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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.

The world’s largest Internet of Things (IoT) event has started today at the Santa Clara Convention Center, with over 12,000 attendees and 200 exhibitions expected to attend the two day event.

And because the new connected world is so interwoven, this event will feature discussions on the industrial IoT, smart homes and cities, autonomous cars, wearables, intelligent devices, and healthcare all at the same event for the first time. That means organizes have combined several usually standalone events – including Internet of Things World, Future Connected Cars, Wearable World Congress, and Apps World North America – all together in one place.

Some of the biggest names in the industry will be attending, including Apple, Intel, Samsung, and Microsoft. The three biggest car sharing services, Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar, will participate in a panel titled “Embracing shared mobility and the cultural implications to create smarter cities,” alongside executives from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

GE subsidiary is sponsoring an “IoT for Cities Hackathon,” which brings together developers and city innovators to tackle the thorniest of city issues; it takes places between May 11 – 12. Over 200 data scientists and urban experts will craft and develop products that will deliver today’s and tomorrow’s smart cities — and the winner receiving $10,000 in cash.

For the whole rundown of the event, check out the IoT World event page.

Mashblur team will be attending the event as well, including yours truly and our editor-in-chief, Christopher Caen. We’ll be busy doing our share of panel moderating, but let us know if you have some news to share. As well, a whole contingent from our parent company, Wearable IoT World, will be at the event as well. Stop by and see us at our booth, on the trade show floor at #844, as well as two micro-booths at the Startup City – one for our accelerator program, WIoTW Labs, and one for the IoT Global Council. See you there.

Smart irrigation controller GreenIQ is integrating its Smart Garden Hub with Nest’s Protect, that firm’s smoke detector and alarm.

When Nest Protect detects a fire, it will alert the Smart Garden Hub, which will activate sprinklers to avoid a garden fire. In the event of an emergency, the hub will activate any outdoors lights to alert the family and neighbors to the event.

See Also: SensorUp is the IoT therapist for your dysfunctional device family

The sprinklers will remain on for 20 minutes, unless the user manually turns them off. Users can also set the GreenIQ sprinklers to continuously run regardless of the Nest Protect’s status, to ensure that all areas in the garden are damp.

Over 2,500 people lose their lives and 12,000 suffer injuries from house fires in the United States annually. As well, with extreme drought conditions in several western and southern states, small fires can quickly spread through dried out gardens and threaten neighborhoods.

GreenIQ hopes that the integration will lower that number, and also lower the amount of direct property loss due to fire damages, which was estimated at $7.3 billion last year.

“It has always been our mission to help make gardens smarter and allow people to feel more connected to their green spaces,” said Odi Dahan, founder and CEO of GreenIQ. “Our integration with Nest is taking it one step further by not only helping our customers save money and conserve water, but also helping to decrease any anxiety people may have about potential fires.”

GreenIQ Smart Garden Hub is one of a growing list of garden IoT systems, focused on ensuring plants and grass have enough water to grow while lowering the amount of water used everyday. The system offers a smart analytics platform to tell the customer how much water should be used, the most optimal position for sprinklers, and the best ways to keep their garden alive, all from the smartphone app.

German tech firm tado°, a smart home play focused on climate control, has announced that it copped nearly $23 million in its latest round of funding. This is in addition to the nearly $34 million raised previously.

tado° is focused on its primary Smart AC Control, a wall-mounted device that help turn remote-controlled air conditioning units into smart climate devices by linking them to a central control unit located inside the house that connects via the internet to your smartphone.

Using infrared technology, the same technology used in remote controls that come with portable air conditioners as well as window and in-wall units, tado°’s Smart AC Control is able to control multiple air conditioning units throughout your home.

It’s been a bit of a rocky time for smart home tech, with the bricking of Nest’s Revolv smart home hub. Consumers may be becoming leery about splashing out on new tech that may go dark before it pays off for them.

“We have had the benefit of seeing the hyperscale of Nest, and learning what has and hasn’t worked in their product line and marketing efforts — and clearly the Revolv hub was a failure, that not many other Smart Home innovators could afford to repeat,” tado° founder and CEO Christian Deilmann told ReadWrite. “At tado°,  we have a very clear product roadmap, and we’re committed to further evolving our product to satisfy this very large, underserved market.”

He added they’re reaching “millions of people around the world with remote-controlled heating and cooling units looking for a smart climate control option, which is not covered by Nest or comes at a cost significantly more than our products.”

What does this mean for users? It means that you can control your air conditioners from your smartphone wherever you might be, and you can set it up so that as you move from one room to another, the room’s climate control system activates ensuring that you use less electricity and have a comfortable space wherever you might be.

The Smart AC Control can also be set to turn you unit(s) on as you head back home from work. This feature set is remarkably similar to that of popular Nest thermostats, which are used to control central air conditioning units and has recently grown as a product line to connect a wide range of devices to the home network.

It is Wi-Fi enabled so it connects to the Internet through your home’s router, has Bluetooth capability which senses when you are home, contains humidity and temperature sensors, a capacitive touch surface for easy control, and an LED matrix which indicates which mode and status it is currently in.

This latest round of funding by tado° is intended to assist in its global expansion, especially into the US market. Recently, tado has added its products to Amazon, Best Buy, and Home Depot and partnered with AT&T in its Digital Life program.

tado° has a unique place in the connected home market. For the millions of homes that rely on smaller non-central heating and air solutions, it certainly has a lot of promise. CEO Deilmann said savings depend on the home and number of AC units installed but he estimated savings for a US household of $200 to $800 a year.

To most people, air pollution comes from factories and car exhausts, but indoor air quality impacts – from smoke, paints, varnishes, and spores – are quickly becoming a bigger cause for concern.

That’s according to an international team of researchers led by the University of Surrey, who claim the lack of real-time data on indoor air pollution is a major issue that leads to the millions of deaths every year.

“It is essential that we are able to effectively monitor indoor air pollution so that we can better understand when and where levels are worst, and in turn offer solutions to make our air healthier,” said Dr Prashant Kumar of the University of Surrey. “Our work looks at the use of small, low-energy monitoring sensors that would be able to gather real-time data and tell families or workers when levels of pollutants are too high.”

The sensors, according to the report, would help manage indoor air pollution levels and offer advice on how to lower the pollution. Kumar claims that just opening a window can reduce indoor air pollution, but without the relevant data families are in the dark about dangers in their own home.

“We are calling for greater importance to be placed on ensuring buildings are built with indoor pollution monitoring in mind,” said Kumar. “As we enter the age of smart cities this is one way in which technology will actively benefit health. A combination of policy and technology will help ensure that while we are hard at work our buildings are also working to protect us from harmful pollutants that affect both mind and body.”

Forcing homeowners to have sensors fitted into their home might be a tough sell, even in smart cities. We suspect the best way to go about this is subsidizing smart home devices that offer this functionality, which would entice companies like Nest that already track smoke levels with their smoke detector.

Lutron Electronics has added its Caséta Wireless system to the growing list of devices that support Amazon Alexa range, which includes the Echo, Dot, Tap, and Fire TV.

The Caséta Wireless system features various connected LED lights that can change color or brightness on demand. The integration of Alexa allows users to change the lights through voice commands, an ideal solution when you cannot find your smartphone.

See Also: Could smart cities improve indoor air quality with home sensors?

Amazon has been steadily improving the range of voice commands for the Echo, to the point it can now hear you from a few meters away. So if you want to turn the lights on when you enter your house late at night, there’s a good chance your Echo will hear you from the porch.

Lutron already provides a mobile app, available on iOS, Apple Watch and Android, for turning on and changing the light’s colors. The system also supports other smart home hubs like Works with Nest and Apple’s HomeKit, so this is a completion of the smart home package to make sure all consumers are happy.

These aren’t the first lights to take advantage of Amazon’s Alexa platform, Philips Hue, LIFX and Belkin WeMo are already integrated and offer similar functionality.

Lutron’s Caséta Wireless kit currently retails for under $100, and most wireless lightbulbs launched after 2014 are compatible with the system. You can check Lutron’s compatibility page for more information.

Hundreds of other devices are starting to integrate with Amazon’s platform, as customers start to realise the benefits of the Echo, Dot, and Tap in everyday life. Even platform hubs like the Nest thermostat and SmartThings are integrated with Alexa, taking advantage of the voice commands and APIs Amazon has on offer.

Smart homes’ connected technologies are leaving homeowners vulnerable to data and privacy theft, according to a new study that examined several common IoT consumer devices.

IoTTech News reports that research by Romanian internet security software maker Bitdefender identified four common IoT products that were susceptible to cyber attack: WeMo switch, LinkHub, LIFX Bulb and the MUZO Cobblestone audio receiver.

Bitdefender undertook the study as IoT smart home systems proliferate globally, making them more subject to hackers’ attention. It examined how these devices communicated with its mobile app, as well as how they connected the cloud and the Internet more broadly. The research recommended that manufacturers need to take greater steps to prevent sensitive data from being overheard as the increasing array of devices communicate with each other.

Though not one of the devices in this report, at a recent conference university researchers easily showed how one of the most popular smart home devices, the Nest thermostat, can be hacked especially with physical access to the device. In under 15 seconds, bad guys could remove the Nest from its mount, plug in a USB cable, and back-door the device without the owner’s knowledge. The hacked Nest can then be used to spy on the household or serve as a platform to attack other networked devices.

“IoT vendors need to prioritize security before their devices become hugely popular, leaving millions of people at risk from cyberattacks,” said Bitdefender malware researcher Radu Basaraba.

“The IoT opens a completely new dimension to security where the Internet meets the physical world,” he said. “If projections of a hyper-connected world become reality and manufacturers don’t bake security into their products, consequences can becoming life-threatening.”

For the Bitdefender report, the research found that hackers could use the LIFX Bulb to reroute users to a fake hotspot while the LinkHub smart lighting system was sending unencrypted data. The WeMo remote switch was made vulnerable by weak access point authentication, and the MUZO receiver suffered from weak initial credentials that left the device open to hacking.

Another day, another smart home system looking to break into the market. This time, a team of ex-ASUS engineers have launched a Kickstarter for SmartAll, an AI butler that connects to smart devices.

The hub, which is on sale at Kickstarter, is a small camera with an LED strip around it. It is able to recognize up to five family members and customize a room to their liking — it is also able to spot intruders and create a “panic mode” where the lights and alarms turn on. Users are able to livestream the camera’s POV from a mobile device and save footage. On top of all the camera capabilities, the hub also understands voice commands, like “turn on the television” or “turn up the heating”.

See Also: Scotts Miracle-Gro platform gives you an IoT green thumb

Once all the smart devices are connected to the butler, it will begin learning patterns and start to automatically make decisions after seven days. If you boil the kettle at 8.30am each morning or turn off the lights at 11pm everyday, it will do that task for you.

It should be noted that while SmartAll supports over 1,000 devices, including Nest’s thermostat, the iRobot Roomba, and a selection of smart home door locks, it hasn’t launched any other smart home devices.

That might be a bit of a strain when it comes to connecting everything up and ensuring that devices work correctly. For one-function items like a door lock or a kettle that might not be too hard, but for a vacuum things like what rooms to clean and how long to clean may be hard to compute.

SmartAll already has an SDK ready for developers to build on the platform. It plans to add health management and emotion recognition to the hub in future updates, giving you food tips and changing songs to fit your current mood.

On Kickstarter, SmartAll is selling its butler for $199, though it has an early bird still available for the first 500, at $149. One year of cloud recording service costs an additional $100 or $299 with the butler.