Qualcomm announced this week plans to sell Vuforia, its augmented reality business, to Internet of Things company PTC for $65 million. PTC plans to use Vuforia to expand its IoT offerings. More specifically, PTC said in its release that developers and businesses can utilize AR for design, product control and monitoring, and digital overlays to communicate information to operators and technicians. "Because of what IoT is enabling, more and more products are now a mixture of digital and part physical content," said PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann in a statement. "So, naturally, the ways in which we interact with these products will evolve …

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.

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 …

Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer has set a date for its upcoming Android Wear smartwatch unveiling. The Tag Heuer Connected, as it's called, will make its debut at the LVMH Tower in New York City on November 9th, according to invites sent out by the company today. The watch is reportedly based on the popular Tag Carrera and will cost around $1,800, according to a interview with Tag CEO Jean-Claude Biver on CNBC last month. Tag is targeting the crowd of fashion-conscious luxury collectors who may have pined for the gold Apple Watch, but found its aesthetic appeal lacking. Apple's decision to began selling …

The thing is, Amazon has always dabbled in many corners of the tech industry as it’s pursued its well-worn mantra of “growth before profits.” And that means the company is more than the world’s largest retailer. It’s also an Internet of Things company. A device maker. A payments company. The list goes on. Some bets, like its massive cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services, have proven hugely successful. Others, like the Fire phone, have not.

It's hard to tell where Michael Hauser's love for denim ends and where his love of technology begins. The 25-year-old Dutch entrepreneur was just 20 years old when he opened House of Blue Jeans, a 100-square-meter (1,080-square-foot) clothing shop in Zoetermeer, a small city east of The Hague. He initially launched his business as an online store, Hauser says, and when he opened the brick-and-mortar version, he was eager to find ways in which using technology could make running the physical shop efficient but also more appealing to his customers.

 In the works for about a year, the highlight of the update is the new Autosteer feature. This is designed specifically for highway driving, and when engaged keeps the car in its lane. When you need to change lanes, you flip your turn signal and the car will move over on its own when it determines it’s safe to do so. So we’re not quite ready to simply enter an address and let the car handle everything, but it’s a glimpse into out autonomous future.Tesla is rolling out version 7.0 of its software, and with it new autopilot features that …

Retailers have been quicker than other firms to implement internet of things (IoT) devices and applications, but what about beacons? Those are still catching on, according to Retail TouchPoints. A mere 29 percent of retailers surveyed worldwide by the research company say they have implemented beacon technology in their retail stores.

The Internet of Things (IoT) can help marketers move beyond predicting or reacting to customer behavior. Instead, it can blur product experience with customer experience — so that having a product, using a product and dealing with its company become a continuum. That’s a key takeaway from a discussion I had recently with Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. I wanted to understand what his company’s newly announced IoT Cloud could mean for marketers and customers, beyond just more data from everywhere. The new Salesforce Cloud is not only designed to process all those signals marketers currently monitor — such as social media …

Together, virtual reality and augmented reality are expected to generate about $150 billion in revenue by the year 2020. Of that staggering sum, according to data released today by Manatt Digital Media, $120 billion is likely to come from sales of augmented reality—with the lion’s share comprised of hardware, commerce, data, voice services, and film and TV projects—and $30 billion from virtual reality, mainly from games and hardware. The report suggests that the major VR and AR areas that will be generating revenue fall into one of three categories.