Samsung will dish out $1.2 billion over the next four years for Internet of Things (IoT) research and startups, solidifying the company's emphasis on the lucrative IoT market.

The investment, revealed last week at a forum in Washington, D.C., will move IoT to the center of Samsung's strategy, and will focus on using connected devices for benefits to society, said Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman and CEO Oh- Hyun Kwon.

"At Samsung, putting people at the center of everything we do is our highest value. … The same must be true for IoT if we want to realize its full transformative power," said Kwon at the forum. "Today, IoT is changing individual lives – helping people to age in their own homes. But tomorrow, using IoT, we can give the same independence to millions of Americans. We can keep people out of hospitals and nursing homes. As our populations live longer, these benefits and cost savings for society cannot be ignored."

Samsung’s investment will target IoT applications with social benefits, such as digital health, smart machines and autonomous vehicles, according to the company.

Lee Drake, CEO of OS-Cubed, a Rochester, N.Y.-based solution provider, said the term "Internet of Things" is still vague – but predicts that more connected devices will lead to opportunities in the future.

"The 'Internet of Things,' like 'cloud computing,' is a pretty generic term, and could easily be construed as pretty much everything Samsung makes these days," said Drake. "Nonetheless, it seems likely that as time goes on, more and more of the things we use every day will be internet-connected."

While IoT may be a vague term now, according to research firm IDC, the global Internet of Things market will be worth $1.7 trillion in 2020.
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Drake said his reseller business will see both challenges and opportunities in the next few years in integrating these devices, coordinating their use and crafting unique solutions using the device capabilities.
This is not Samsung's first move into IoT – just last week, Samsung said it will acquire U.S. cloud firm Joyent to bolster its IoT-related software and services. Last year, Samsung also launched Artik, a System on a Chip (SoC) that connects objects and the computing power behind those objects.

It doesn't happen often but Bluetooth is getting an upgrade all the way to a new version, Bluetooth 5. Announced last week by Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), will have double the speed, quadruple the range and increases data capacity by 800%. It should also work far better outdoors than current offerings. In an age of smart connected homes and smartwatch devices this is very good news indeed.

Bluetooth is lower power consuming than Wi-Fi, but has been limited by range and bandwidth, until now. Bluetooth 5 is expected to start arriving later this year and early in 2017 inside new devices.

Expect new smartphones, smartwatches, speakers, headphones, smart bulbs, connected cameras and more to sport the new Bluetooth 5 connection. There are currently over 30,000 companies working with the Bluetooth SIG so expect this to appear on a huge scale when it starts to arrive later this year.

This could also mean indoor location tracking, like that used by Apple in its Stores, could become wider spanning and more accurate than ever.
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Expect to hear manufacturers announcing their devices which will pack Bluetooth 5 towards the end of 2016.

Meet Energysquare, a thin charging pad made so that you don’t have to plug in your phone charger ever again. Energysquare doesn’t rely on induction like most wireless chargers out there. Instead, Energysquare uses a conductive surface as well as a sticker on the back of your phone. The company is currently doing a Kickstarter campaign.

The main device is a mousepad-size device with a grid of 25 metal squares. Metal squares are nice, but putting your phone on this pad doesn’t do much.

You’ll also have to put a sticker at the back of your phone. This sticker has two tiny metal dots at each end as well as a USB or Lightning connector so that you can plug the sticker to your phone. After that, you’re set.

While I’m not a fan of putting stickers on the back of your phone, I’m just tired of plugging and unplugging my phone multiple times a day. The idea behind Energysquare is that you have a charging pad at work and one at home so that you can just put your phone on the table to charge it.

Compared to inductive chargers, Energysquare can charge at full speed and you can put multiple devices on one pad. As long as the two ends of the stickers are on two different squares, your phone will start charging.
And the good thing is that stickers are quite inexpensive. You can get a bunch of them for $10. So you can replace your phone without having to think about this. An Energysquare charging pad costs $65 on Kickstarter.
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Eventually, the startup wants to be able to sell charging pads to train stations, airports and bars. This seems like a long shot, but it would certainly be quite useful to have charging tables everywhere you go.

Over a year ago, Google announced plans to build a modular smartphone. Since then, they have been quiet about what they were doing until this year’s I/O Developer’s Conference. Google said that Project Ara would deliver a developer’s edition of the phone by fourth quarter 2016 and a consumer version should be available sometime in 2017. You may want to watch Google’s YouTube video of the project.

Project Ara is based on the idea that you should be able to assemble a smartphone around different modules, swapping components at will. That may sound a lot like LG's G5, which lets you replace the bottom of the smartphone with parts like a camera module with dedicated shutter controls, but Ara's approach is a lot more complex. The design Google showed off has slots for six modules.

Swapping in those different parts will let you easily tailor the functionality of your phone to your liking. More important, Google argues, it means you can replace outdated components of your phone with newer parts while keeping the phone itself, thus extending the life cycle of your mobile devices.
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In a demo done at this year’s I/O conference, a Google engineer inserted a camera module onto a phone that could take a photo without rebooting. That's a vast improvement over last year’s demo where the Ara phone had to reboot before the camera module would work. Removing the module is simply a matter of using a voice command or selecting an eject option from settings. The prototype looks fairly compact if the modules themselves sport a blocky appearance — like a Tetris board if you could use it to make phone calls.
Google has already lined up some partners to develop Ara modules, including Panasonic and TDK among a host of others. And it hopes the release of a developer kit will bring along even more modules, which could include everything from health monitoring to navigation.