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Smart Home Market $56.18 Billion by 2020
FutureForAll.org
The smart home market is estimated to grow from $25.38 Billion in 2015 to $56.18 Billion by 2020, at a CAGR of 17.2% between 2015 and 2020, while the assisted living market is estimated to grow from $1.20 Billion in 2015 to $3.96 Billion by 2020. The report aims at estimating the market size and future growth potential of smart home and ambient assisted living market across different segments such as products, services, and regions. The base year considered for the study is 2014 and the market size is forecast from 2015 to 2020. Growing geriatric population and rising demands for managed healthcare are expected to play a key role in fueling the growth of the AAL market in the next five years. Increased security and safety concerns, rising demands for energy savings, and low carbon emission-oriented solutions are driving the growth of the smart home market.
The smart home and ambient assisted living market comprises players such as Honeywell International, Inc. (U.S.), Siemens AG (Germany), Schneider Electric S.E. (France), Ingersoll Rand Plc. (Ireland), Legrand SA (France), ABB Group (Switzerland), Medic4all Group (Switzerland), Tunstall Healthcare Ltd. (U.K.), Chubb Community Care (U.K.), Televic N.V. (Belgium), Telbios (Italy), Vitaphone GmbH (Germany), GETEMED AG (Germany), Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Netherlands), CareTech AB (Sweden), and Assisted Living Technologies, Inc. (U.S.)
63 Fintech Startups Targeting Millennials
Fintech startups prominent in the millennial demographic range include “robo-advisors” offering low-cost alternatives to brokerages, to lending firms innovating in credit risk, and stock-picking and automated savings apps.
Many of the fintech startups are leveraging existing technologies already popular among young adults such as social networks and mobile messaging. Project crowdfunding sites GoFundMe and Andreessen Horowitz-backed Tilt, for example, mirror or take advantage of social networks and are largely popular among college audiences. Google Ventures and General Catalyst-backed HelloDigit transfers money directly via text message.
Beyond Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google: Intelligent Assistants Landscape
VB:
Ever since Apple’s Siri heralded the age of intelligent assistants (IAs) four years ago — followed by Microsoft, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook — pundits have complained that intelligent assistant technology isn’t living up to its promise…
In 2015, the IA space introduced new features, functions, and integrations at an accelerated rate. As the general public becomes more comfortable communicating with machines using their own words, demand is growing. On the supply side, technology providers benefit from “the API economy.” Well-defined interfaces and integration points make it possible for today’s IAs to add new tasks and capabilities to their repertoire quickly and efficiently. For example, Alexa, the IA for Amazon’s Echo, has moved beyond reading e-books aloud and can now order pizza and summon Uber.
Apple’s Siri, which is decidedly less open, still allows its users to make posts to Facebook, book tables at nearby restaurants, play podcasts, and make appointments for you. Google’s unnamed IA is able to provide turn-by-turn directions. Microsoft’s Cortana adds travel times for planning purposes. And now Facebook’s message-based M can recommend clothing stores and new fashions and share all this with your friends…
Here are the developments we saw in 2015:
- The proliferation of bots: New bots appeared almost weekly. One example is Evia, which can help individuals buy car insurance based on a picture of their license plate.
- Mass acceptance of natural language processing: We no longer bark commands or search terms, instead we ask questions and speak in full sentences.
- Migration to messaging: WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, and their peers are adding bots and becoming e-commerce ecosystems.
- Emergence of emotion detection: Companies like Emobase and Heartbeat Technologies are sorting out how to recognize and respond to our emotional “tells.”
And here’s what we’ll see in 2016:
- Intelligent Authentication (IAuth) promotes trust: IAuth will make it possible for an IA to have strong confidence that the person it is conversing with is who he or she claims to be. It will also help IAs maintain context and be better able to take turns in a conversation.
- Growth of conversational commerce: Today’s IAs customarily answer questions and then move on. Future IAs will know that, because you asked about nearby restaurants, there’s a good chance you will want to book a table. And, as long as you are going to book a table, perhaps you want share the experience with your friends and family.
- Empathetic IAs: Speech analytics can already detect when an individual is angry and ready to change vendors, but a new generation of solutions providers promote emotion detection that is responsive to a broader array of feelings.
- Ubiquitous IA: Amazon’s Echo has open APIs that keep adding capabilities. Today most of them are in the kitchen but many have moved to the family room to rule the TV. Consistent, conversational interfaces to cars and public kiosks are next.
Funding per Internet of Things Category
We are currently tracking over 803 companies in 16 categories across 43 countries, with a total of $6.82 Billion in funding.
HT: Noric Dilanchian
Virtual/Augmented Reality: Commercial and industrial applications account for most deals
The number of VR/AR startups is increasing as venture capital dollars continue to flood in, with investment reaching an all time high in 2015 of $658M in equity funding across 126 deals, according to CB Insights data. Even as VR/AR startups launch, larger corporates are developing VR/AR-related businesses, products, and investing in the space…
VR/AR categories
Commercial and industrial applications
The companies in this category will advance productivity in an enterprise setting through enhanced visualization. Commercial and Industrial applications of VR/AR include marketing technology, sports training, labor training, retail, interior design, real estate, transactions, aerospace/defense, security, quality testing, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and data analytics.
Content
Pure content studios and agencies that create VR/AR content such as bonus movie or TV show content and journalistic content. This category also includes gaming and education. There are a number of companies that resemble production houses, advertising agencies or VR “work-for-hire” shops that produce VR/AR experiences for their clients. Some of these companies have started off as pure content creators and have later also become distributors.
- Education
These companies provide learning and education for people whether it is for the classroom, corporate learning management, or certifications. The education software market will see innovation through immersive learning enabled by VR/AR.
- Gaming
Gaming is of the more obvious and near-term use cases for VR/AR. Popular first person shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D, Halo, and massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) such as Everquest and World of Warcraft were popular video games that immersed gamers in alternate visually appealing environments (for their time) and enabled interaction with bots and other players. New VR games coming out will advance that immersive experience, once confined by a screen.
Discovery & Distribution
These companies provide a destination to search and discover VR/AR content and apps. Some of them have created their own content to seed their platforms while some of the content companies have added discovery and distribution as part of their offering, as noted above.
Social
Companies in this category allow for social, collaboration and communication within the medium. I’ve seen companies here provide virtual meeting environments and chat rooms where the user is represented in a virtual environment with an avatar.
Hardware
Hardware includes head mounted displays (HMDs), mobile HMDs, other mixed reality displays, cameras and capture technology, accessories and input devices, and specialty lenses. After Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, it is interesting to see other companies’ involvement with HMDs: Google’s investment in Magic Leap, HTC’s Vive, Samsung’s collaboration with Oculus on the GearVR, Sony’s PlayStation VR, and Fox’s recent investment in Osterhout Design Group.
Infrastructure & Tools
This category captures a lot of different types of companies, but in essence these companies (aside from the headsets and mobile devices) provide the backbone, piping, delivery, building blocks, or creation software for VR/AR. I consider this category to encompass creation tools, dev tools, gaming engines, SDKs, gesture & motion tracking, haptic feedback technology, WebVR, encoding, and live-streaming tools. Companies in this space are solving the technology limitations for great VR/AR experiences (such as high quality delivery, VR/AR asset transfer, and the challenges of “presence”).
Funding Data
The top funded categories were hardware, followed by infrastructure and tools, commercial/industrial applications, and content. The least funded category is discovery and distribution.
The Evolution of Digital Capacity by Country
The Digital Evolution Index (DEI) analyzes the key underlying drivers and barriers that govern a country’s evolution into a digital economy: Demand, Supply, Institutional Environment, and Innovation. A longitudinal analysis of these four drivers during the years 2008 to 2013 enables us to make sense of the evolving global digital landscape, reveal patterns and provide insights into both current consumers and those to come. The index and the corresponding analyses of the patterns reveal many broad conclusions – each of them has powerful managerial, investment and policy implications.
See also Bhaskar Chakravorti and Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi Europe’s Other Crisis: A Digital Recession and Where the Digital Economy Is Moving the Fastest
Watch the HBR video
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IoT: Market Landscape, Companies, Funding, VCs, Maturity Level
Posted in Internet of Things, Misc
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What has @Facebook Wrought: No More Six Degrees of Separation
How connected is the world? Playwrights [1], poets [2], and scientists [3] have proposed that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by six other people. In honor of Friends Day, we’ve crunched the Facebook friend graph and determined that the number is 3.57. Each person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people. The average distance we observe is 4.57, corresponding to 3.57 intermediaries or “degrees of separation.” Within the US, people are connected to each other by an average of 3.46 degrees.
Our collective “degrees of separation” have shrunk over the past five years. In 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook computed the average across the 721 million people using the site then, and found that it was 3.74 [4,5]. Now, with twice as many people using the site, we’ve grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world.
Note that the original research project concluded that people in the United States, not “the planet,” were separated by about six people on average. See Wikipedia for a summary of Milgram’s small-world experiment and Milgram’s 1967 Psychology Today article (PDF).
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102 Startups Digitally Disrupting Banking
Digital banking startups have secured more than $10.3B in funding since 2010, as they disrupt the banking value chain, providing consumers with new alternatives for services traditionally dominated by consumer banks, including lending, bill pay, personal finance, and investment management.
The breakdown of the categories is as follows:
- Marketplace Lending: Tech startups primarily providing platforms for consumer borrowers to connect with willing lenders. These are often referred to as peer-to-peer (P2P) lenders, though institutions also provide capital on many of these marketplaces.
- Direct Lending & Underwriting: Companies primarily lending directly online and/or facilitating consumer access to credit scoring, often using machine learning technologies and other nontraditional methods to assess creditworthiness.
- Online/Mobile Banking: Startups providing digital-native banking deposit and account solutions, either online or through various mobile platforms.
- Personal Finance: Tech startups offering tools and advice to manage personal accounts, expenses, budgeting, and personal financial planning.
- Bill Pay / Money Transfer: Startups enabling individuals to transfer money to peers and pay bills, often across international borders.
- Investment Management: A broad category encompassing companies serving retail investors with automated, social, or other novel investment vehicles and advice. These startups may also offer retail investors alternative ways to access securities beyond large traditional brokerages. Some, like Personal Capital, pair algorithmically-driven advice and portfolio management with human advice.
- Robo-advisor: Investment management startups that focus exclusively on providing fully automated, algorithm-driven investments.