Gartner Inc yesterday said shipments of Internet of Things (IoT) devices would expand at an annual rate of 35 percent to 25 billion units by 2020, from 3.7 billion units at the end of last year.
Applications for the automotive sector are also projected to increase 67.2 percent annually between 2013 and 2020, Gartner said.
In the era of IoT, “things tend to be installed for many years and with long replacement cycles, unlike previous-generation hardware devices such as smartphones,” which consumers replace every one to two years, Gartner analyst Jim Tully said.
Tully said the business model and value chain will be very different in the IoT era.
The bulk of the value comes from service providers, such as General Electric Co or Accenture PLC or Wipro Ltd, with relatively little value from hardware devices, he said.
Hardware-focused businesses need a radical re-think about how to generate profits, he said, citing SKF AB as an example.
The Swedish company now provides pre-emptive maintenance services by measuring the degree of ball wearing using sensors within ball bearings, he said.
Consumers and enterprises are expected to spend a total US$263 billion on IoT-related services by 2020, according to Gartner.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained