The Apple Watch may be just what the smartwatch market needed. Smartwatch unit sales will jump from 30 million last year to 50 million this year and 66.7 million in 2017, Gartner said in a research note released on Tuesday. The industry can thank Apple for the anticipated surge, according to Gartner, as the Apple Watch has been "popularizing wearables as a lifestyle trend." Launched last April, the Apple Watch is one of the most high-profile products in wearable tech. It's spurring interest in smartwatches, Gartner says, not so much because of its features but because of its aesthetics. It's a fashion statement.

Intel's investment in the Internet of Things is paying off, with new products being launched this year and revenue growing for the division. Intel recently introduced several technologies aimed at the retail industry. "Retail is a great example of one of the industrial markets that is taking advantage of IoT," said Bridget Karlin, managing director of the IoT Strategy and Technology Office at Intel's Internet of Things Group. She estimates retail is expected to be about a $35 billion industry with IoT by 2020. Intel recently partnered with Levi Strauss & Co. to help the San Francisco-based retailer address issues …

Researchers with arguably too much time on their hands have discovered security blunders surrounding Fisher-Price Smart Toys and hereO GPS watches for children. Fortunately, the two sets of vulnerabilities, discovered by security researchers at Metasploit biz Rapid7, have been addressed and fixed by both affected vendors. Even so, the failure by the toymakers to discover the flaws during quality control before the products left the drawing board, let alone the factory, once again raises concerns about the security of internet and mobile-enabled gadgets and gizmos. Improper authentication handling by a Wi-Fi-equipped digital stuffed animal from Fisher-Price could have allowed attackers to …

Domino’s is continuing its innovative mobile-ordering streak by integrating Amazon Echo prior to the Super Bowl, an attempt to drum up sales during one of food takeout’s biggest days of the year. The pizza chain is hoping to become a leader in mobile-ordering solutions and create a modern brand image in the eyes of consumers. Its latest launch is expanding its mobile-ordering experiments to Amazon Echo owners, allowing them to place and track orders through voice recognition.

This year marks the 50th year of the Super Bowl, and plenty has changed since the first time teams duked it out for the national title.  Players are bigger and faster, replays more instant and from more angles, commercials cost the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP. But this year, there’s something else that has the potential to change the game: big data. Sports analysts have been collecting data on football games since the very beginning, but our data collection techniques and abilities have vastly improved. I have written before about how the NFL is using big data.

This change is being driven by proliferation smartphone penetration will hit 2.89 billion globally by 2017 according to the GSMA and by usage many reports estimate that consumers now look at their mobile screens up to 220 times a day. Brands can’t afford to miss out on the mobile opportunity. Wearables on the other hand are still very much at an early juncture in their trajectory. However, the expectations are just as immense as mobile. In February this year, Cisco forecast that global wearable device connections would total 578 million in 2019, compared with 170 million in 2015. But will the growth of both these sectors impact each other and, …

With the Internet of Things (IoT) being the latest buzzword, air-conditioning (AC) company Blue Star will be integrating this concept in all of its products and is targeting to become the market leader in Japanese-dominated inverter AC segment. Under a road map laid down by the company, it will integrate 75 per cent of its product portfolio in line with the concept while the entire integration will be over by 2020. "Realising the changing scenario in cooling needs of consumers, we are moving over towards this integration", the company's executive director B Thaigarajan told Business Standard. According to him enabling the ACs …

HTC’s (financial) struggle is real. The Taiwanese tech firm endured another rough quarter of business after it posted a NT$3.4 billion ($101 million) net loss for Q4 2015. Total revenue came in at NT$25.7 billion ($766 million), which is up nearly 20 percent quarter-on-quarter but down a massive 46 percent year-on-year. The phone maker booked a slender NT$0.47 billion (then $14.7 million) profit one year ago in Q4 2014, but this time around it is a third successive quarterly loss following on from a NT$4.5 billion ($139 million) loss in Q3 2015, when it stopped forecasting its own sales, and a NT$8.0 billion (US$252 million) loss in Q2. HTC made some unspecific positive noises about its …

Networking giant Cisco Systems has agreed to pay $1.4 billion for Jasper, a Santa Clara, Calif-based company that focuses on technology for connecting smart devices to the Internet — the so-called Internet of Things. Jasper had raised about $205 million in venture capital investments from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark and more recently from the private equity fund Temasek. Having reached a valuation north of $1 billion, it was considered a candidate for an IPO. The company makes cloud-based control software that helps companies connect machinery and equipment ranging from vending machines to farming equipment on the Internet. Among its 3,500 …

Porsche does not plan to join luxury carmakers who are trying to develop self-driving vehicles, its chief executive told a German newspaper, indicating differences between large premium brands and sports car companies. Lamborghini, also part of the Volkswagen group, has expressed similar scepticism about the trend towards autonomous driving, a concept which brands such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz are seeking to build into their models. The comments from Porsche Chief Executive Oliver Blume show that some car makers believe their drivers want to remain firmly in control at the wheel. "One wants to drive a Porsche by oneself," Blume said in an …