Today’s topics include Samsung’s IoT Push with Artik Development Boards, Verizon’s AOL Acquisition, Verizon Wireless and Sprint’s FCC settlement, and new design and analytics capabilities for IBM’s marketing cloud.
Samsung has been building up its capabilities around the burgeoning Internet of things, buying IoT startup SmartThings in 2014 and promising to invest $100 million in a development program. At the IoT World 2015 show in San Francisco May 12, Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics, introduced a family of development boards that the company hopes will be adopted by developers and enthusiasts as they build their connected devices.
Samsung’s Artik family of development boards come in different sizes and with varying degrees of performance, features and components, giving developers options for hardware to power everything from small wearable devices and residential IoT systems to drones, home appliances and surveillance cameras.
Verizon’s $4.4 billion acquisition for AOL, announced on May 12, will help the prospective parent company gain additional online advertising tools as well as a stream of fresh and varied content, according to industry analysts. The content will help attract more users in the face of growing online advertising competition from Google, Facebook and others.
For Verizon, the key benefit of the purchase is acquiring AOL’s established online advertising platform, even more than the company’s content, Andrew Frank, an analyst with Gartner, told eWEEK.
Verizon Wireless and Sprint Corp. will pay settlements of $90 million and $68 million, respectively, to U.S. regulators after government investigations determined that the two companies “crammed” customer phone bills with unauthorized charges and then ignored complaints and requests for refunds. The actions marked the agency’s third enforcement action since October 2014 against U.S. phone carriers for bill cramming. With the latest case, the FCC has now fined all four major U.S. carriers, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, a total of $353 million for the practice.
IBM announced new design and analytics capabilities as part of IBM Marketing Cloud to enable brands to address the rising complexity marketers face engaging with customers as individuals. Announced at the IBM Amplify 2015 conference, these new capabilities from IBM enable marketers to collaborate, design and deliver customer experiences with a focus on personalization.