The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show wrapped up in Las Vegas last week, and for as much as there were many exciting developments in consumer electronics technology showcased at the event there was plenty of pointless gadgets, gizmos and concepts that won’t likely resonate with consumers or make it off the show floor.

Curved TVs and screens

Samsung Curved Ultra HD TV

Curved TVs first made an appearance in prototype form at the 2013 CES. Last year they were once again in the spotlight, but more for Michael Bay’s Internet-breaking flubbed appearance than for actual consumer enthusiasm.

At CES 2015 manufacturers brought out curved TVs in full force. There were also a number of curved computer monitors as well. Nearly every vendor in the display business had one or the other.

But the problem with curved displays is that vendors have yet to present a compelling use case for them. Vendors claim that the curvature of the screen matches the natural curvature of the eye, thus presents a more immersive experience, but that effect is not really noticeable unless you have a very large screen. Plus unless you view the screen at a perfect angle — directly in front of it — things simply won’t look right. Being on the wrong end of the curve means the image will look distorted.

Curved TVs are more expensive than traditional flat panel sets, and likely command higher margins per unit sold. Both Samsung (KRX:005930) and Sony (TYO: 6758) are struggling with slowing growth, and need a new product to excite consumers and get them to continue to buy TVs. Unfortunately, sales data shows that enthusiasm from consumers for these curved displays is limited at best.

Too many Internet of Things

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has been hyping the Internet of Things for quite some time, and it CES it seemed like nearly every company at the trade show had an IoT device. Philips (NYSE: PHG) for instance brought $60 IoT enabled Hue light bulbs,while Samsung — its CEO’s keynote was focused on the topic — brought IoT connected appliances.

Two of the big problems with IoT that have been brought up before are sticker shock and security. Vendors need to convince the public the extra costs of an IoT device compared to a non-IoT counterpart are worth it while addressing the security concerns of having everyday objects connected to the web.

But there’s also a third problem with IoT: too many competing standards. Every vendor that brought an IoT device to CES also brought a competing and incompatible standard.

During his keynote, Samsung’s CEO proposed a $100 million fund to develop an open standard for IoT — a must to ensure that a house full of IoT devices can talk to one another.

But until an open IoT standard is developed, and embraced, by most of the world’s IoT vendors the technology will remain, as Gartner calls it, the most overhyped technology in development.

Smartwatches

Though CES isn’t really a mobile-focused show, next month’s Mobile World Congress, a number of vendors brought smartwatches to the show.

But try as they might, the market for smartwatches simply isn’t there. Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) might be able to gain some traction and attention with its iWatch, but other vendors are struggling to figure out how exactly to market these devices to users. In fact, during a panel on the topic at CES a number of prominent industry players admitted that they still haven’t quite figured the market out altogether.

“I have yet to find a killer app that makes me want this,” Creative Strategies president Tim Bajarin is quoted as saying on stage during the panel.

Perhaps vendors are having trouble finding a market for the devices because consumers are generally skeptical about the devices. A survey from December by UBS found that only 27% of users are very likely or somewhat likely to buy a smartwatch.

The post 3 Things That Didn’t Matter at CES 2015 appeared first on VR World.

2014 was an interesting year for Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). While the company remains wildly profitable, beating the estimates of analysts during the past quarter, it remains at something of an impasse regarding its pivot towards mobile and the Internet of Things.

For Intel, the PC Client and Data Center groups bring in the lion’s share of the company’s revenue and profit. Its IoT group is growing: in the third quarter of 2013 it saw a healthy growth in revenue of 14% year-over-year. But mobile is a different story. The division, despite some promising wins in 2014, is a perpetual money loser for the company. Largely due to Intel’s aggressive contra revenue strategy of paying vendors to include its silicon in devices, revenue shrank to $1 million from $353 million a year prior. In mid-November, Intel brass announced that the division would be absorbed by the PC client group in 2015.

Intel has a lot riding on its continued transition out of its traditional PC and desktop business. ARM’s traditional stronghold is mobile, and Intel needs to work on convincing the world there’s an alternative.

2015 will be an important year for Intel. This year the company made a big push to continue the diversification of its business, and 2015 will the the next act in this transition play.

In order to get a better sense of what to expect from Intel in 2015, VR World sat down with Intel’s David McCloskey, director of marketing and business operations for Asia Pacific and Japan, when he was in Taipei. Below are excerpts of the conversation.

VR World: What’s Intel planning for 2015?

David McCloskey: The overall theme for [next year] is the continuation of the overall immersive and much more personal computing experience. Within computing, the transformations we see continued to be powered by high-performing and lower-power types of devices. You see that continuing theme across the form factor. You saw that momentum begin during the second half of this year with things like compute sticks — which are all enabled because you have that combination of power and performance.

We’ll see more devices driven by the demand for power and performance.

VRW: Mobile chips typically have lower margins than Desktop and Server. How do you plan to generate more margins from Mobile?

DM:. As we’ve ramped Bay Trail, we’ve enabled lower price points, which is critical for regions like Asia, with the same or better margins. That’s the power of Moore’s Law, and advancements in transistors and microprocessor architecture.

Typically we get the question: ‘doesn’t that generate a sell-down, and how do you support your ASPs?’. The reality is, it’s a much different value proposition. We talked about the Core-M coming to help the 2-in-1 category, and in that 10-to-11-inch screen size it becomes a debate whether you’ve sold a tablet or you’ve driven an incremental unit from that stack.

Financially, it’s a great thing for us and it’s a great thing for users. And it’s probably not a sell-down from a 15-inch Core i5 notebook.

Within those underlying themes, the big thing about the computing transformation is the form factor explosion. These mini-PCs, the compute stick stuff, kinda came out of nowhere. The other underlying piece to that are the standards like wireless charging. That fundamental capability — especially scalable across gadgets and wearables up through notebooks — will completely reinvent the way we think about usage. Those capabilities will bring a new computing world which will drive business models.

The wireless charging example is akin to Centrino, where there’s a big infrastructure play and there’s a big business model opportunity that’s connected back to the technology.

Intel’s David McCloskey chats about 2015. (Photo: Jimmy Chuang/VR World)

VRW: The Internet of Things was a hot topic for Intel in 2014. What will we see next year in IoT?

DM: We’ve been in IoT for 30 years from an underlying compute perspective. The big challenge is that we’re looking to evolve. We just announced a few days ago a new set of standards of security in order to help scale up. The three big challenges for IoT are the interoperability, security, and scalability. What we think will help us get to the orders of magnitude of billions of devices, and zetabytes of data, is solving those three issues. I think the advancements we are making in addressing the interoperability, addressing security, and addressing scalability.

VRW: Can you describe how Intel is working with software vendors to push out this new vision for computing?

DM: For us it goes back to scalability. Two of the key players we announced in the IoT space are NTT Data in Japan and Tata Consulting Services in India. We do all of our normal work with Microsoft, in terms of their embedded OS, Enterprise, client and so forth. But for us the scale opportunities is through these two SIs.

Stepping up the value chain, our hope is that working with the likes of an NTT Data, TCS, Accenture, etc, there’s much more ability for those guys to pull those value chains together and for us to get the scalability.

VRW: Let’s look back at the past year in the mobile segment. How was 2014 for Intel?

DM: There are two things: We said we wanted to ship 40 million units of tablets. We’re going to ship 40 million units of tablets.

Next, what we didn’t expect is that we’d build a phone business at the same time with Asus as a lead partner. We’re really pleased with the ramp and what Asus has been able to do with us. For tablets and phones as well. The underlying point there, especially in the phone sector, is that we’ve been able to dispel this myth of the Intel Architecture [being ill-suited] in phones in terms of battery life and heat. There’s no question typically about the performance we’d bring, the question is can you fit it into the form factors.

If you shift that out of 2014, the issue becomes how do you build on that momentum.

VRW: Thanks for your time.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

The post Intel’s David McCloskey Looks Ahead at 2015 and Back at 2014 appeared first on VR World.

Behind the emerging market of the Internet of Things are embedded processors. Without these chips, such as Intel’s Atom and Quark, there would simply be be no IoT.

On Wednesday in Taipei Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) hosted its IoT Asia Tour to showcase some of its IoT solutions from partners in order to give an idea to industry stakeholders where the ecosystem is going.

As a testament to the confidence that Intel has in the staying power of IoT, Philip Cronin, the company’s regional sales director for the Asia Pacific and Japan likened the rise of IoT to that of both cloud services and big data.

“Nobody is rejecting the concept of IoT,” Cronin said on stage during the event’s keynote.

To get a sense of how Intel’s embedded technology is driving the IoT — as Intel has been pushing IoT with some effort for over a year now — we sat down with Richard Dwyer, Intel’s VP and general manager of its embedded sales group, when he was in Taipei.

VR World: In the embedded space, how would you compare Intel’s efforts to those of ARM and AMD. What are Intel’s strengths?

Richard Dwyer: First and foremost, we are the preeminent microprocessor silicon manufacturer in the world — we’re pretty proud of it. We’ve made a number of investments over the past three-to-five years in assets that help us differentiate those transistors and microprocessors that we build in ways that go beyond what our competitors offer in the marketplace.

One of the things that I think is truly unique — it’s not just because we bought McAfee (now referred to as Intel Security) so we have 15 to 16 security workloads we can apply to different applications — but we have the ability to do hooks in the silicon with that software. We have Intel Security, we make the microprocessors, we create hooks that tightly couple that security environment with the software stack that sits on top of it. That’s a pretty unique offering and position. That allows us to do things like establishing root of trust and passing that root of trust up through the chain of command before the processor boots.

Another differentiation is having a common architecture from the very low end such as Quark all the way up the architectural stack to Xeon’s in the data center.  The common architecture creates code compatibility and scalability from device to cloud as well as enabling more secured system. Couple core expertise with the IP and the assets that we’ve acquired, such as Wind River, McAfee, Mashery, Aepona as well as internally developed IP from our SSG and labs R&D efforts, Intel is able to create significant value with integrated system up the stack, from devices to data center.

So, our strength and differentiation is based on our ability to take transistors and the assets that we’ve purchased — such as Wind River from an Operating System perspective, or a hypervisor — and couple those assets with the security-based IP we’ve acquired from McAfee as well as that we’ve acquired from our own research. We’ve created this offering that leverages the silicon technology all the way up the stack.

I think our strength is our strength. Period, full stop. We will continue to build assets and IP that differentiates us from the competition.

I don’t approach a customer that’s approaching other architectures — there are many other architectures. I go into the discussion first and foremost trying to understand what’s the problem the customer has, what’s the business and engineering issue we’re trying to solve, and then we have a discussion about what our strengths are. Our strengths are our strengths: I think they are formidable and we will continue to invest in them. But I’m not going to disparage the other guys.

VRW:You’ve mentioned before that the Internet of Things is happening first in Asia. Why is that?

RD: I think that Asia is an “IP incubation melting pot” of capability, intellect, and manufacturing that is unmatched in other places around the world.  There were 1000 people [at the Intel IoT event] today. This set of people create things. They create solutions: there were ISVs, SIs, hardware manufacturers… this melting pot of talent is what percolates and generates wonderful things.

That’s not to say that there is not innovation and invention in other parts of the world. But things happen and come to life first here. I think there is a desire for risk taking here. People are willing to take bets, and to run fast and run hard. It’s an exciting place to be because there is so much capability here.

VRW: For IoT to succeed — or any platform really — there needs to be open standards. The problem is, there are competing open standards (for example with wireless charging). In large IoT environments a certain degree of hardware and software agnosticism is required — which is the case for using open standards. What’s Intel doing to ensure that competing open standards do not hamper the development of IoT or provide an annoyance to end users?

RD: Our position is that we realize that we cannot do this on our own. We participate in industry consortia with other companies — the biggest companies in the world — so that the standards we are involved with and helping to define we aren’t doing alone. We have, for example, the Industrial Internet Consortium which has members that are the “who’s who”.

Our focus will be to continue to participate in consortia that has the best, brightest and biggest companies in the world so that the standards we are involved with become ubiquitous. So that we are able to deliver solutions that are interoperable, that are multi-vendor oriented. The only way we can describe how we’re doing that is name the consortia we’re involved in and those peers that sit on the consortia with us.

Open standards are always open, there just may be some differences. At the end of the day, it’s likely that one may win. Which one will win? I think the one that will win will be the one that has the most market momentum and mass behind it based on who’s participating — but that’s Rick’s opinion, not Intel speaking.

VRW: Thanks for your time.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The post Intel’s Richard Dwyer Talks the Intel Embedded Advantage in the Internet of Things appeared first on VR World.

ARM (NASDAQ:ARMH) today announced its new mbed IoT device platform which consists of three parts, primarily focused around software and software enablement. The goal of this platform is to take away from the complexities of building an IoT solution using an ARM Cortex-M processor.

ARM wants to help the IoT growth by allowing people building IoT devices to focus on unique features and differentiation rather than spend most of their time on how their silicon will work with an OS and how it will interact with other silicon.

The first, and biggest part of this new mbed IoT device platform is the inclusion of a free mbed OS for ARM Cortex-M processors. The OS already has built-in security, communication and device management features in order to enable quality and efficient IoT devices. The mbed OS already has built-in support for countless communications standards including 2G, 3G, CDMA and LTE as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Smart, Thread, 802.15.4/6LoWPAN as well as HTTP, TLS/DTLS, CoAP, MQTT and Lightweight M2M. It will be available to key mbed partners this quarter and in devices in 2015.

This operating system should theoretically be more lightweight than some other IoT embedded operating systems and mbed should help unify the countless ARM Cortex-M products under a single OS. Currently, ARM has six different Cortex-M class processors in their product line, which means that with the mbed OS they can effectively and easily scale in almost any type of embedded IoT device imaginable. This announcement follows the company’s recent announcement of their most powerful Cortex-M processor, the Cortex-M7.

Another reason why this mbed IoT platform is so important is because ARM’s licensees are churning out Cortex-M processors faster than anyone could have imagined. Since 2005 alone over 8 billion Cortex-M-based chips have shipped. Out of that 8.6 billion, 4.6 billion of those took place in the past 18 months alone. This means that something like this was absolutely necessary from ARM’s perspective to make their platform to continue to be the platform of choice of IoT as they have Intel and Imagination breathing down their backs.

The second part of the mbed IoT platform is the mbed device server which is a licensable software product that ARM is offering to customers to help connect and manage devices. ARM claims that this will help provide a bridge between different protocols and APIs used for IoT used by developers. It effectively serves as a receiving end software platform for IoT devices for cloud services and the like. It also is designed to reduce the complexity of device and application management by eliminating the need for duplicate infrastructure for clients and servers.

Last but not least is the mbed.org website which will serve as a community to unify the more than 70,000 developers around the mbed platform. The website will serve as a repository for software components, a comprehensive database of hardware dev kits, reference apps and documentation. The community is already quite large and will enable ARM’s community to latch on and grow with it, creating an even bigger and more powerful community as a whole.

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There is a hardware contest being run by Hackaday that offers hardware hackers and makers to create something that is both open and connected. This device must be something that can enable others to use it for good and kind of create a cascade effect. A good example would be something like the Raspberry Pi, which has enabled tons of interesting usage applications and spurred tons of people to rethink how we use hardware. The awesome part about the Hackaday prize is that they are offering the winners of the contest to either take a trip out to space on the carrier of their choosing or $196,418 in cash, whichever they find more interesting. Obviously some people are going to be more interested in the cash if they’re committing time and resources to this project. But, there’s a good chance that space travel will not come in under $200,000 and who knows when you’ll have another opportunity to go to space. The contest itself is already running, but they are taking submissions up until August 4th, at which point they will no longer be taking any new entrants. You can check out the current entrants’ ideas over at Hackaday.io and see what you might come up against, or even what kinds of ideas this contest has brought forward. The best part about this whole Hackaday contest is that no matter what happens, there’s a very good chance that we’ll get an awesome product out of it that may once again change the way that we look at or use hardware. Just don’t forget that the entry deadline is August 4th if you’re interested in entering. The awards themselves for the best projects will be judged not only by their overall openness, but also on the actual physical hardware built and how it connects to the outside world (including the internet). This is another way of trying to spur the way that we use connected devices and how we connect our things to the Internet of Things. The judges that will be picking the award winners are also a virtual who’s who of the hardware hacking world’s most notable figures which includes; Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, Ronin, Jack Ganssle, The Ganssle Group, Joe Grand, Grand Idea Studio, Sprite_TM, Spritesmods.com, Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Adafruit, Dave Jones, eevblog.com, Elecia White, Logical Elegance, Ian Lesnet, Dangerous Prototypes. We wish all of the current (and hopefully future) entrants on their projects and we can’t wait to see what’ll come of it.

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Oracle used the Imagination Summit 2014 in Santa Clara, California to announce their affiliation with Imagination Technologies of the UK. The collaboration is aimed at enhancing Java for embedded applications, including those used for the Internet of Things (IoT) and to optimize Java for the MIPS CPU architecture.

Oracle shared their vision of the Internet of Things at the Imagination Summit 2014

The MIPS32 and MIPS64 systems will gain support through Oracle’s Java Development Kit (JDK) for developing, debugging, and monitoring Java applications. Developers can use Java in various applications including routers, wireless access points, residential gateways, networking equipment, and mobile devices. Krishna Yarlagadda, President of Imagination in North America, indicated that his company is extremely committed to growing the MIPS ecosystem.

Henrik Stahl, Oracle’s VP of Product Management for Java & Internet of Things, appeared on stage at the Imagination Summit 2014

Imagination’s BusBridge 2 Module features an easily configurable, high-performance, low latency MIPS core interface. It is designed for semiconductor manufacturing companies, ASIC developers, and system OEMs who want to quickly integrate a MIPS core into an AHB-based system. AHB is a bus protocol introduced in Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture version 2 from ARM.

Imagination’s BusBridge 3 family of synthesizable functional blocks help SoC designers integrate MIPS32 CPU’s into the most popular high performance chip bus hierarchies. The OCP2AXI bridge works to connect the MIPS32 OCP{Open Core Protocol) interface to an AXI system bus while the OCP Splitter, a small, synthesizable function block has an OCP input that expands to two OCP outputs. Downloads and User Guides are available on line. Imagination also provides a MIPS Developer Forum.

Additionally a joint effort between Oracle and Imagination will be aimed at improving Java on systems involving Imagination’s PowerVR graphics, a product for multimedia processing, including 2D and 3D graphics. The PowerVR architecture is based on Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), in contrast to Immediate Mode Rendering (IMR) used by most graphics engines in the PC and games console worlds.

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Woot.com, an online discount website owned by Amazon just released its latest ‘deal of the day’. And what a deal it is, slashing the price of an Galaxy Gear Smartwatch by 46%, from $349.99 to mere $159.99. Is it enough to kick the sale volume up?

Woot! now offers Galaxy Gear smartwatch for $159.99

As you can see on the screenshot above, you cannot order more than a single unit of the watch, but opening multiple accounts isn’t exactly a problematic thing to do. If you want to, of course.

By all accounts, Galaxy Gear failed to land on the sweet spot of tens of millions of Galaxy smartphone customers, which wasn’t helped by an utterly creepy and stereotypical advertising campaign which looks like it was created by a member of tech bro gang in a Starbucks somewhere in the new San Francisco. ‘Revenge of Geeks Creepers’, that is.

Still, $159.99 is just $10 more than a regular Pebble, which doesn’t feature a camera or a colored LCD screen (no touch capabilities either) but has a larger ecosystem (apps). If you own a compatible phone (Galaxy SIII, S4, S5, Note II, Note III or a similar Android 4.x running device), the $160 price tag does not look too bad for checking the technology out. The original price of $299.00 was simply overrated for a first generation product.

Naturally, you could wait until this Friday (April 11th) and get a Galaxy Gear 2 watch without camera for $199.99, or wait until the end of the month and get a camera-equipped model for of $299.99.

You can also watch our video review of the Galaxy Gear below

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