In the United States, Strategy Analytics found that 34% of all smart TV owners are connecting at least once a week, and by far the most popular application is Netflix. Another 33% connect to the Internet through the TV less than once a week, 12% no longer connect and 22% never established Internet-connectivity.

In Europe 48% of smart TV owners are not using the connected capabilities of their TV at all. About 33% had never set up the device in the first place, and the remainder set it up initially but stopped using it, according to Strategy Analytics. Less than 10% of all European smart TV owners are using the connected capabilities regularly (at least weekly), and 43% connect to the Web on the TV less than once a week.

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Source: homemediamagazine.com

Mahindra Satyam is a leader in consulting, product engineering, design, evaluation and implementation services for the Smart Grid sector. Mahindra Satyam and Symantec plan to combine expertise and capabilities to deliver cyber security and compliance solutions. This combined approach will leverage Symantec’s Smart Grid solutions for control center security, data control and management, as well as system and device security while utilizing Mahindra Satyam’s extensive experience in deploying and managing Smart Grid solutions.

Numerous trials have led to only a few cases of industry deployments and to anemic rates of consumer adoption. According to Pike Research, that is starting to change, and over the remainder of the decade momentum will build in this nascent market. In its new report, Pike Research predicts that the global annual shipments of standalone HEM systems will grow from a quarter million in 2011 to nearly 4.7 million in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.3%.

Combined revenue for all HEM segments will grow from a base of $93 million in 2011 to more than $2 billion in 2020, the cleantech market intelligence firm forecasts.

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Source: telecomengine.com

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Source: EE Times

This Jam Session will be organised by Cosm/Pachube.

Register here

The framework for this session:

WE BELIEVE: A post-modern, healthy energy infrastructure will not be built around a few centralized power sources, but instead as a completely decentralized system spread across the entire urban landscape.

WE BELIEVE: People will no longer be disconnected, ignorant consumers, but become directly involved as energy producers, independent and far more aware and knowledgeable about where their energy comes from and where it goes.

WE BELIEVE: They will be independent and empowered. They will be able to share production with their neighbors directly, greatly increasing the efficiency and reliability of the system as a whole.

And on the 7th day, there was rest. yada yada

In this vision of a decentralized power system, HOW WILL PEOPLE SHARE ENERGY THEY PRODUCE WITH THEIR NEIGHBORS? What will be the mechanism?

We aim to incorporate work generated during the Eindhoven Science Hack Day and will present the outcome during the International IoT Event.

The event will run for 2 days (June 4-5). Attendance is limited and we want to gather a group of committed, invested participants for a productive and interesting session. It will be held at the Eindhoven High Tech Campus.

Register here

Program (still a draft):

Monday June 4th – Day 1

9.30      Doors open
10.00    The energy challenge – Ed
10.15    Key speaker #1 (+ 5 min idea posting)
10.45    Key speaker #2 (+ 5 min idea posting)
11.15    Key speaker #3 (+ 5 min idea posting)
11.45    Breaking down (technical, user, network)
12.15    Wrap up per group – main findings
12.30    Lunch
13.00    Ideas (lots of them, individual or teams)
13.30    Rumble (all ideas out in the open – people team up around the ones they love)
14.30    Teams make a case (product, plan, market)
16.00     First Day Findings
16.30     Drinks

Tuesday June 5th – Day 2

9.30      Doors open
10.00    Instructions (deliver presentation for IOTEvent)
10.15    A fresh look at yesterday’s work
10.30    Tell the story (make a draft presentation – video, storyboard, or keynote)
11.30    Stepping stones & hurdles (identify
12.00    Research & sketches
12.30    Lunch
13.00    Product, business plan& tech.
14.30    Bring things together.
15.30    Pitches, you b***s!
16.30     Drinks

One of the key lessons we’ve learned over the years – apart from the fact that few people could spell or pronounce ‘Pachube’! – is that we should be focusing on helping people connect with each other as well as their devices. We aren’t just building behind-the-scenes infrastructure. The idea of the internet of things needing a piece of equipment (a ‘patch-bay’) has become less useful than the concept of it involving shared ‘workspaces’ and ‘environments’ (‘microcosms’ and ‘macrocosms’). Cosm has an even bigger vision than Pachube: we want it to help people, teams, companies & cities build, share and make sense of their own ‘cosms’: devices, environments, communities.

Read more at the Cosm Site

As the global director of research for Accenture, Dr. Kishore Swaminathan defines Accenture’s Technology Vision and helps set Accenture’s technology and research agenda. He also directly heads Accenture’s Systems Integration research located in Chicago (US), Silicon Valley, California (US), Sophia Antipolis (France) and Bangalore (India).

Born and raised in the 2,500-year old city of Madurai in southern India, Swaminathan took an interest in science while studying, ironically, history. “I realized that the ideas of Archimedes and Pythagoras endure but not the empire of Alexander,” he recalls.

“It made me want to focus on science to understand the world in a deep way, taking nothing for granted, but questioning everything.”

At 18, he enrolled in the elite Indian Institute of Technology at Madras, where he received his Bachelor of Technology in aeronautical engineering, and then went on to earn his master’s and Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Even my doctoral dissertation was concerned with science,” Swaminathan says. “I was interested in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, so I focused on how computers might be able to process scientific literature and discover scientific trends.”

Although he originally intended to become a teacher, he accepted a position at Accenture’s Center for Strategic Technology Research in Chicago in 1990 since “it was a new lab that was just getting started and I thought I’d be able to help define and shape the lab.”

Over the years, Swaminathan has worked on more than a dozen research projects and has as many patents to his credit. His interests include document understanding, corporate knowledge management, computer-supported collaboration, sensor networks, data and process analytics, system architecture and software development. One of his projects in corporate knowledge management received the Computerworld Smithsonian award for the best application of IT in 2000.

In 2001, Swaminathan took a one-year leave of absence from Accenture to launch Artsonia, an online children’s art museum that now displays over a million pieces of art from children in more than 100 countries. “I always felt that schools focus so much on teaching, but not enough on fostering creative self-expression,” he says. “For me, Artsonia was a labor of love—to give children a global audience for something they did on their own.”

Creativity and innovation will be recurring themes in Swaminathan’s role as the chief scientist of Accenture. “For any company, innovation comes from a systemic mind-set that embraces and nurtures creative ideas,” he notes. “Creativity does not necessarily result in innovation, but there’s no innovation without creativity.”

As a result, Swaminathan wants to identify creative people from all levels of the company and set up mentorship programs to nurture and develop their ideas, in addition to several other ambitious plans. “Last year, I took on the responsibility to develop—from scratch—a brand-new research capability in software engineering and systems integration in Accenture. In less than three years, I want to create a research group of big thinkers who are not afraid of redefining the field. We are going to completely rethink how large-scale business systems will be architected, designed, built, managed, operated and so on. This is strategically important for Accenture, our clients and society at large given the importance of computers in our daily lives.”

The signing follows a successful preparation period, and marks the start of the actual design phase of the five trial test sites. The projects will be implemented at Schiphol airport, in a few offices of ABB and Siemens, and in residential districts in Gorinchem, Heerhugowaard, and Goes. Intelligent energy systems, also known as smart grids, are essential for the realization of an affordable and reliable sustainable energy supply. At the same time, the Smart Energy Collective wants to offer an important contribution to the standardization that this new field requires. As of now, the Smart Energy Collective is the largest sector-transcending initiative in Europe for the concrete development of smart grids and services. Current participants in the project (in alphabetical order) are: ABB, Alliander, APX Endex, BAM, DELTA, DNV KEMA, Efficient Home Energy, Eaton, Eneco, Enexis, Essent, GEN, Gemalto, Heijmans, IBM, ICT Automatisering, Imtech, KPN, Nedap, NXP Semiconductors, Philips, Priva, Siemens, Smart Dutch, Stedin and TenneT.

Based on the implementation of five demonstration projects involving different user groups—industry, offices, existing residential districts, and newly developed districts—the Smart Energy Collective wants to test the smart grids in actual practice, as well as to provide an important impulse to standardization; the need for this is high. During a survey conducted during the first phase, it was evident that there are more than 6,000 relevant standards that play a role in the new technologies, which will be introduced to the market over the coming years. Finally, the objective is to create a common market for energy services that is of a sufficiently large scale. Working groups have been established for standardization, market mechanisms, services and business cases, smart grids, privacy and security, and ICT infrastructure, in order to establish a solid foundation for the design of the five demonstration projects, as well as for future projects.

In the first phase of the project, five trial sites were selected in diverging environments as a means of acquiring an all-encompassing overview.

Industry: The Industry demonstration project will be implemented at Schiphol Airport (the GROUNDS) and is focused on small, medium, and large industries. The objective is to prevent local network congestion and to maintain a local energy balance through the use of local electricity generation with one or more combined heat and power (CHP) plants.

Offices: The Offices demonstration project will primarily investigate how the flexibility in the energy demand of these offices can be exploited by energy management systems, and the introduction of commercial generating sets with a complete portfolio of offices. The trial test site will consist of a few offices of Siemens and ABB, and potentially other partners in the collective.

All Electric Residential District: An entirely electric district provides a unique electricity market profile because the entire energy demand is electric, and local generation is effected through means of solar panels. The charging of electric vehicles and space heating, through electric heat pumps, requires flexibility to reduce the peak load. Storage of electricity, potentially supplemented by local generation using biogas-fired CHP plants, supports this flexibility and the network required for this demonstration project. The trial test site will be implemented in Gorinchem.

Gas and Electricity Network District: This trial test site—which will be implemented in Heerhugowaard—is focused on the potential of the existing residential buildings, where gas and electricity applications are brought into competition with each other. In addition, the project will investigate how to get the best out of these two worlds. This provides many opportunities for cost-efficient sustainable energy solutions with a high market potential.

District Heating Area: This demonstration project—in Goes—distinguishes itself from other demonstration projects, due to the fully integrated heat and electricity solution. Many possibilities will be investigated, including opportunities for introducing comfort-based services. The desired flexibility will be realized, as well as the smart electricity and heating market optimized on the basis of intelligent underground thermal energy storage systems.

About the Smart Energy Collective
The Smart Energy Collective is a sector-transcending cooperation involving a wide range of companies, on the basis of an open invitation, who share views on our future energy supply. This occurs in coordination with end-users and other involved parties. Smart energy and smart grid enable consumers to better control their own energy management. By improving the ease of use of the energy system and increasing its accessibility, cost savings can be realized. Furthermore, this will result in transforming our energy supply into a sustainable supply, and accelerate the commercial product innovation that is essential for this. The large-scale Smart Energy demonstration projects are required to implement and test intelligent energy concepts and networks in actual practice. To date, twenty six parties are currently participating in the Smart Energy Collective. For more information, please visit www.smartenergycollective.com.

The main purpose of this event was to discuss the ongoing evolution of the Weightless M2M communications standard for white space radios. The event was split into two days featuring a variety of sub-group plenary discussions and tutorials.

“We’re now seeing the future unfolding in front of us,” commented William Webb, CEO of Weightless. “Weightless is the ideal standard for M2M communications, making use of the newly available white space spectrum, and it’s wonderful to see the movers and shakers of the wireless industry meeting to establish a standard for the common good, as well as for the networking necessary to put together the complex value-chains in this space.

“While regulatory, security, testing and MAC/PHY subgroups might a little dry to your everyday consumer, remember that the endpoint is a world where everything, from bins to parking spaces, lights to shopping trolleys, are connected into an intelligent municipal whole. This technology will be the engine of the smart city, the smart grid, future healthcare systems and much more.

“We’re comfortable on schedule at this stage to deliver a finished standard early in 2013. Our members will soon be testing various aspects of Weightless in real-world deployments on the Cambridge network.”

White space is the unused and underused parts of the wireless spectrum. For example, around the world many TV channels are left vacant in most locations. White space technology opens up these channels and will also allow underused frequencies within other UHF licensed and unlicensed bands to be used efficiently for wireless communication.

The Weightless group will shortly issue a new version of the Weightless specification based on discussions between its members.

From July 1, the retail cost of data roaming will, for the first time, be regulated in Europe. Most smartphone users today turn data roaming off when they travel because of the high costs and unpredictability of roaming charges. But over the next two years, the cost of sending an email while roaming abroad will fall from, on average, Eur0.07 when the price caps come into effect in July, to Eur0.02 in 2014. The cost of five minutes on Facebook will fall from Eur0.35 to Eur0.10 while a five minute video on Youtube will fall in price from Eur3.50 to Eur1 (the price caps are “per megabyte and these figures are Informa Telecoms & Media calculations).

In addition to the new price caps for data services, voice and SMS, the European Parliament has approved new rules that will allow new players such as mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to enter the roaming market. However, Informa Telecoms & Media is sceptical that this will result in a significant increase in competition. The most likely new entrants, Informa believes, could be Apple and Google.

“From a consumer perspective the price cuts are great news, particularly when it comes to data services which will see some sharp price declines over the next two years”, commented Mark Newman, Chief Research Officer at Informa Telecoms & Media. “But it is less clear whether we’ll see many new companies entering the market to provide roaming services,” he added. “Roaming is an extremely complex business and there will need to be new investment in mobile networks to allow new players to provide roaming services. The cost of these network upgrades and the mechanisms by which these new players are allowed into the market have yet to be agreed”.

However, Informa Telecoms & Media believes that smartphone vendors and platform developers such as Apple and Google may be tempted into the market once new rules come into effect in July 2014 that allow consumers to buy their national and roaming services from different providers- while keeping the same number.

Most smartphone users turn their phones off while travelling abroad because they are scared of the huge bills that they could run up while they are roaming. Smartphone vendors are constantly looking to develop new services, features and functionality that allow them to keep up their prices and to differentiate themselves from their competitors. “Offering their users a data plan – via an app store – that allows them to use their favourite services while abroad at a much lower price than that offered by their home network would clearly be an attractive proposition”.

The new wholesale and retail price caps will result in a continued decline in operator revenues from roaming services within the European Union. However, the European (retail) roaming market as a whole will grow over the next five years. Outside of Europe there is little pressure on operators to reduce roaming prices and the growth in revenues from Europeans travelling to destinations outside of Europe will more than compensate for the decline in intra- European revenues. Furthermore, Europe is slowly recovering from a financial downturn which saw a massive dip in travel and the usage of roaming services in the period 2009-2010.

New research from Informa Telecoms & Media forecasts that the European roaming market (retail revenues from Europeans travelling both within and outside Europe) will rise from $10.1 bn in 2012 to $12.5 bn in 2016. Globally, the roaming market is expected to grow by 43% between 2012 and 2016, delivering revenues of almost US$60bn.