A Belk executive at the NRF 105th Annual Convention & Expo said the retailer is conducting tests in the mobile messaging space by sending relevant content and coupons to shoppers’ smartphones, showcasing the potency of beacons for department stores. During the “Exhibitor BIG !deas: Modernize the Retail Experience with Mobile Devices” session, executives from Belk, Apple, Ascena Retail Group and Luxottica Retail discussed the paramount importance of leveraging mobility to augment in-store interactions and drive sales. Beacons still remain a top desired tactic for many retailers, thanks to their ability to communicate with shoppers in fitting rooms, send targeted deals and offer customers …

Machine learning firm Maluuba has raised about $6.5 million in Series A funding led by Emerillon Capital. “Headquartered in Waterloo, Canada, Maluuba started out with the launch of a ‘Siri for Android’ technology,” Vator.tv writes. “Maluuba has always been focused on building out voice search experiences.”

Retailer True Religion’s Apple Watch application enables store associates to easily sift through various sizes, styles and colors of jeans to find what a shopper might like and send the image to a monitor so the item can be easily inspected and then purchased via an on-screen bar code. True Religion worked with Aptos Inc. and Formula 3 Group to develop the new endless aisle solution, bringing the retailer’s full range of products into its 1,500 square foot stores. The Apple Watch app, called Band, integrates with the Aptos Enterprise Order Management and Mobile Store Point of Sale solutions, and …

BMW Group’s new venture BMW Labs portal, which went online yesterday, allows customers the chance to test in advance new services still under development and therefore play an active role in helping to shape the Group’s ConnectedDrive services. The first ConnectedDrive option to be made available via BMW Labs is the integration of the IFTTT (IF This Then That) service into BMW vehicles. IFTTT is a free-of-charge service which allows web applications and intelligent devices on the Internet of Things to be linked together. Users can create statements known as “Recipes”, which allow them free rein to combine “Triggers” with …

You've heard of the Internet of Things – the generic name given to all the various networked sensors, machines, devices and even buildings in the world – but most of those "things" stay in one place for the most part. The world is primed for an explosion of autonomous ambulatory devices, which led a team of engineers from the University of Waterloo in Canada to draft a conceptual framework for an "Internet of Drones." The authors of a paper on the concept (linked at the bottom of the page) lay out what is essentially a structure for how drone traffic could be …

Princeton boffins have looked at the networking behavior of a bunch of Internet of Things kit and found – stop me if you've heard this one – device makers aren't paying attention. The pair, PhD student Sarthak Grover and Center for Information Technology Policy fellow Roya Ensafi, say the devices they tested obey the rules of bad security, like badly-implemented encryption and privacy leaks. Their presentation, here, was given to the Federal Trade Commission's PrivacyCon 2016. As the researchers note, novice programmers abound in the Things market, making novice mistakes, and trying to do things on hardware that can't support security. …

Nest got back to us, saying that the researchers assumed incorrectly what the geo-location data was for, which actually was used for the weather station, not the user’s house: “The authors initially made an incorrect assumption, which we pointed out to them before they presented their report, that the response to the weather update request contains exact location of the customer’s home. In fact, the weather information is provided by an online weather service, and the geolocation coordinates are for their remote weather stations, not our customers’ homes. The only user information that is contained in the requests is zip …

New York City is starting to see its first LinkNYC public Wi-Fi kiosks. The Links, so called, offer up speeds upwards of 300Mbps for free. “For comparison, that’s about thirty times as fast as the internet speeds available to half of all US subscribers,” The Next Web notes. “LinkNYC was acquired last June by a consortium led by Google’s Sidewalk Labs.”

Imagine you wake up in your bed to a freezing cold house. You know you set the thermostat to the right temperature the night before, so something must be wrong. You stumble out of bed and into the hallway to look at the thermostat. It's off -- and it won't turn back on. That was the scenario for some Nest thermostat owners (the company owned by Alphabet's Google) after a software updated inadvertently added a bug to thermostat's system, causing the batteries to drain and the device to turn off. In the scheme of Internet-connected devices, this wasn't a disaster. Nest identified the problem …

Amazon launched its Dash Replenishment Service on Tuesday, in a move to capture a piece of the growing Internet of Things (IoT) market that is expected to grow into a $453 billion industry by 2020. The ecommerce giant unveiled a list of third-party IoT devices that will be connecting to its Dash Replenishment Service over the course of this month. For example, starting Tuesday, Brother has some IoT printers that will automatically ping Amazon with a request to ship more ink when levels get low. Later this month Gmate's SMART Blood Glucose Meter will automatically reorder additional testing strips and lancets from Amazon …