Microsoft Unveils New-Gen Modern PCs, Connected Devices and IoT Solutions at Computex 2019

Microsoft today discussed how new modern Windows PCs, connected devices and IoT services and programs at Computex 2019.

"We continue to work closely with our partners to deliver intelligent edge solutions that enhance work and life experiences. The breadth of new PCs, IoT devices and IoT solutions on display at Computex, along with future ecosystem innovations will drive growth and business transformation for partners and customers," said Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft

Partners are Delivering Modern PC Experiences

Partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI have recently announced new modern PCs that will delight both creators and gamers. Some of the highlights include:

	Acer’s ConceptD 500 is equipped with up to 9th Generation Intel Core processors and up to NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 GPUs to make workloads and multi-media creation smoother and faster on complex projects. Its multiple CPU cores achieve high single-core speed while staying cool with low heat output and low power consumption. With up to NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 GPUs, the desktop supports four 5K displays (5120×2880 @ 60Hz) with HDR colour, making visual effects, motion graphics and animation rendering a breeze.
	The Asus ZenBook Pro Duo (UX581) is an ultraportable laptop that includes a 4K OLED UHD ASUS ScreenPad Plus (3840 x 2160), a full-width secondary touchscreen (3840 x 1100) that expands and enhances the interactive capabilities of the original ASUS ScreenPad. The display is a frameless four-sided ASUS NanoEdge design, with ultra slim bezels for immersive visuals.
	The new Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 packs more performance in a thinner design and larger display. Dell’s first laptop with Intel’s Ice Lake-U 10nm 10th gen processors and features adaptive performance based on the latest Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology, which proactively changes the power of the CPU according to the performance of the workload. It comes with a redesigned thermal system to cool the higher performing processor, while creating an overall 8% thinner 2-in-1 than the previous generation.
	HP OMEN X 2S is the world’s first dual-screen gaming laptop, allowing player to chat, browse for their perfect songs to accompany their gaming sessions, watch Twitch or YouTube, or even serve as a hub for OMEN Command Center software through an easy-to-use 6-inch 1080p touchscreen above the keyboard – freeing them from the hassles of alt-tabbing. The laptop also features a real-time screen mirroring feature that enhances the gaming experience, by cutting and magnifying parts of the main screen – such as copying the map portion of a racing game – to a second screen, ensuring centered vision and more vertical head movement.
	The new Lenovo ThinkPad T495 offers feature upgrades without compromise, and provides a high level of hardware security and manageability. It features a longer battery life, and increased performance by up to 18 percent (compared to benchmarks of prior generations). Lenovo is also delivering greater peace of mind with just a slide of the ThinkShutter, an all-in-one integrated camera security cover that physically protects ThinkPad users from malicious webcam snoopers.
	Featuring the latest RTX graphics and 9th Generation Intel Core i9 processor and Wi-Fi 6, the new MSI GE65 Raider can easily handle demanding AAA game titles. Its ultra-fast 240Hz IPS-level thin bezel display ensures sharp and clear images in a compact form factor, and the new two-toned mesh design at the underside of the unit, inspired by a dragon theme, provides better ventilation and prevents hot air from recirculating.

These new modern PCs from ecosystem partners require a modern operating system that enables foundational experiences customers already expect from their devices, including seamless updates, security that protects users from malicious attacks, anywhere connectivity with 5G, LTE and Wi-Fi that is consistent and reliable over time. Beyond that, the modern OS must deliver innovative new human centric experiences including cloud connectivity that enables seamless access to data and compute power, rich AI powered applications and experiences, multi-sense capabilities - people can interact using touch, pen, voice, mouse and keyboard - and  the right sensor support and posture awareness to enable a breadth of new form factors and applications.

“Microsoft is investing to enable modern OS experiences that take advantage of silicon advancements, powerful PCs, the cloud and the power of AI. Some of these innovations, including Asian Inking platform, cognitive recognition services that help with photo tagging, as well as the new Your Phone capabilities that lets users mirror their Android phone screen on their PC, are new innovations users can expect in the coming months,” said Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft.

Powering Intelligent Edge and Internet of Things (IoT)

At Computex, Microsoft also shared new services and programs that hardware manufacturers can leverage to get their devices connected and included in IoT solutions:

• IoT Plug and Play is a new open modelling language to connect IoT devices to the cloud seamlessly, helping device partners to deploy IoT solutions at scale. This provides partners a straightforward way to model the capabilities and data coming from their IoT devices and will provide customers with a large portfolio of partner-certified devices that can easily be made to work with any IoT solution, often without writing any new code.

• Microsoft Azure IoT Device Agent V2 for Windows 10 IoTlets operators configure, monitor and manage their devices remotely from their Azure dashboard. It provides an open-source, ready to build package that creates and manages the Azure IoT Hub identities on the device, manages the cloud connection and its renewal, provides a plug-in model for platform components, which allows easy onboarding to various Azure services, including discovery, initialization, error reporting and state aggregation. It also comes with a set of ready-to-ship plug-ins for commonly used platform components and leverages Azure IoT Module twin so a separate UWP app is not required to connect to Azure IoT Hub.

• Azure IoT Centralis a fully managed global IoT SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution that makes it easy to connect, monitor, and manage IoT assets at scale. New custom dashboard features allow partners to bring their own brand and user experience to their IoT solution, and benefit from the built-in security, reliability, device connectivity and role-based user account management provided by IoT Central.

Partners such as Techsun and Advantech are implementing IoT solutions built on Microsoft’s comprehensive, trusted and easy-to-use edge to cloud platforms to embrace business model transformation and accelerate time to value for customers.

“At Microsoft our goal is to simplify IoT – from the cloud down to the smallest microcontroller (MCU) based devices, and we do this by meeting our partners and customers where they are, with the right intelligent cloud services, software and dev tools, to get devices connected, and manage their solutions at scale,” Nick Parker, CVP, Consumer and Device Sales, Microsoft

Consumer IoT (Ambient Commerce) to Attract More Investments Among All IoT Technologies in Next 3 years

Internet of Things (IoT) is widely recognized by enterprises as one of the most important emerging technologies. Increased levels of investment can be expected across all IoT technology areas in the next phase. However, consumer IoT (Ambient Commerce) will attract more investments among all IoT technologies over the next three years, according to leading data and analytics company GlobalData.

Classified as one of the many use cases for the internet of things (IoT), Ambient commerce helps retailers better understand their customers' shopping habits and needs.

In a recent survey by the company, ‘Global Emerging Technology Trends Survey 2018: Focus on the Internet of Things’, IoT was identified as an important emerging technology by almost three-quarters (74%) of respondents. The only technologies to perform better were cybersecurity and cloud computing. IoT performed similarly to artificial intelligence (AI), another much-hyped technology.

Businesses are confident about their ability to make IoT a core competency, with more than three-quarters of GlobalData’s survey respondents expecting to reach that stage within two years. Certain industries are leading the way, in particular the technology, media and telecoms sector.

According to GlobalData’s Disruptor Tech Database, IoT can be divided into seven distinct technology areas – ambient commerce, automated home, connected cars, industrial IoT, medical IoT, smart cities and wearable technologies.

Kathryn Weldon, Technology Analyst at GlobalData says: “Ambient commerce and industrial IoT are top of mind for executives, although increased levels of investment can be expected across all IoT technology areas over the next three years (largely due to differing priorities across industries e.g. healthcare companies focusing on medical IoT).



“Ambient commerce is offering goods and services to customers before they order them, based on an analysis of past spending patterns and information derived from sensors, taking advantage of online sites and mobile handsets, among others. Ambient commerce’s growth in future is backed by the rapidly evolving interconnected digital lives.”

While there are many technology challenges associated with implementing IoT projects, the most difficult to address issues relate to the organization’s existing culture, processes and applications. The smartest organizations will be those that take on the challenge of integration with existing processes and systems, rather than simply viewing IoT as something to tack on to an existing offer.

Weldon continues: “The development and implementation of IoT solutions is a complex, multi-disciplinary effort. Smart companies are choosing to partner with technology providers, and participate in industry consortia rather than trying to develop the full range of skills themselves. We would advise all enterprises to engage with partners for IoT technologies, and establish partnerships across their customer and supplier base.

“Across every sector, leading companies are actively deploying IoT solutions but the majority of organizations are still in the ‘planning’ or ‘pilot’ stages. Don’t be left behind; the effective deployment of IoT will differentiate in the market in the short-term, and will be essential over the long-term.”

The Internet of Things (IoT) Will Now Save the World's Water

On the occasion of World Water Day yesterday, tech giant IBM entered into a pact with Ireland's Dublin City University for a collaborative R&D pilot to leverage the in trend internet of things (IoT) technology to help protect water, which is currently the most precious natural resource on planet Earth.

The collaboration will see IBM joining the University's Water Institute Industry Advisory Council and bringing together its cognitive IoT-based environmental solutions with Dublin City University's much-inspired Water Institute expertise and leadership in environmental sensing via the university’s National Centre for Sensor Research.

According to details released so far about the collaboration, the pact signed between the two parties aims to focus on the new DCU sensor technologies, which could possibly hold the potential of monitoring several key water quality aspects, that too at costs significantly lower than what current commercial technologies are able to achieve.

These newly developed DCU sensor technologies when combined with the tech giant's environmental IoT platform, may eventually result in impacting the water management movement on a big scale all around the world.

The deployment of IBM’s machine learning and cognitive IoT technologies with DCU sensors will work towards protecting and conserving the natural resources of planet Earth and address several environmental management issues such as quality of water for both marine and freshwater environments.

The tech giant's cognitive IoT technologies are capable of providing deep learning capabilities for sensor platforms. This results in ensuring reliable and quality data capture even under tough environmental conditions. Further, the advanced analytics embedded in IoT-based sensor platforms, or the sensors themselves, can also extend a helping hand in early detection of environmental changes or subtle trends that might prove to be important to public health and safety or even remediation efforts.

Scientists at IBM Research are currently working on developing integrated IoT solutions that are capable of supporting a myriad of sensors so that they can better understand ecosystem challenges and then manage them. For instance, these ecosystem challenges might include changes in water quality due to climate-realted, natural or artificial effects. These sensors being developed by IBM can help in measuring several biological, physical and chemical parameters that can help in better understanding of the changes in the environment.

IBM and DCU's Water Institute have decided to selectively pilot these technologies in Ireland and the United States. The first sensors are being deployed in New York's Lake George in conjunction with the ongoing Jefferson Project.

According to Harry Kolar, engineer, IBM Research, they are optimistic that in the period of over next few years, the internet of things technologies will play an important role in protecting the environment and natural resources of the planet.

Commenting on the collaboration, he added, “At IBM Research, we are excited to leverage IBM’s expertise in cognitive and IoT environmental monitoring and management with the DCU Water Institute to help advance the future of water management."

Gartner's Top 10 Internet Of Things Technologies For 2017 & 2018

We're all very interested to know what the future holds for us, unfortunately, in life we seldom get that luxury. But, Garnter with it's recent analysis has taken upon itself to provide all the IoT enthusiasts a sneak-peak into what the years 2017 and 2018 holds for the Internet of Things.

IoT has been lauded by various industry experts over the years for pushing beyond the ages-old business models and paving the way for new and improved business model going beyond the basic analytics, intelligence and data boundaries that previously halted their progress.

Here's what IoT has in store for us in the near future!

1. IoT Analytics - In order to extract the full potential of the data captured, and knowledge extracted, IoT analytics would be in the need to completely revamp itself which includes new algorithms, approaches to machine learning, architectures and data structures.




2. Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks – According to Gartner's prediction, Low-power, short-range networks will have a substantial effect on wireless IoT connectivity by the year 2025. They will have much more domination than wide-area IoT networks.




3. Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks- Gartner reveals that traditional cellular networks are not capable of delivering a proper combination of operational cost and technical features for IoT applications requiring a wide-area coverage coupled with high connection density, relatively low bandwidth, low hardware and operating cost, and a good battery life.



4. IoT Standards and Ecosystems – Though they cannot be out and out classified as technologies, most of these do end up as application programming interfaces (APIs). The future will see standards and their associated APIs donning a central role as IoT devices will require to interoperate and communicate, and many IoT business models will depend upon sharing data between multiple organizations and devices.




5. IoT Security - According to Gartner, the future will see IoT Security accelerating at an unprecedented rate, all thanks to the the hardware and software advances that will take place. The only thing, that can prove to be a hurdle is the shortage of skills. Hence, in order to tackle this problem, enterprises should begin investing in developing this expertise in-house from today onwards.



6. IoT Platforms - Gartner believes that IoT Platforms power pack infrastructure components of an IoT system into one product. IoT Platforms provided services can be broadly classified into three main categories, namely low-level device control and operations such as firmware updates, security, device monitoring and management and communications; IoT application development, including visualization, logic, application programming, analytics and adapters in order to connect to the enterprise systems and lastly, IoT data acquisition, transformation and management.




7. IoT Processors - According to Gartner made predictions, low-end 8-bit microcontrollers will have an upper hand in IoT until the year 2019 but shipments of 32-bit microcontrollers will overtake the 8-bit devices domination by the year 2020.




8. Event Stream Processing - Some of the IoT applications have been predicted to result in generating excessively high data rates that will be needed to be analyzed in real time. The emergence of distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) is the result of the growing need of creating millions of events per second in some of the telecom and telemetry situations.




9. IoT Device Management - Gartner believes that the future will see a significant progress being made in the direction of solving the complex challenge of building technologies that are state, location and context-aware while at the very same time in line with data and knowledge taxonomies. IoT Device Management, in all probability, will end up breaking through the tough boundaries of traditional data management and result in creating data structures that will be able to flex and learn to unique inbound data requirements over a period of time.




10. IoT Operating Systems – Since the traditional Operating systems are on the complex and resource-intensive side for a majority of IoT applications, Gartner predicts that minimal and small footprint operating systems will climb the success ladder in IoT by the year 2020. (Read - Samsung To Unveil New IoT Operating System This Month)

Gartner's Top 10 Internet Of Things Technologies For 2017 & 2018

We're all very interested to know what the future holds for us, unfortunately, in life we seldom get that luxury. But, Garnter with it's recent analysis has taken upon itself to provide all the IoT enthusiasts a sneak-peak into what the years 2017 and 2018 holds for the Internet of Things.

IoT has been lauded by various industry experts over the years for pushing beyond the ages-old business models and paving the way for new and improved business model going beyond the basic analytics, intelligence and data boundaries that previously halted their progress.

Here's what IoT has in store for us in the near future!

1. IoT Analytics - In order to extract the full potential of the data captured, and knowledge extracted, IoT analytics would be in the need to completely revamp itself which includes new algorithms, approaches to machine learning, architectures and data structures.




2. Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks – According to Gartner's prediction, Low-power, short-range networks will have a substantial effect on wireless IoT connectivity by the year 2025. They will have much more domination than wide-area IoT networks.




3. Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks- Gartner reveals that traditional cellular networks are not capable of delivering a proper combination of operational cost and technical features for IoT applications requiring a wide-area coverage coupled with high connection density, relatively low bandwidth, low hardware and operating cost, and a good battery life.



4. IoT Standards and Ecosystems – Though they cannot be out and out classified as technologies, most of these do end up as application programming interfaces (APIs). The future will see standards and their associated APIs donning a central role as IoT devices will require to interoperate and communicate, and many IoT business models will depend upon sharing data between multiple organizations and devices.




5. IoT Security - According to Gartner, the future will see IoT Security accelerating at an unprecedented rate, all thanks to the the hardware and software advances that will take place. The only thing, that can prove to be a hurdle is the shortage of skills. Hence, in order to tackle this problem, enterprises should begin investing in developing this expertise in-house from today onwards.



6. IoT Platforms - Gartner believes that IoT Platforms power pack infrastructure components of an IoT system into one product. IoT Platforms provided services can be broadly classified into three main categories, namely low-level device control and operations such as firmware updates, security, device monitoring and management and communications; IoT application development, including visualization, logic, application programming, analytics and adapters in order to connect to the enterprise systems and lastly, IoT data acquisition, transformation and management.




7. IoT Processors - According to Gartner made predictions, low-end 8-bit microcontrollers will have an upper hand in IoT until the year 2019 but shipments of 32-bit microcontrollers will overtake the 8-bit devices domination by the year 2020.




8. Event Stream Processing - Some of the IoT applications have been predicted to result in generating excessively high data rates that will be needed to be analyzed in real time. The emergence of distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) is the result of the growing need of creating millions of events per second in some of the telecom and telemetry situations.




9. IoT Device Management - Gartner believes that the future will see a significant progress being made in the direction of solving the complex challenge of building technologies that are state, location and context-aware while at the very same time in line with data and knowledge taxonomies. IoT Device Management, in all probability, will end up breaking through the tough boundaries of traditional data management and result in creating data structures that will be able to flex and learn to unique inbound data requirements over a period of time.




10. IoT Operating Systems – Since the traditional Operating systems are on the complex and resource-intensive side for a majority of IoT applications, Gartner predicts that minimal and small footprint operating systems will climb the success ladder in IoT by the year 2020. (Read - Samsung To Unveil New IoT Operating System This Month)