July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Over five billion wireless connectivity chips will ship in 2013, according to ABI Research, as our appetite for everything mobile continues to grow. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are both growing, of course, but so are lesser-known specs such as Zigbee, UWB, and, yes, even NFC.

Most of those five billion chips won’t be in phones, as tablets, sensors, cameras, lightbulbs, refrigerators, and more increasingly get connected to the Internet.

I talked to Peter Cooney, a wireless analyst with ABI, just before the the research company’s London offices closed for the Christmas long weekend.

“While the base market is primarily things that we know like smartphones and tablets, the growth is for the internet of things … those devices are growing very quickly,” Cooney said.

Of course, a lot of chips are being made for and shipped in more standard devices, Cooney added: smartphones, tablets, laptops, and netbooks. Even old-school feature phones are incorporating Bluetooth in addition to the standard cellular connectivity radios.

And one technology that we’re not seeing much of this side of the Atlantic is poised for a breakout: NFC. In fact, it’s more than poised, according to Cooney.

“NFC has gone from two million devices in 2010 to 100 million in 2012,” he said. “Android is really driving that growth, but NFC is coming of age … and integration into smartphones is driving growth in other areas.”

In fact, many “other” areas — as in not phones, not tablets, not laptops — are also getting a lot of wireless innovation.

“Really, any kind of consumer device is getting wireless chips,” Cooney told me this morning.

That’s something we’ve seen a lot of this year: sensors and connected switches for windows and doors, lights, heating, and more. SmartThings wants to help you control the real world, as does ReelyActive. And while NFC has been the next great thing for some time, we’re seeing a ton of innovation in the home automation space using multiple wireless protocols.

One of the big trends ABI is seeing is integration — like what Apple did in the iPhone 5 by marrying the LTE and global 4G chips into one.

“They’re essentially integrating to reduce cost and size,” Cooley said. Broadcom, one of the leading suppliers in the “combo IC” (integrated chip) market, will continue to dominate, ABI said.

Even old-fashioned technologies are showing new tricks: Bluetooth smart is coming out, and faster Wi-fi (WiGig) is on the horizon. It all ads up to a lot of wireless devices.

“In 2013 cumulative shipments of Bluetooth-enabled devices will surpass 10 billion and Wi-Fi enabled devices will surpass 10 billion cumulative shipments in 2015,” Cooney said in a statement.

The internet of things, indeed.

photo credit: Gramophone Maryland via photopin cc, BrickArt!san via photopin cc

Microsoft’s research division comes up with some pretty cool stuff, like its Holoflector augmented reality mirror, but its latest project is much more homely.

To be more precise, the company debuted HomeOS today, an operating system designed to make all your devices work in conjunction with how you live at home.

“It is no secret that homes are ever-increasing hotbeds of new technology such as set-top boxes, game consoles, wireless routers, home automation devices, tablets, smart phones, and security cameras. This innovation is breeding heterogeneity and complexity that frustrates even technically-savvy users’ attempts to improve day-to-day life by implementing functionality that uses these devices in combination,” Microsoft writes in a post announcing HomeOS.

The operating system works in conjunction with a “HomeStore” app market, where you can buy apps to orchestrate activities around the house. The basic idea is to have device makers make their home appliances compatible with HomeOS, and then let developers take over.

Microsoft is testing the current prototype in over a dozen homes, with researchers from universities across the globe experimenting with the technology. The OS is free for non-commercial use.

We’ve embedded a demo of what the OS can do below, with a slightly longer video available on Microsoft’s website. And having watched  some of the videos, I can say this is probably the closest we’ve come to recreating the “House of the Future” attraction in Disney theme parks’ Tomorrowland.

Photo courtesy of Disney via Yesterdayland

In a hospital somewhere, a patient falls out of bed. A loud alarm goes off, and nurses rush in. Then three blood pressure monitors and a crash cart go missing from the ER. Operations managers quickly locate them in other parts of the hospital via a GPS-like function loaded into the software on their computers.

The key to all this is sensors. The aforementioned hospital isn’t really a hospital, but a demonstration lab at IBM’s campus in Austin, Tex., (pictured below). But the software and technology are real and are being deployed in hospitals today, and not just by IBM.

Cisco recently announced a partnership with Control4. Together, the two companies want to make technology that will create connected cities that can allow for remote schooling and doctor consultations, as well as automated home entertainment, lighting and security. Other companies are piling into the smart home/connected city space. Automation and home energy management is an area getting hot this year, with players like Schneider Electric, Vivent, Intel, Tendril and LG jumping into the game.

Sensors are playing an increasing role in not only smart grid-enabled rollouts, but smart homes, smart cities and smart hospitals. Players like Cisco, IBM and Microsoft are launching IT frameworks for cities that can help manage water, electricity, waste and traffic — with energy efficiency in mind. They are used across the spectrum in energy efficiency offerings that are poised to gain momentum in 2011.

For example, several venture-backed startups offer lighting systems that promise to reduce electricity costs. Redwood Systems and SynapSense use sensors to find energy inefficiencies in energy-hogging data centers. And sensors play a role in the smart grid, too. Smart meter company Elster recently paired its software platform with ABB’s sensor technology to monitor voltage so utilities can more efficiently monitor and operate power distribution.

The idea of ever-more intelligent infrastructure, whether for energy efficiency or operational gains, goes beyond sensors, of course. Sensors provide data, but that data must be processed by software and analytics in order to yield useful recommendations. Storing information in a way that makes it easily and quickly accessible is important, too. For example, in the hospital scenario, a doctor assessing a new patient could come in and quickly pull up the patient’s treatment records on a screen (pictured, above) and see his medical allergies and treatment history. Besides creating efficiencies within hospitals, digitized records would be especially useful in the case of, say, a patient with Alzheimer’s or someone who’s unable to recall and explain key diagnostic and treatment information.

Clearly major companies and startups alike see connected homes and cities as the next big thing. What do you think? Would you want to live in smart home and connected city, or do you like things just the way they are?

[Top image via Flickr/Tom Purves]