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Cisco has pegged the Internet of Everything for soon impacting our lives ten times more than the Internet itself. Yet so many companies in the more commonly called Internet of Things (IoT) are struggling for survival.

Why? Maybe, like the Google Glass, it was just too soon. Or like another seemingly failed Google acquisition, Revolv home automation hub, maybe the bigger guys are gobbling up the competition (

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Dubrovnik is seemingly the polar opposite of Sarajevo, the capital and largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dubrovnik struggles to modernise and become a smart city, while protecting its pristine 7th century spirit, while Sarajevo tries to build a smart city from rubble.

They may make for strange bedfellows, but these two cities with seemingly different problems are working together to build connected cities that solve their citizens’ problems.

Dubrovnik is a geographic...

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Big data—which will soon be an understatement—is the amalgamation of information we’re getting from all of our mobile devices, and then adding to that soon the information we’re getting from all those other devices soon from the Internet of Things. Now the debate is if big data is valuable at all. Soon this insurmountable amount of data will become nonsense, unless we add context. Big data will enable machine learning that can in turn enable contextual...

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“There are people who will then research and find out ‘Why is this?’ Or change policies based on this data. Information can save lives,” said Nancy Lublin, founder of Crisis Text Line. In just over two years, 15 million text messages have been sent to “741741” from every area code in the US, connecting people with anxiety and depression with counsellors.

It has grown rapidly because “just someone being...

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The great thing about the Internet of Things (IoT) is that it takes communication to unprecedented heights. But that’s also its weakness. Those ‘Things’ never shut up, babbling away in tongues and confusing everything.

In theory, the global village of IoTs could potentially save the world by helping us use our precious food, water and energy wisely. However, keeping up with all this unstructured talk would consume more of the earth’s resources than could be...

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Barcelona—a smart city – is an interconnected ecosystem with many parts, and therefore it can be natural to try to house all of these moving parts in one place, via traditional top-down government plans. But governments aren’t necessarily known for their cultures of innovation; infact the stiltedness of governments combined with budget constraints are reasons it’s taking much longer than planned for us to see truly smart cities come to fruition.

The solution?...

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Smart Cities are no longer a promise of the future but an increasing priority for local, regional and countrywide governments and a flourishing business area for technological firms and CSPs with interests in the IoT market.

The European Union is so far the part of the world where more efforts have been made to develop smart cities. At...

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By Nick Booth

Uncommunicative data refuses to come out of its silo – and boy can it be difficult.

As we all know, there are hundreds of benevolent IT developers who only want to do one thing – improve the world, one Internet working of Things at a time. Oh to be young and idealistic!

In a way, they are like parents – they want the best and they can see possibilities that the offspring can’t. Tragically the IoT cannot benefit from the wisdom of their experience....

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Deep within the bowels of the internet there is a battle raging - one that has the potential to fundamentally change how people use the web.

Actually, that’s probably a bit dramatic. The bowels of the internet are far more likely to be a brightly lit, open-plan office in downtown San Francisco, or maybe a bit further south in Silicon...

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By Professor Mischa Dohler & Professor Gerhard Fettweis, Fellows of the IEEE

Each Internet generation was believed to be the last, with designs pushed to near perfection. The first and original Internet, a virtually infinite network of computers, was a paradigm changer and went on to define the economies of the late 20th century. However, after that Internet came the Mobile Internet, connecting billions of smart phones and laptops, and yet again redefining entire segments...

By Chetan Sharma (@chetansharma), President and Founder, Chetan Sharma Consulting

In my last post “IoT: Mobile’s next frontier?” I explored the potential opportunity of Internet of Things. Since then, I have had the opportunity to travel extensively in Americas, Europe, and Asia on assignments and we also hosted two Mobile Breakfast Series forums on IoT in

By Julian Garcia Barbosa, Big Data Senior Account Executive at Telefónica. 

Improving citizen security, optimising waste management, anticipating traffic jams and analysing citizen sentiment: these are just a few examples of what Big Data could do to bring our cities into the future.

According to a UN report, 70% of the global population will live in urban areas by 2050. In spite of occupying only 2%...

By Francisco Jariego, Director of Industrial IoT, Telefónica

More than half of the world’s population lives in cities and this proportion is increasing day by day.

As urban environments are becoming more densely populated and more complex, cities face challenges in a number of different areas: congested transport infrastructure, air quality and pollution, energy efficiency and climate change.

Governments around the world are now racing to transform their towns into...

Speaking at the Technology for Marketers & Advertisers conference, Simon Birkenhead, Director of Global Ad Sales at Telefonica, explained: “The iPhone, born in 2007, doesn’t look too different today from what it did seven years ago. The iPad was born in 1993, it was called the Apple Newton. That was the first iPad. The design has changed a bit, it’s a bit more ‘gadgety’ but the concept hasn’t really changed that much.”

Instead...

By Xenia Elsaesser (@XeniaEl), Communications and Programme Officer for Think Big 

Click here to read our wrap up of Day One at MWC 

“Connectivity is a human right”: the bold statement that was first made by Mark Zuckerberg by the way of (unsurprisingly) a Facebook post in August 2013.

After a half-year lull, Zuckerberg used

By Matthew Key, CEO, Telefonica Digital

15 July 2013: By 2015 over six billion objects in the world will be connected to the internet. The explosion of M2M communications, creating what is known as the Internet of Things, is set to fundamentally transform almost every aspect of human society and disrupt every industry it touches.

We see it as the biggest growth opportunity in the market and aim for M2M to represent...