Connected Devices Weekly Update/Connected Devices Weekly Update/2016-09-01

<< Connected Devices Weekly Updates Home

Program		Status	Notes
Project Vaani	Validation (Lindsay/Sandip)	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Cue	Validation Stage (Julie/Preeti)	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Smart Display	Josh	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Haiku	Maria/Liz	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Sensor Web	Cindy/Wesley	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Smart Kitchen	Tamara/Nicole	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Magnet	Maria/Francisco	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Research Team	Lindsay	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Participation Update	Michael/Brian	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Market Developments Update	Irina		Lowe's, a US home improvement retailer, integrated Amazon's Alexa with its series of smart home devices, called Iris. The first devices are thermostats, fans and light switches, with other Iris devices coming on board at a later time. Lowe’s also announced it is selling Iris products on Amazon for the first time. Sonos is also joining Alexa's ecosystem. Sonos says it will add Alexa support to all existing speakers via a free software update sometime in 2017, with a privte beta coming in 2016. Deloitte released IoT adoption figures for the UK that show adoption of smart home gadgets flatlining in 2016 compared to 2015. The adoption of monitoring systems and thermostats is flat at 3% of the market, as well as that of smart lightning and appliances, at 2% of the UK market. Most popular IoT devices are smart TVs with 28% adoption, followed by wireless speakers (10%), fitness bands (9%) and smart watches (4%). Xiaomi is entering the smart home market with a value proposition of low cost and speed. Su Jun, the head of the company's appliances team: "Many of our products can be made in the factory, loaded onto trucks, shipped to warehouses, and delivered to customers all in one day." Jin Di, research manager with the Boston-based consulting firm IDC: "The low-price strategy may have gained it lots of fans early on. But it's not a long-term development strategy." The Economist wrote a feature on the cloud computing market. Amazon has the largest share, with over 30% of cloud services sales in Q2. It has ten times as much computing capacity as the next 14 cloud providers combined, according to Gartner. AWS’s sales in the past quarter were about three times the size of its closest competitor, Microsoft’s Azure. This business is the reason why its parent company was able to report its third consecutive record quarterly profit in July, after years of patchy results. IBM (7% market share) and Google (5%) follow Amazon and Microsoft.
Other Announcements / Questions	--	--