detroit, Saber and others are focused on energy — its generation, storage, management, current conversion and conservation.