If you're going to have a smart home, you might as well let a robot run it, right? Samsung is hoping Otto, its "home companion robot," will introduce consumers to the friendlier side of the Internet of Things (IoT) as the company pushes further into the smart home market. Otto is designed to be a central hub for controlling all of the smart devices and appliances in your home. Alongside being integrated with your smart appliances, the battery-operated robot can also answer questions (like "Okay Google" or Siri), play music, function as an intercom, take photos, and even function as …

Sometimes the wheels can just come off this whole internet of things... thing. When cameras are talking to the cloud, there's room for them to make mistakes, and these devices are filming pieces of your private life so that can be a little worrisome. Unfortunately, some owners of the Ring Doorbell Pro recently experienced just this sort of mixup when the "smart" system showed them video of visitors outside — only it wasn't their own home that the feed was coming from. They were getting video from other Ring users. Now this isn't the worst thing to have happen security-wise. It's pretty hard to …

Not everyone is inclined to rewire their home for a fullNest experience or invite an Amazon robo-assistant named Alexa into their lives. But even smart home holdouts will admit there are some appliances around the house whose digital updates are more important than others. For instance, your smoke alarm, which can buzz your phone if it thinks there’s a fire in your living room. Roost is a company that makes a series of Wi-Fi-enabled fire and carbon monoxide detectors. If you don’t want to replace your hardware store smoke detectors with Roost’s hardware, the company also makes an Internet-connected 9-volt battery that fits in regular …

While many companies, big and small, have been jumping into the wearables space in recent years, the use-cases for these devices often feels superficial — with fitness perhaps the most compelling scenario at this nascent stage. Yet smartwatches have far richer potential than merely performing a spot of sweat tracking. The other problem with the current crop of smartwatches is the experience of using apps on wrist-mounted devices does not always live up to the promise of getting stuff done faster or more efficiently. Just having to load an app on this type of supplementary device can feel like an …

At first, it sounded great. You walk around a city and cunningly hidden Bluetooth beacons sense your phone and use trigonometry to calculate your exact position at all times. They bring indoor mapping and navigation to malls, airports and even to specific shops and stores. They allow blind people to navigate. You can use them with your phone to unlock doors, be guided to a specific library book, be micro-billed according to how long you spend in a cinema or on a train, or be messaged about a museum exhibit/zoo animal/historic building you're standing in front of.

German automaker BMW is expanding its ConnectedDrive Online Entertainment with the introduction of audio and music streaming service Deezer. Deezer joins Napster, giving consumers access to an on-demand library of 35 million tracks and 100 million playlists, allowing consumers to enjoy music in their vehicles without needing an accompanying mobile device. Boosting its ConnectedDrive service, BMW is also rolling out solutions to remotely control everything from parking to the car owner’s house.

While IoT technologies may be poised to upend how consumers live, even industry leaders are dumfounded by data security and ethics issues that loom large over the Internet of Things. According to prognostications like Gartner's, the Internet of Things (IoT) market is due to reach more than 26 billion connected devices by 2020 -- and some estimates are twice that, at 50 billion. Even today, IoT devices have wrought data smog, a massive volume and velocity of data that companies now have to ingest, manage and analyze. 

You may have heard of virtual reality (VR). You may have even used it once. And then you might have thought it was just a passing fad. But there are quite a few people who think otherwise. On Wednesday, Facebook owned Oculus announced that over a million people used Samsung's Gear VR headset in April. Oculus, which Facebook bought for $2 billion in 2014, provides the software for Samsung's device. Oculus also said developers have created more than 250 apps for the Gear VR, highlighting the attraction of VR platforms for developers. While the numbers may seem small, it's only been six months since thelaunch …

Those panoramas trapped on your phone will finally get a better viewing experience, both on News Feed and the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR. Facebook is also releasing Gear VR usage stats for the first time, saying Gear VR has 1 million monthly users, and those who use it spend 25 minutes per day on the device. That could encourage developers to build for the platform. Facebook’s upcoming “360 Photos” feature will let people upload flat panoramas like those taken on iPhones, Google Photo Spheres or photos from 360 cameras. Facebook will then morph them into 360 Photos for News Feed where users …

Fancy driving a driverless car? You can now register for the UK's first public trial of autonomous vehicles. If you're in the UK, you can register with the Gateway (Greenwich Automated Transport Environment) project and take a ride around London's Greenwich area in a totally automated self-driving electric shuttle. You'll then be invited to share your thoughts on the experience. You can also take part in workshops to discuss the future of automated transport. "The move to automated vehicles is probably the most significant change in transport since the transition from horse-drawn carriages to motorised vehicles," said professor Nick Reed, director at …