Amazon's bid to create worldwide blockbuster shows may extend well beyond very familiar Western stories like Lord of the Rings. Investors speaking to the Financial Times claimed that Amazon is in talks that would let it spend up to $ 1 billion for th…
IDC report expects spending to accelerate over the next five years, says Rene Millman.
Spending on technologies to enable smart cities programmes in Asia Pacific, excluding Japan (APeJ), is set to reach $ 28.3 billion in 2018, according to new figures released by IDC.
In its first Worldwide Semi-annual Smart Cities Spending Guide since it began tracking these projects in 2006, the analyst firm has looked at the technology investments associated with smart city use cases. IDC finds that as these initiatives gain traction, spending is set to accelerate and hit $ 45.3 billion by 2021.
“This research spans an exhaustive compilation of worldwide Smart City projects across 41 categories of use cases,” said Gerald Wang, head of Public Sector at IDC Asia Pacific.
“This is expected to aid both technology buyers and market suppliers to have a greater grasp of the broad trends and niche opportunities, as well as best practices in regional and global smart city programmes.”
IDC predicts that the key investments for connected projects in APeJ will be in intelligent transportation, data-driven public safety, and resilient energy and infrastructure. Wang added: “A deeper dive suggests different prioritisation across first-, second-, and third-tier cities in the region”.
The report finds that intelligent traffic transit and fixed visual surveillance systems are already seeing a big push from governments in APeJ, in order to streamline traffic and make communities more secure. Together, these two use cases represent more than 36 percent of overall spending throughout the forecast period, says IDC.
However, use cases for Vehicle to Everything (V2X) connectivity and ‘officer wearables’ (such as Fitbits and smart glasses) will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45 percent and 43.3 percent, respectively.
State/local government and transportation are the two leading adopters of smart city technologies. Services account for the highest single spending bloc overall, with a 32.5 percent share last year. The sector is likely to experience linear growth to hit $ 16.7 billion by 2021, according to IDC.
Hardware was the second largest technology group in 2017, with $ 31.7 billion of spending, followed by software (with an 18 percent share) and connectivity (with 17.8 percent). Throughout the forecast period, software is expected to grow fastest to reach $ 8.3 billion by 2021, according to IDC.
“With the fast influx of populations to urban areas in APeJ, it will be a challenge for all governments to supply sufficient fresh water, universal access to cleaner energy, the ability to travel efficiently from one point to another, and a sense of safety and security,” said Ashutosh Bisht, IDC’s research manager for Asia Pacific.
“These are the kinds of promises that smart cities must fulfil if they are to stay competitive and provide a decent quality of life to their citizens.”
This is one area where many Asian countries – including Japan – are streets ahead of much of North America and Europe. Fast-expanding cities in China, South Korea, and Japan, together with Singapore, are forging ahead with connected services, automation, smart transport, and more.
In some cases, they have a more relaxed and encouraging attitude to technologies such as pilotless air transport, while keeping pace with US achievements in autonomous and connected cars. As a result, the West has a real challenge on its hands to strike the right balance between legacy services, safety, and light touch regulation for the future.
That said, China in particular lacks regulations to protect its citizens’ private data from mass exploitation by government and others. In Europe, GDPR prevents initiatives such as China’s upcoming compulsory social ratings system, which seeks to control people’s behaviour via the way they use public services, transport, and other connected networks.
Read more: Smart city hotspots: FLIR manages traffic using thermal imaging
Read more: Poles apart: Five cities putting smart streetlights to new uses
Read more: Intel:”Smart cities give every person back 125 hours a year”
Read more: Gartner: Four strategies to make smart cities work for citizens
Read more: Cisco announces $ 1 billion smart cities fund
Read more: EHANG passenger drone boasts successful manned test flights
Read more: South Korea most automated nation on earth, says report. The UK? Going nowhere
The post Asia Pacific smart city spend to top $ 28.3 billion in 2018 appeared first on Internet of Business.
Worldwide spending on Internet of Things security will hit $ 1.5 billion in 2018, a 28 per cent increase from 2017, says Gartner.
However, the analyst company warns that IoT security is being left up to business units, with a lack of overall business strategy, poor “security by design”, and little control over the technology within connected devices.
Its report, Forecast: IoT Security, Worldwide, 2018, says that IoT-based attacks are already a reality. A recent Gartner survey found that nearly 20 per cent of organisations have experienced at least one IoT-based attack in the past three years.
“In IoT initiatives, organisations often don’t have control over the source and nature of the software and hardware being used by smart connected devices,” said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.
“We expect to see demand for tools and services aimed at improving discovery and asset management, software and hardware security assessment, and penetration testing. In addition, organisations will look to increase their understanding of the implications of externalising network connectivity.”
These factors will be the main drivers of growth in IoT security, with spending hitting a forecast $ 3.1 billion in 2021, says the company.
Gartner explains that endpoint security spending will be roughly one-third of the value of professional services security spending this year: $ 373 million against $ 946 million. Meanwhile, gateway security spending is forecast to hit $ 186 million.
However, in 2021 professional services security spending is likely to exceed $ 2 billion, with endpoint security hitting $ 631 million, and gateway security $ 415 million.
Despite healthy year-on-year growth in worldwide spending into the next decade, Gartner predicts that the biggest inhibitor to the growth of IoT security will be a lack of prioritisation and implementation of security best practices and tools. This will hamper spending on IoT security by 80 percent: an extraordinary figure.
“Although IoT security is consistently referred to as a primary concern, most IoT security implementations have been planned, deployed, and operated at the business-unit level, in cooperation with some IT departments to ensure the IT portions affected by the devices are sufficiently addressed,” said Contu.
However, coordination via common architecture or a consistent security strategy is all but absent, and vendor product and service selection remains largely ad hoc, based upon the device provider’s alliances with partners or the core system that the devices are enhancing or replacing.”
While basic security patterns have been revealed in many vertical projects, they have not yet been “codified into policy or design templates to allow for consistent reuse”, continues Gartner.
“As a result, technical standards for specific IoT security components in the industry are only now just starting to be addressed by IT security standards bodies, consortium organisations, and vendor alliances”, adds the report.
This absence of “security by design” comes from a lack of specific and stringent regulations. Going forward, Gartner expects this trend to change, especially in heavily regulated industries, such as healthcare and the automotive sector.
By 2021, Gartner predicts that regulatory compliance will be the prime influencer for IoT security uptake – hence the significant uptick in spending.
As Gartner says, spending is up, but the consistent theme in all 2018 IoT security reports has been exactly the same: users’ approach to the specific problem of securing IoT implementations is lax, device manufacturers are rushing to market to compete, and strategy is poor at board level. Meanwhile, regulations are playing catchup with the market, just as the law is years behind the advance of AI in other areas of the connected world.
Read more: Cambridge Analytica vs Facebook: Why AI laws are inadequate
The result of all this is a vacuum where security policy should be, even as people are throwing money at the problem. As the IoT grows, this poses a serious challenge to decision-makers, who are leaving the big decisions to line-of-business departments that may lack both a big-picture view and security expertise.
Hopefully, Gartner’s name and reputation will persuade more people to listen to the subtext beneath the healthy spending figures.
• Just some of our 2018 security coverage so far:-
Read more: Reports reveal critical need for IoT cybersecurity upgrade
Read more: IIoT security: How to secure the ‘Internet of Threats’, by IBM
Read more: Tenable unveils cybersecurity benchmarking tool
Read more: Vendors, users ignoring IoT security in rush to market – report
Read more: IoT ramps up cyber security risk, says in-depth report
The post Gartner: IoT security spend hitting $ 1.5 billion – but strategy poor appeared first on Internet of Business.
For a limited time, Amazon is offering great deals on a selection of Anime Blu-rays. They start at $ 18.
DBZ fans can snag the entire Dragon Ball Z: Seasons 1-9 Collection on Blu-ray for $ 126. It’s temporarily out of stock, but you can still order it now and it’ll ship as soon as possible. Maybe you’d like to binge the highly-rated Fruits Basket: The Complete Series for $ 44.99 instead.
Some of these even have special collector’s features, like Akira: Movie with a collector’s steelbook case. It also comes with a Blu-ray, a DVD, a 32-page color booklet, and a slew of special features.
Make sure to check out the entire sale before it expires.
This story continues at The Next Web
The Next Web
Norway will spend 100 million Norwegian Crowns ($ 12.7 million) to upgrade the doomsday seed vault it built ten years ago. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was constructed in an abandoned Arctic coal mine to store and safeguard the world’s crops and plants from global natural or man-made disaster. If nuclear war or global warming kills certain crops, governments will be able to request seeds from the vault to restart their agricultural industries.
The Norwegian Government says the upgrades will include the construction of a new concrete access tunnel and a service building that will house “emergency power and refrigerating units and other electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel.” Norway’s Minister of Agriculture and Food,…
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Who needs humans when there are pets to love us?
Valentine’s Day is here in full force, screaming at us with flowers, chocolates, creepy Cupids with arrows, and more. Cast aside the commercialism of the day of love by casting aside your human companions and turning your attention to your animal pals! I mean, get this, according to a survey from our pals at Petcube, 65% of people surveyed said they prioritize their pets over their romantic partner (just @ me next time, Petcube!). Feel the unconditional love only a pet can provide by celebrating Valentine’s Day with the animal in your life!
If you asked me anywhere else, I’d tell you spending Valentine’s Day with your animal starts and stops at petting them, holding them close, giving them treats, playing with toys, and reminding them just how good they are. Since this is iMore, we’re gonna add a little spin by giving things a tech angle.
Here are some ways technology can help you spend Valentine’s Day with your pet!
If you’re not able to be home for Valentine’s Day, you can use a WiFi-enabled camera to tune in to the action while you’re away.
I have a Logitech Circle 2 camera in my home that keeps a close eye on the front and back doors of my house when I’m away. Thankfully, I’ve never had to use it to encourage a crook to bounce, so it’s mostly served as a way for me to check in on the puppers when I’m not there in person.
The $ 180 Circle cam (and many other WiFi-connected smart cameras) features both a microphone and a speaker, so you can communicate with your puppers (or cats or pet pigs or ferrets) to remind them how much you love ’em.
If you’ve got a pet with separation anxiety, this is also a good way to check in for soothing when needed.
You don’t have to stop at just chatting with your pet these days. There are some pretty incredible “smart” (read WiFi-connected and app-controlled) products on the market for your animal companion.
The $ 180 Furbo Dog Camera lets you not only check in on your pet pal while you’re away from home, it also lets you hit a button to deliver a delicious treat! You simply refill the camera with treats and you can drop ’em for your pet at any time. I foresee this being an issue with my two dogs — my chihuahua/rat terrier mix is pretty feisty and she’d probably try to claim all the treats for herself — but I can imagine this’d be a pretty nifty little device for a single-pet home. Load up your pet with heart-shaped treats for Valentine’s Day if you’re not able to be there in person!
Petcube also makes a $ 170 Wi-Fi-connected treat camera.
There’s also the Petcube Camera, which serves as a Wi-Fi-connected camera and pet toy.
You can use the microphone and speaker to chat with your animal while you watch them with the camera. Best of all, it features a built-in laser that you can control with the companion app, so you can enjoy a bit of catch-the-laser while you’re away from home.
With the $ 150 Petcube, there’s no reason to be away from home to use the built-in laser. You and your pet can play for hours while you’re drowning out the day of love.
While it’s only tangentially related to tech, I can’t pass up one of the best ways to give your pets a little Valentine’s Day love: a subscription box!
I recently subscribed to BarkBox and my dogs seem to have figured out the sound a BarkBox makes when it’s being opened, ’cause they get excited every time I begin to open the box. A $ 29 monthly subscription to BarkBox nets your pupper(s) a toy or two and a few packages of treats. January’s box, called “The Knights of the Hound Table,” featured a princess squeaky toy, a dragon squeaky toy, and three medieval-themed bags of treats!
If you have a cat, you can check out The Dollar Pet Club, which features toys and treats for cats.
If you have a rabbit, a parrot, or a pet rat, you can check out the Exotic Pet subscription boxes over at Cratejoy. If I still had pet rats, I’d definitely subscribe to the RatPak.
Are you spending Valentine’s Day with your pet pal? Their unconditional love is unmatched! Enjoy your day and feel free to share your story in the comments below or over on Twitter!
Updated February 2018: This article was updated to include new links, prices, and ideas for celebrating Valentine’s Day with your fluffs.
One of the ways of keeping your smartphone addiction under control entails checking out how much time you’re actually spending in apps on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch…. Read the rest of this post here
“Tip: checking out how much time you spend in iPhone & iPad apps” is an article by iDownloadBlog.com.
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Apple today apologized after sending incorrect information to some iOS developers using its Search Ads Basic service yesterday. The reports actually belonged to other developers, according to Steve Troughton-Smith and others affected.
The follow-up email blames the mishap on a “processing error” and adds that all future reports of these kind will require developers to sign into their accounts to view their dashboards to ensure this issue does not occur again.
Um Apple you might want to check why Search Ads is emailing me some other developer's ad spend details pic.twitter.com/hfBcsqpCiy
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) February 6, 2018
Thank you for being a part of the iOS developer community and for using our new Search Ads Basic service.
Due to a processing error, the January monthly results email we sent to you contains incorrect app promotion information.
Accurate performance information is always available in your Search Ads account. To ensure such an issue will not recur, all future performance communications will direct you to sign in to your account to view your Dashboard.
We apologize for the inconvenience this error has caused. We value your business and will work hard to make our new Basic service something you’ll love.
Introduced late last year, Search Ads Basic works so that developers only pay out if a user installs the app. It includes suggestions on how much a developer should pay based on historical data pulled from the App Store based on the type of app being marketed, and uses App Store trends to target the ideal audience.
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