Even though Brother International is a supplier of many  IT products, from machine tools to head-mounted displays to industrial sewing machines, it’s best known for printers. And in today’s world, those printers are no longer stand-alone devices, but components of the internet of things.

That’s why I was interested in this list from Robert Burnett, Brother’s director, B2B product & solution – basically, the company’s point man for large customer implementations. Not surprisingly, Burnett focuses on IoT security mistakes related to printers and also shares Brother’s recommendations for dealing with the top five.

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For years, IT departments have been railing about the dangers of shadow IT and bring-your-own-device. The worry is that these unauthorized practices bring risks to corporate systems, introducing new vulnerabilities and increasing the attack surface.

That may be true, but it’s not the whole story. As I’ve long argued, shadow IT may increase risks, but it can also cut costs, boost productivity and speed innovation. That’s why users are often so eager to circumvent what they see as slow and conservative IT departments by adopting increasingly powerful and affordable consumer and cloud-based alternatives, with or without the blessing of the powers that be. Just as important, there’s plenty of evidence of that enlightened IT departments should work to leverage those new approaches to serve their internal customers in a more agile manner.

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As faithful readers of TechWatch (love you, Mom) may know, the rollout of many companies’ ambitious drone delivery services has not gone as quickly as promised. Despite recent signs of progress in Australia and the United States—not to mention clever ideas for burger deliveries to cars stuck in traffic—drone delivery remains a long way from becoming a viable option in the vast majority of use cases. And the problem affects many areas of drone usage, not just the heavily hyped drone delivery applications.

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Apple calls CarPlay “the ultimate co-pilot.” BMW calls it the “smart and fast way to conveniently use your iPhone features while in your car. ... You can control your iPhone and use apps with the touchscreen display, the iDrive Controller or voice commands.”

However you describe it, though, Apple’s CarPlay system suddenly finds itself in the center of what could be a defining conversation about the future of the internet of things (IoT).

You see, the German luxury carmaker’s plans to charge $80 a year to access CarPlay have suddenly become the talk of the internet, from tech blogs to car sites. The hue and cry makes CarPlay the perfect illustration of the promise—and the pitfalls—of the IoT.

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One of the strengths of internet of things (IoT) technology is that it can do so many things well. From smart toothbrushes to predictive maintenance on jetliners, the IoT has more use cases than you can count. The result is that various IoT uses cases require optimization for particular characteristics, from cost to speed to long life, as well as myriad others.

But in a recent post, "How the internet of things will change advertising" (which you should definitely read), the always-insightful Stacy Higginbotham tossed in a line that I can’t stop thinking about: “It's crucial that the IoT optimizes for trust."

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Internet of things (IoT) vendors and pundits like to crow about the billions and billions of connected devices that make the IoT so ubiquitous and powerful. But how much of that installed base is really relevant to the enterprise?

To find out, I traded emails with Rob Mesirow, principal at PwC’s Connected Solutions, the firm’s new one-stop-shop of IoT solutions, who suggests that consumer adoption may not paint a true picture of the enterprise opportunities. If you remove the health trackers and the smart thermostats from the market, he suggested, there are very few connected devices left.

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You’d almost think I’d get tired of writing this story over and over and over… but the ongoing growth of cloud computing is too big a trend to ignore.

Critically, the impressive growth numbers of the three leading cloud infrastructure providers—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s not just about new workloads being run in the cloud; it’s also about more and more enterprises moving existing workloads to the cloud from on-premises data centers.

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As someone who’s spent his whole career working in offices, not factories, I had very little idea what a modern “smart factory” powered by the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) might look like. That’s why I was so interested in Tempo Automation’s new 42,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco’s trendy Design District.

Frankly, I pictured the company’s facility, which uses IIoT to automatically configure, operate, and monitor the prototyping and low-volume production of printed circuit board assemblies (PCBAs), as a cacophony of robots and conveyor belts attended to by a grizzled band of grease-stained technicians. You know, a 21^stcentury update of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic Modern Times making equipment for customers in the aerospace, medtech, industrial automation, consumer electronics, and automotive industries. (The company just inked a new contract with Lockheed Martin.)

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Earlier this month, I wrote that “even as smartwatch shipments continue to grow, significant industrial and business use cases for these internet-connected devices have yet to appear.”

And then a few days later, as if on cue, International Data Corporation (IDC) put out a press release about the latest edition of the Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. The release quoted Ramon T. Llamas, research director for IDC's Wearables team, saying, "Two major drivers for the wearables market are healthcare and enterprise adoption.”

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Take a glance at the wrists of your co-workers, and you’re likely to see more and more of them adorned with smartwatches, fitness trackers, and other wearable technology. In meetings, you increasingly see colleagues surreptitiously glancing at their tiny screens, hoping in vain that no one is noticing.

It isn’t just you. The latest smartwatch numbers all say that smartwatch shipments are growing fast, and the internet-connected devices are beginning to achieve mainstream acceptance: Last month, The NPD Group's new Smartwatch Total Market Report noted that smartwatch unit sales jumped 61 percent in 2018, while dollar volume rose 51 percent to approach $5 billion in sales. Some 16 percent of U.S. adults now own a smartwatch, the report said, up from 12 percent at the end of 2017.

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Given the Internet of Things’ (IoT) perch atop the hype cycle, IoT trend-spotting has become a full-time business, not just an end-of-the-year pastime. It seems every major — and minor — IoT player is busy laying out its vision of where the technology is going. Most of them harp on the same themes, of course, from massive growth to security vulnerabilities to skills shortages.

Those are all real concerns, but Chris Nelson, vice president of engineering at operational intelligence (OT) vendor OSIsoft, shared some more unique viewpoints via email. In addition to his contention that the IoT will blur the lines between IT, which runs the customers’ systems and email, and OT, which runs the technology behind the production systems, he talked about what will drive the IoT in the next year.

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Everyone knows the Internet of Things (IoT) is a transformative technology for consumers, vendors, and enterprises that’s in the process of becoming a historically huge market—measured in trillions, not billions, of dollars. That’s great, and most likely true, but perhaps a little vague in some respects. For example: What, exactly, do enterprises hope to gain from their investments in the IoT? Are they planning to use the IoT to save money on things they’re already doing, or do they see the technology as a way to create new businesses and boost revenue?

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“Two years ago, predictive maintenance was forecast to be one of the most promising uses of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT).”

That’s the lead of report based on a recent Bain & Company survey of more than 600 high-tech executives (Beyond Proofs of Concept: Scaling the Industrial IoT, by Bain partners Michael Schallehn, Christopher Schorling, Peter Bowen and Oliver Straehle). The report goes on to note that identifying precisely when equipment might fail “seemed like a no-brainer.” And yet, the report concludes, “predictive maintenance has failed to take off as broadly as expected.” In fact, industrial leaders were not as excited about predictive maintenance as they were back in a 2016 survey.

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Lots of vendors are eager to sell enterprises an “IoT platform,” but it’s not always clear exactly what those “platforms” actually do, why you need one, and which one you should choose. As Hackernoon put it in April 2018:

"We’re a cross-functional, fully integrated, full-stack, serverless, hardware agnostic, AI, IoT platform that offers you infinite infrastructure . . .“ said every confusing IoT platform website ever.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is everywhere these days, from smart houses to smart cities to industrial applications. And now it’s coming to the coolers in a drugstore near you.

Walgreens is testing innovative, IoT-powered "smart coolers" that combine cameras, facial recognition software, and display screens in the cooler doors to serve targeted ads depending on what it can tell about shoppers rooting around for cold drinks and frozen treats.

Bringing the online ad experience in store

According to the Wall Street Journal, the system attempts to recreate the online advertising experience in brick and mortar stores, using facial recognition software to determine the age of the shopper and what products they’ve already selected — as well as environmental factors — to determine what ads to show. Supplied by Chicago-based Cooler Screens, the technology is designed to transform “retail cooler surfaces into IoT-enabled screens and [create] the largest retail point-of-sale merchandising platform in the world.”

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