The global agricultural and farming industry is facing a perfect storm. Earlier this month, the world population hit eight billion for the first time, in the two weeks since it has grown another 1.5 million. That is a lot of extra mouths to feed when there are already 690 million people going hungry, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Since the 1980s the pace of development in the global electronics industry has outstripped that of practically any other industry. It has become a leading sector of the economy for some countries and a heavyweight contributor to total industrial production in many others. The industry’s race is far from run. Consumer electronics alone is a trillion-dollar industry that is expanding every year, and the connectivity explosion brought by the IoT will further expand electronics’ reach. 

Energy harvesting will reduce the constant battery replacements in IoT sensors, benefitting maintenance engineers and future generations alike.

Monitoring different industrial quantities, and understanding what this data might represent, is important to many sectors – from manufacturing, transportation, and logistics, to mining, energy and utilities, among others.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications date back to the late 1960s. Still, it is only now that new wireless technology allows its adoption at a scale of a million devices per kilometer.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) regularly publishes a list of the world’s 100 most destructive species. Chief among the culprits are the likes of the Nile Perch and the small Indian mongoose, both voracious and opportunistic predators between them responsible for the extinction of well over 200 species. Luckily the IUCN list doesn’t include humans because when it comes to eliminating other species, we make the Nile Perch and small Indian mongoose look like amateurs.

Crushed ice-flavored slushies are popular but nothing new. And lack of innovation is the mark of a market that’s at risk of falling out of fashion and into decline.

IoT Hype & Reality’ was the title of a 2019 presentation I made at a Global Semiconductor Alliance event just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. At that time, I recall some tech journalists were still wondering out loud if the IoT would ever happen, and I was arguing that it was already well underway.

Wireless connectivity with embedded machine learning (ML) opens up a whole world of opportunity. Connected devices that can directly process the information they gather on-device can be used to make the planet greener, cleaner, and a better place to live.

While we live in an increasingly tech-focused world, we still face many of the same dangers and threats to our personal safety that we did centuries ago. How can we turn our technology to help mitigate those dangers?