The intersection of real-time communications applications, analytics, and intelligence opens the door to innovative solutions that provide value added capabilities for both businesses and consumers. Artificial and augmented intelligence and machine learning techniques consist of applications that replicate human capabilities as well as enhance them.

Last week, I wrote about how great of a tool the Cisco VNI is for mobile trend analysis and how it might not be best to use as THE ONLY definitive future forward-looking mobile trend predicter. The reason I really started looking at the Feb 2017 report, though, was because I wanted to see what it said about WiFi offload. I just went off on a tangent last week.  This week, I return to the topic of WiFi offload.

My thesis has been that if WiFi offers lower costs for operators (who willingly support WiFi offload), then why do they not support this even more, as opposed to spending money on 5G? 

I reached out across the globe to some of my coworkers who are up on all things IoT and AI, and asked them to share some cool innovations they’ve recently come across. Here’s six that they wanted to share.

I’ve been at Mobile World Congress one day so far.  Here's what I've seen in terms of messaging.

If you keep up to date with the latest innovations in communications technology, ITEXPO has always been one of the places to learn, meet key vendors, and network.  With a regular winter event in southern Florida every year, it’s hard to say “no” to attending.  This year did not disappoint, especially with the addition of a co-located Internet of Things (IoT) event and even more to see and experience during your trip to Florida.  A few key observations:

This is the time of year I typically grade myself on the predictions I made this time last year.

In September, I wrote a blog on why mobile advertising is expected to grow based on Mary Meeker’s yearly Internet Trends report. Something to be considered is that there is also an opposing force to this: ad blockers. When you think of ad blockers, you probably think of it as an extension on your browser on your desktop that can only block ads when browsing on your computer. Ad blockers have kept up with the times and now provide smartphone-wide ad blocking...mostly with the exception of native ads.

Every year, Ericsson puts out a nice overall Mobility Report in June.  I’m finally getting around to reading it now.  There is some really nice information in there about IoT growth and 5G.

However, this one graphic really struck me. 

Back in April, I wrote a blog about LTE subscription growth and ended that blog with “by the end of 2020, half of all mobile connections will NOT be LTE.  In fact, in 2015, 3G still grew.”  On June 9^th, the GSA put a press release out about LTE, but that press release also contained the words “3G/HSPA subscriptions grew by 48 million” in Q1 2016.  So even though all we hear about is LTE these days, 3G remains important.

Facebook is at it again. Back in 2011, Facebook formally kicked off the Open Compute Project (OCP) along with companies like Rackspace, Intel, and Goldman Sachs. The intent was to share ideas and figure out ways to build the most efficient computing infrastructure at the lowest possible cost. The various projects were set up in an open source model to help hardware with more efficient, more scalable and more flexible platforms for computing, storage, and networking.  There are now more than 150 member companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and recently this year service providers AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG., EE, and Verizon all joined the project as well.