If you go to a Taylor Swift concert, you could have a front row seat to an Internet of Things use case. On Swift’s 1989 Tour that is criss-crossing the globe, concert-goers receive a wristband upon entrance to the venue. At some point during the show it magically lights up, coordinated to songs from the queen of pop music. What’s really going on here? As this Slate article explains, its powered by a company named PixMob, which specializes in wireless LED technology. The wristbands use infrared transmitters to control the LEDs on the wristbands (that’s the same infrared that’s used by remote controls …

What's the latest inside poop from the Internet of Things, which has already brought us smart TVs, smart appliances and smart thermometers? A smart baby-changing pad. The Smart Changing Pad connects with an app so new parents can track their child's weight, sleep and even the number of diapers they use. It's debuting Monday at the ABC Kids Expo in Las Vegas, made by a start-up called Hatch Baby, which recently raised $7 million in early funding.

German automaker Mercedes-Benz is putting itself on the frontline of technological innovation with its latest mobile application. Designed in collaboration with Pivotal, the Mercedes Me connected car app is being billed as the first-ever app of its kind and the first step in a new era of digital transformation for both the automaker and its industry. With consumers now wanting safety, environmental friendliness and a number of conveniences for their cars, the Mercedes Me app could position the brand as a leading developer of next-generation automobiles.

German automakers Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi are among the leaders in strategy and execution in autonomous cars, with Tesla and Jaguar a bit further behind, according to a new report by Navigant Research. Although fully self-driving cars are still at least a decade away, pieces of the technology are already being implemented into vehicles today, meaning that the battle to be first is already waging. Because of the safety and ease of such a vehicle, the first brand to release an effective, fully autonomous car could capture a sizable segment of the market.

He’s been Cisco’s CEO for a little over 5 months now, since taking over for John Chambers, and Chuck Robbins hasn’t been sitting on his heels. At the recent Global Editor’s Conference (GEC) at the company’s San Jose headquarters, the company’s leader told the invited group of journalists from all over the world, including little ol’ me, that Cisco is strong and now will use that strength to build a partnership-type economy and help facilitate growth throughout the IT, IoT and OT worlds. “I am incredibly bullish about where we are,” Robbins said. “Today, IT teams are shifting what they …

Day by day, appliance by appliance, “the internet of things” – that utopian notion that one day all objects, people and data will be interconnected online – quietly works its way into our quotidian routines, the clicks and whirrs of gleaming automata replacing that gurgling noise your dad used to make when he couldn’t get the VCR to stop blinking “00:01”. As Wired magazine and those Apple adverts where people dance to vintage soul in converted loft spaces keep cheerfully telling us, this march of progress into our homes should be regarded as a “good thing”. Yet surely I’m not …

Best Buy has formed a retail partnership with the manufacturer of what is expected to be one of the hottest selling items in consumer electronics this holiday season. The retailer is teaming up with Yuneec International to offer the Typhoon drone series, which includes the Typhoon Q500 4K and Typhoon G multicopters, as well as the Typhoon Wizard, a new ultra-lightweight remote control drone. “We are excited to be launching a partnership with the country’s largest and most recognizable consumer electronics retail chain,” said Shan Phillips, CEO of Yuneec USA. “Yuneec offers options for every type of drone pilot or photographer with …

The future of internet technologies for businesses is not a matter of cost, it’s a matter of value. NCORITA’s fourth technology conference focused on “The Future of IT.”  Keynote speaker Carl Deal challenged attendees to think about how the technologies he was about to speak about could be applied to their world. “When we start talking about digital, start talking about the future, first of all is extinction,” Deal said. “Extinction is driven by the choices we make—it’s self-inflicted. The second is it’s inflicted upon us by the choices our competitors make, or don’t make, and the forces of natural selection in …

A few weeks ago at Cisco's San Jose headquarters, I visited the networking giant's Internet of Everything Showcase, a laboratory that develops and tests a range of Internet of Things technologies for clients. One of the projects that Shaun Kirby, Cisco Consulting Services' chief technologist, and Ben Varghese, an emerging technology consultant at the company, showed me is aimed specifically at reducing wait times for shoppers at a big-box retailer, the name of which they said they could not disclose. The approach that the retailer is testing involves mounting location beacons (the tests involve Wi-Fi tags made by Ekahau) under shopping carts and then using …

AT&T is nearly ready to launch a feature that will allow a customer’s smartphone, tablet and other devices to share a single phone number. The feature, now called NumberSync, is a key to making it more attractive for customers to own multiple devices with built-in wireless connections, just as it was important to offer shared data plans. As previously reported by Re/code, AT&T has been testing the underlying technology, code-named Cascade, since at least last year. It was developed in part at the company’s Foundry incubator in Palo Alto, Calif.