Vodafone announced on Wednesday rollout plans for its NarrowBand Internet of Things (NB IoT) network, which will start in four European countries next year.

The dedicated IoT network will go live in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain in the first quarter of 2017.

See Also: Australia to spend millions making its cities smarter

Vodafone wants the NB IoT network live in all countries (where it offers wireless service) by 2020.

NarrowBand is a low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) technology that uses licensed spectrum to provide communications over long distance.

This type of networking is useful for enterprise IoT projects, like agriculture and factories, where normal wireless service is either unavailable or expensive.

Vodafone has been one of the largest backers on NarrowBand, an evolution of Huawei’s NB-CIoT effort. 3GPP, the largest telecommunication association, standardized the technology in June.

NarrowBand is currently competing with LoRa, another IoT network built by Semtech. A few developments in Asia have cropped up in the past using that standard, creating fragmentation in the IoT networking industry.

“The questions of battery life and deep in-building penetration have now been answered by NB-IoT,” said Vodafone’s IoT director Ivo Rook, in a statement.

“The low cost of the modules means we can expect a new wave of connected devices and soaring market demand,” he said. “Vodafone’s world-leading expertise and experience in IoT will prove invaluable in shaping this exciting market.”

The IoT market is expected to balloon in the next few years, as more enterprise and home devices launch. Vodafone is paving the way for this surge, adding dedicated networks to even more markets.

Smart city projects have plenty of on-paper advantages, but city leaders are keen to remain in the good books of residents and broken promises, lack of city funds, and failed projects don’t make a good resume.

It’s part of the reason we aren’t seeing much smart city investment outside of hubs like San Francisco, New York City, and Austin, Texas, where city planners can afford to spend a few million on projects.

See Also: Latin America smart city market to grow 19% by 2020

U.S. lawmakers want that to change and are looking to create a bill that gives city planners more smart city legroom, hopefully inspiring city leaders to embark on missions to revive their city centers.

Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene has said she and a team of like-minded individuals are working on a bill to improve pilot programs for cities, encouraging public and private investment and reducing the hardships for city leaders that fail to achieve the project goals.

“We have draft legislation as well on smart communities that we are working on in conjunction with folks in the Senate so that we have grant programs and understand pilot programs so we get best practices” said DelBene at an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event in Philadelphia on Wednesday.

The success of the Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, where the government awarded the winning city $40 million and Paul Allen’s investment firm Vulcan gave an additional $10 million, may lead to more federal funding and grants for smart city projects.

Even though Columbus, Ohio was declared the winning city, city leaders in Denver, Colorado, Portland, Orlando and San Francisco were surprised by the level of private sector interest in smart city projects and the enthusiasm from the public for new upgrades to the city.

Some of the city leaders even called for the projects to continue regardless of the result, receiving enough private sector funding to start building smart systems.

DelBene sees this as an opportunity to push smart city projects even further, by ensuring that regardless of private sector investment, the government will be there to back projects and offer advice.

Smart Handbags

KiBand

Elvie

Dubstein

Tree Wi-Fi

Porkfolio

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has reported that sales of tech products, such as drones, wearables and smart home appliances will increase 1.3 percent above last year’s industry revenues.

The popularity of smart technology and the increased awareness about the Internet of Things should end up pushing the consumer technology industry within the U.S. to $286.6 billion in revenues by the end of this year.

“We have only just scratched the surface of what IoT will become. IoT is a loose paradigm of physical objects becoming digitized, sensorized and connected,” states Shawn DuBravac, Chief Economist for the CTA. “But what generally happens, is that once these objects are connected, they fall into other categories. Connected door locks become part of the smart home. Connected sports equipment becomes part of connected fitness. It’s the everyday things that will undergo the most pronounced changes. IoT is emerging everywhere around the consumer.”

CTA projects unit shipments will reach 183 million in 2016, while revenues will reach $55 billion.

According to the report, smartphones will see their first small decline in unit sales and revenue, due to the vast improvements made to smartphones in recent years.

“The future of smartphones is dynamic. Smartphones are expected to grow by 5 percent on a unit sales basis for 2016 before dropping 2 percent year-over-year in 2017,” explains DuBravac. “This will mark the first of year-over-year smartphone unit decline in the U.S. Low, single-digit unit declines are expected through 2020, although any new breakthroughs in smartphone design or performance could reverse that trend, even if temporarily.”

This future dip is no cause for concern though, because it means that there are plenty of growth opportunities ahead as shoppers look for more devices that will help them in their daily lives.

“The smartphone will remain an important complement and component of this future,” says DuBravac.

It is devices that are geared towards health and fitness that are playing a large role in the growth of wearables, according to DuBravac.

Fitness activity trackers are on track to reach 28 million units in 2016, which is an increase of 60 percent. Smartwatches are getting more attention by vendors as their features offer more and more abilities such as heart monitoring and UV monitoring.

Wearables have become a large market within the tech industry, and they appear to have a bright future.

Wearable devices are enabling patient-generated data for a U.S. cancer study, as connected technology is proving increasingly useful for medical research.

As reported in an article by Mobile Health News, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) has teamed up with cloud-based analytics startup Medidata to research multiple myeloma. This comes as wearbles are used increasingly in medical applications.

The two New York-based organizations are launching the patient-generated health data trial of 40 patients afflicted with the blood cancer that accumulates in bone marrow. Wearable devices on the subjects will track activity and sleep, while patients will use an app to answer surveys about life quality aspects like appetite and fatigue.

“This is a first exercise and the hope is that we’d be able to take learnings from this exercise to the deployment of mobile health technologies either with this particular partner or with others,” said Medidata’s Kara Dennis, a managing director of mobile health.

“We want to make sure we can support the application of these tools with technology, so we’ve got mechanisms to gather and process and analyze all the data.” “We’re very focused on building tools for those purposes and we want to make sure this can be implemented in a way that patients can effectively use these tools and technologies and that investigative sites can also make use of these tools and technologies,” Dennis adds.

The specific nature of this type of cancer dictated how connected devices were incorporated into the study, particularly in the search for the most useful data on such aspects as quality of life.

“Because of the nature of the disease, myeloma patients are subject to bone pain and fractures,” said MSK hematologist Dr. Neha Korde, who is captaining the study.

“Pain is one of the most difficult symptoms to manage and assess,” said Korde. “We believe that activity and sleep patterns will correlate with self-reported pain levels.”

Once the four-month study is complete, MSK and Medidata hope to use insights gained for the possible development of similar patient-generated health data studies in the future. Korde said that MSK is likely to expand the research to a larger trial if the pilot study proves accurate, reliable and easy for patients to use.

Meanwhile, Dennis said that Medidata may look to partner with others for similar trials if the MSK study goes well.

“There is a broad interest from sponsors we’ve spoken with in quality of life in oncology as a way to evaluate one dimension of therapeutic impact,” said Dennis. “So a number of companies, organizations are interested in understanding, while on therapy, what is the ability of patients to move, to leave their home, to be active, to be productive, to go to work. Those kinds of things along with sleep quality, ‘are subjects waking in the middle of the night’, duration, time to sleep onset, number of night awakenings, those kind of quality of life elements are interesting to many oncology sponsors we’ve spoken with.”

China headed to self-driving

In spite of the fact that the service said chip away at the new directions are well in progress, any postponement for the business could slow down force in China's up to this time hard-charging self-ruling vehicle industry.

Specifically, the ban on parkway testing of self-driving autos on the interstates will hurt research that joins information on genuine driving propensities and movement conditions.

The choice by the Chinese government to breaking point testing takes after negative response to a deadly mishap this spring in the U.S. including a Tesla auto driving in autopilot mode. As an aftereffect of the casualty the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an examination that opens independent vehicles to unwelcome wariness.

As reported before by Mashblur, China was well in front of administrative bend with respect to self-governing vehicle testing from a worldwide point of view. The legislature had expressed that they meant to actualize controls that are institutionalized over the whole nation. It said that these tenets would prepare for self-sufficient vehicles that will show up on China's interstates in three to five years, and after that in Chinese urban areas by 2025.

The brought together administrative methodology was seen as giving China a critical preferred standpoint over nations like the U.S. which experiences an incoherent interwoven of state models and laws for self-driving autos.

What's more, an immense sum is riding on rivalry for strength in the business sector for self-governing vehicle improvement and creation. The Chinese government has flagged that a great part of the nation's modern recuperation is reliant on rotating its conventional assembling commercial ventures to imaginative divisions like self-sufficient vehicles.

China's Premier Li Keqiang as of late reported his nation is looking for new development in rising innovation like the Internet of Things (IoT) and self-driving vehicles.

Google co-founder Larry Page has been personally funding a pair of startups devoted to creating flying cars, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Page has reportedly funded one startup, named Zee.Aero, with more than $100 million since its creation in 2010, and putting money into another, named Kitty Hawk, since last year. His interest in the companies is a personal ambition, says Bloomberg, and he even retained an office at once of the company's headquarters, where he was referred to pseudonymously as GUS — the guy upstairs.

Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk have been developing designs for flying cars completely separately, says Bloomberg, with Zee.Aero conducting test flights of its prototypes at an airport about an hour's drive away from Google's Mountain View headquarters.Bloomberg reports that Zee.Aero has hired aerospace designers and engineers from organizations including NASA, Boeing, and SpaceX, and has been testing two single-seater prototype designs — one that looks like a "small conventional plane" and another with propellors dotted down its sides.

Previously known patents registered by Zee.Aero show a craft that matches this description, with a thin central fuselage and twin rows of propellors like outriggers. The patent, filed in 2012, says the aircraft is capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and is described as a "safe, quiet, easy to control, efficient and compact aircraft." Not quite a flying car, then, but certainly a vision of personal aviation.

The other startup Page has been investing in, Kitty Hawk, has reportedly been building its own craft "that resembles a giant version of a quadcopter drone," according toBloomberg's sources. The startup is smaller than Zee.Aero, and kept separate from its older rival. Some of its engineers come from AeroVelo — a firm that previously won the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize in 2013 for building a human-powered helicopter that can stay aloft for more than a minute (see the video below). And Kitty Hawk wouldn't be the first firm to design a quadcopter-inspired aircraft; similar concepts have been floated by Chinese firm Ehang and even built by lone engineers.

Don’t want your child to spend the summer watching TV, playing video games or complaining that there’s nothing to do? A summer business can be a fun way to encourage creativity and confidence. 

These business ventures aren't really about making money. In fact, if extra income is the priority for the summer, a job is the safer route. But starting a business provides an invaluable life experience for kids, plus it develops very practical skills like organization, money management, problem solving and communication. 

If your budding entrepreneur shows interest in starting a business this summer, here are a few tips to help make the experience a positive one: 

It’s important that your child is passionate about what he or she is doing. You want them to enjoy the experience and not lose interest and be back on the couch by the end of June. 

If your child doesn’t already have a specific business idea in mind, have them make a list of their favorite things to do. If they love animals, they could start a pet-walking or pet-sitting business. Maybe they want to make candles and sell them on Etsy. They could hold an acting workshop for younger kids in the neighborhood, teach music lessons or even design a mobile app. 

It’s okay to think outside the box. Zappos founder Tony Hsieh started a worm farm at the age of nine, with the goal of becoming “the number one worm farmer in the world.” Resist the urge to say things won’t work or that no one would pay for their idea. This process is a learning experience; the end result doesn’t necessarily matter. 

Have your child think about all the nuts and bolts needed to turn their idea into a reality. What kind of equipment, supplies or training do they need? If they’ll be mowing lawns, what do they need? A lawn mower, gas for the lawn mower, etc. If they’ll be baby sitting, should they take a CPR or first aid course beforehand? 

They should write down their goals for the business, including both financial goals and anything else they want to achieve. It will be fun and educational to revisit these goals in September.  

A summer business is a great way to introduce kids to basic money management skills as well as complex topics like calculating gross profits and managing overhead. Teenagers can keep track of income and business expenses. Younger kids can practice adding up price totals and counting change.  

You may need to give your child money to kick start their business. If so, have them itemize all their upfront costs, so they know exactly how much is needed. You could offer to fund a certain amount, as long as they contribute some of their own birthday money or allowance. You could even hold an investor meeting where your child pitches their idea to you and outlines their financial needs. 

Being an effective communicator and empathetic listener are essential building blocks for entrepreneurship. Help your child develop how to succinctly explain their product/service and understand their business’ value proposition. Stress the importance of customer service, and encourage your child to listen to and accommodate special requests when needed. 

Child business owners are subject to the same rules and legal requirements as adults. You can find out if any local licensing or permits are needed by checking with your local city/county clerk’s office. 

In some cases, you may actually want to create an official company structure, but only if you’re concerned that the business will take off or put your family’s assets at risk. For example, our oldest son loves designing apps. If it seems that an app will be commercially successful on iTunes, we’ll decide to roll it under our holding company. And, if we didn’t already have a holding company, we’d form an LLC (Limited Liability Company) for it. You can decide the scope of your child’s business and your family’s liability protection needs. 

If your child’s earnings are greater than $400, they’ll need to file their own tax return. Most likely, they won’t be in a position to owe any income tax, but they will need to pay self-employment tax. Help them prepare for this ahead of time -- perhaps setting aside 15 percent of the earnings for tax time. They’ll report their business income and expenses on Form 1040 Schedule C, and self-employment tax is reported on Schedule SE. And in case you’re wondering -- yes, you can still declare your child a dependent even if they file their own return.  

The most important thing to remember is that the process should be fun. Entrepreneurship is a labor of love, not just labor. It’s also about taking chances, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes and doing it all over again. Keep those messages front and center throughout the journey. 

The global healthcare market for medical wearables just passed its physical with flying colors, with a new study predicting the segment will grow a respectable 30% by 2020.

An article by Enterprise Innovation reports the results of a study by research firm Frost & Sullivan that predicts the global healthcare market for wearable devices will blossom from $5.1 billion in 2015 to $18.9 billion in 2020. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.9%.

The report also found that connected consumer health devices will post a CAGR of almost 28% while growth in clinical-grade wearables will reach nearly 33%.

As reported previously, much of this growth will be driven by the increasing number of seniors who will suffer ill health and have the money to tackle their medical issues with new technology.

“Breakthrough technological innovations in wearable electronics, sensors, alternate power sources and wireless platforms are enabling novel applications that would not have been feasible even five years ago,” said Venkat Rajan, Transformational Health Director with Frost & Sullivan. “Moving beyond basic consumer-centric applications, newer wearable devices with more robust and reliable feature sets open a wide spectrum of clinical use cases.”

Chronic disease monitoring and other clinical uses are anticipated to have a transformative effect on care provision models. Though clinical grade devices promise care that is less restricted by geography and traditional scheduling, the report says the new devices need to justify their cost by demonstrating the benefits of improved functionality and data insight.

“Clinical wearables must concurrently justify their value to payers, patients, and clinicians to gain a market foothold,” noted Rajan. “Confidence in the accuracy of collected data is paramount to the utility of information in any medical decision support.”

Despite the expanding horizons for the segment, there are still challenges looming ahead, as seen by the many medical wearables that have struggled to succeed after launching to great fanfare. The report particularly cautions about device-makers wishing to include every bell and whistle, and ending up creating products that are overly complex.

“The effort required on the user side to understand, maintain or properly operate the device would often lead to high abandonment rates after a few months,” the report said.

This month’s report on Google’s autonomous car fleet reveals two new features coming to the company’s prototype car, the ability to honk the horn and a hum similar to most non-electric cars.

The sound of a car horn might be the stuff of nightmares for frequent drivers, but Google believes it can be a powerful tool that may prevent accidents on the road. For the first few months, the car honked internally, but Google recently made the honk audible to nearby cars.

See Also: Musk to Apple: Try and keep up, ok?

“Our self-driving cars are designed to see 360 degrees and not be distracted, unlike human drivers, who are not always fully aware of their surroundings. Our self-driving software is designed to recognize when honking may help alert other drivers to our presence — for example, when a driver begins swerving into our lane or backing out of a blind driveway,” said Google in the report.

The self-driving system has two types of honk: two short honks as a friendly heads up to the other driver, and one long honk for urgent situations. Google’s testers report back to engineers on all honks, to make sure that the car is not being obnoxious on the road.

Google also wants to make sure pedestrians, cyclists, and visually impaired drivers know the car is active, and has added a ‘hum’ that is similar to most non-electric cars.

During the testing phase of the hum, Google explored a variety of sounds, including ambient art sculptures, consumer electronic products, and ocra noises. We hope when the car is available, Google adds these fake engine noises in a variety pack.

Google’s autonomous fleet, which totals 70 cars, reported one crash this month on May 3. The crash, according to the report, happened when a human driver was in control and nobody was hurt.

Autonomous car manufacturers might start to look at the United Kingdom as a viable alternative to Europe or the U.S., thanks to proposed new reforms on insurance legislation that now covering autonomous cars.

Announced in the Queen’s Speech to Parliament earlier today, the reforms allow autonomous cars to be tested and purchased in the U.K. When passed by Parliament, it will be the first legislation of its kind to cover an entire country.

See Also: General Motors flags down Lyft to start autonomous taxi trial

We don’t think this means fully autonomous cars are purchasable, but autonomous features will be allowed inside U.K. cars. This means things like Tesla’s Model S autonomous lane switching or Ford’s self-parking should be available in the next few years.

Nissan, a major automotive supplier in the U.K., plans to add autonomous features to its Qashqai cars in 2017.

Volvo and Jaguar Land Rover are testing autonomous cars in the U.K. already, in project cities like London and Milton Keynes, and will now be able to test the cars across the country. Volvo has also chosen the U.K. as its headquarters for autonomous car development.

We suspect other European-based automotive companies may look at the U.K., which is less restrictive than other European countries on autonomous cars. Take France, for example, only one automotive company is allowed to test cars in the country, the PSA Group.

Germany is another country behind the times with autonomous cars, but Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she’ll address the situation. Italy and Spain have also only had tests in the country; no meaningful legislation to legalize autonomous cars has been implemented in the countries.

It is not just autonomous cars where the U.K. is racing ahead, the country has been praisedfor its relaxed drone laws. The British government has invested millions into IoT and big data developments, in an effort to make the U.K. (and more specifically London) a tech center equivalent to Silicon Valley.

A private medical device maker, BACtrack, earned the $200,000 cash prize for the National Institute of Health Wearable Biosensor Challenge this week for its BACtrack Skyn wristband, an alcohol monitor.

This challenge was issued back in March to encourage the creation of wearables that improve the measuring of blood alcohol levels, while remaining discreet.

See also: Could wearables and social media be the future of medical trials?

Officials in law enforcement, the medical field and transportation have long needed a better way to measure these levels, as traditional portable testers that are currently used are large, costly and not capable of offering ongoing monitoring of alcohol levels for individuals. The challenge hoped to produce some better solutions to this problem.

With this in mind, the competition asked for individuals to design and create a discreet, wearable device that could rival the existing alcohol sensor technology currently available. The most commonly used devices are breathalyzers. By creating a better and more easily used device, alcohol researchers hoped to get more accurate information, relying less on participants’ self-reports in studies.

The alcohol monitor that won is worn on the wrist and measures a person’s blood alcohol content by reading sweat on their skin. An individual can monitor their alcohol consumption and receive alerts on their phone when they are drinking too much. The device can connect to a smartphone or Bluetooth technology, sending information once it is collected.

Unfortunately, this new device does not have the ability to give real-time blood-alcohol level readings. Capturing alcohol breakdown and expulsion via the skin creates a time delay – it takes about 45 minutes for ethanol to make its way out of the body that way. Therefore, it cannot replace devices that are currently used by law enforcement, but for now, this device can only give feedback on recent alcohol use.

A just-announced $1 billion investment in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing serves to expand Apple Inc.’s China strategy on several fronts including self-driving cars.

As reported by Reuters, the U.S. tech behemoth’s decision to invest in Didi aligns Apple with Uber’s main competition for the Chinese market. According to Apple, a key driver of the investment was a chance to gain valuable insight into the Chinese consumer market, an area where Apple has struggled recently as iPhone sales level off.

“We are making the investment for a number of strategic reasons, including a chance to learn more about certain segments of the China market,” said Apple chief executive Tim Cook. “Of course, we believe it will deliver a strong return for our invested capital over time as well.”

The Didi deal gives Apple access to insight from the ride-sharing service’s 11 million rides a day, representing over 87% of the Chinese market for private car-sharing services. However, Didi has been losing billions in its ongoing battle for market share with the aggressive U.S. ride-sharing firm Uber.

From a larger perspective, the Didi investment comes amidst a trend where technology and automotive companies are increasingly collaborating and cross-investing. For example,General Motors recently invested in U.S. car-sharing service Lyft and bought Cruise Automation, a maker of autonomous vehicle technology.

Apple has been closely watched by technology investors for indications that it was diving headlong into developing self-driving cars. The Didi investment is seen as an important step towards Apple’s entry into the automotive business.

The Didi investment is also seen as neatly tying together a variety of Apple businesses, such as mobile payment platform Apple Pay, while diversifying away from its dependence on the iPhone which is seeing sales flatten.

“After all the hints about the service business and what they would like to do in the future, it’s all starting to fit together,” said Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead.

Recent studies have found that the Chinese consumer is notably less inclined towards car ownership than their U.S. counterparts, which is advantageous to firms like Didi. But more significantly, the Chinese consumer’s indifference to the freedom car ownership can offer makes China an ideal market in which to develop self-driving cars. And the data on consumer behavior that Didi will provide would be pure gold to Apple in any initiative to develop self-driving cars for the Chinese market.

And the environment for developing autonomous cars just got more amenable. The Chinese government recently made a major commitment to developing the regulatory framework to speed the introduction of autonomous vehicles on its highways and city streets.

BMW has confirmed plans to launch an electric, autonomous car by 2021, named the iNext. Chief executive Harald Krueger revealed the plans during the company’s celebration of 100 years in business.

“We are further expanding the BMW i line-up,” said Krueger. “In just a few weeks, we will offer an i3 with 50 per cent more battery capacity. In 2018, we will launch a BMW i8 Roadster. This will be followed in 2021 by the BMW iNext, our new innovation driver, with autonomous driving, digital connectivity, intelligent lightweight design, a totally new interior and the next generation of electro-mobility.”

See Also: Germany’s largest rail service wants to self-drive you home

Krueger didn’t give any details on the design or performance of the BMW iNext, we suspect a most of the autonomous car is still being worked on.

It is an interesting development however, since only a few automotive manufacturers have confirmed plans to launch autonomous cars. BMW has been one of the quicker car companies to embrace self-driving, with plans to install automatic parking on most cars by 2018.

An interesting part of the comment from Krueger is “the next generation of electro-mobility”, which suggests redefining of “automotive” from the company.

We’ve heard that automotive companies are looking into offering several autonomous cars on a flat rate, so you could use a sporty car to get to work and then an SUV to take the family somewhere special on the weekends.

The cars would wait in a garage for your call and customers would pay monthly for the package. BMW has not mentioned that scenario in the announcement of the iNext, but it is a possibility.

While BMW is one of the first to announce plans to launch an autonomous car, it is not alone in the race. Tesla is starting to implement self-driving systems on highways already, General Motors recently acquired an autonomous car startup for $1 billion, Audi, Ford, Toyota,Mitsubishi, PSA Group, and Fiat Chrysler are working on their own systems or in partnership with Google.