Casual observers of the Internet of things likely think it’s all about automating appliances and entire homes, as well as devices like wearables that will supposedly make their lives better. But delve deeper into IoT and a different picture emerges: if this is all IoT had to offer, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. In reality, the real revenue generating goldmines for the companies involved in making IoT happen are everything but consumer applications.Manufacturing, “smart” cities, medicine, agriculture, the energy industry, utilities and similarly large enterprises are the type of applications driving IoT. They are collectively greater in size than the combined total of projected consumer applications and IoT provides a solution for improving their performance in many ways. For these benefits to occur, the massive amounts of data generated by IoT devices must be highly analyzed and converted to a form from which people can derive significant benefits. It’s a monumental task, which is why cognitive computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning are essential.Although Microsoft, Amazon, and other companies provide capabilities to accomplish all or some of these functions, the best example is IBM, which has invested heavily in cognitive computing, created the first major AI platform (Watson) in which it has invested billions of dollars, and is expanding the range of applications it serves.

Source: Making Sense of All That Data: IoT Finds Its Missing Link | Electronics360

Japanese tinkerers created a tiny, flower-pollinating drone for a world without insects.

Could there be anything gloomier to think about than a mechanical bee?

It’s a sad fact—bee populations are in decline in many parts of the world. While the reasons bees are in trouble aren’t yet well understood, the problem has some technologists investigating whether drones could fly flower-spreading pollen instead.

The latest effort comes from Japan, where investigators at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science, in Tsukuba, were looking for new uses for sticky substances called ionic liquid gels that have unusual physical properties.

To make their pollinator, the team purchased $100 drones from Amazon and then added patches of horsehair to their undersides. After painting on the gels, which are moist and are about as sticky as a Post-It note, the drones were ready to grab and release pollen grains.

As shown in the video above, the researchers flew the drones smack into the male and female parts of pink and white Japanese lilies. It’s the first time a drone has pollinated a flower, according to project leader Eijiro Miyako.

The invention is still no replacement for the bumblebee. According to Joe Traynor, a “bee broker” in California, the almond industry in that state alone requires 1.8 million hives—containing around 35 billion bees—to pollinate almost a million acres of almond trees that each year sprout some three trillion flowers.

“I don’t see any technology that could replace bees,” says Traynor.

Source: Watch This $100 Drone Try to Do a Bumblebee’s Job