As one wag put it at last year’s Mobile World Congress, “There sure are a load of mobile phones at this car show.” While drivers focused on the cars in Barcelona this year, the industry has been diving into the details of vehicle autonomy. And, as with so much at MWC19, says Jeremy Cowan, 5th Generation (5G) mobile communications is at the heart of it.   

THE WEEK IN 5G – The ding dong battle over the acceptability, or otherwise, of Huawei’s involvement in national 5G infrastructure projects is intensifying, says Jeremy Cowan.

Your focus naturally shifts according to which stage of your journey you’re at, writes Pilgrim Beart the chief executive of DevicePilot, so ensuring you’re always focused on the right things is the key to becoming established on a successful growth trajectory.

The world’s population is 7.7bn people and that’s the total addressable market for providing mobile or fixed connections to human customers. It’s a big market and it focuses on relatively high value services with at least reasonable margins per month. That margin availability underpins the ability to sell to, configure and bring customers on-board in processes that involve only partial [...]

At the dawn of the Internet of Things, it was routinely projected that IoT would be a market of billions of devices. In fact, most predicted there would be tens of billions of connections live by the dawn of next decade. Back in 2011, Ericsson’s then-CEO Hans Vestberg estimated that there would be 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

The promise of automation prototypes has rarely been fulfilled. Great conceptual product rarely makes it a commercially viable automation solution, says automation consultant, Steve Derby.

The first person I ran into at last week’s IoT Solutions World Congress 2018 in Barcelona was an old friend of IoT Now’s who shall remain nameless. He looked exhausted. I had arrived a few hours after him on the first day.

Jason Chandralal, general manager – product engineering services at Happiest Minds, says that IoT could be one of the biggest testing opportunities ever, but it needs to evolve and be automated to meet the unprecedented demands on it.

We talk a lot about how connected cars and autonomous vehicles are going to shape smart cities, but that’s looking through the wrong end of the binoculars, writes Annie Turner. Cities are going to have a profound impact on the automotive industry in future.

It’s been quite a week for the tech sector. Some vendors are betting the farm to catch up or just to find a niche in the Internet of Things. Others are smirking as they see a return on earlier IoT investments. Jeremy Cowan reports from a volatile marketplace.