The Fruit, not the Computers

For a long time we talked about IoT in the abstract, something that will happen. The future is now, and applications are budding everywhere, being used to solve practical real world problems in places you might not imagine. A Swiss company has created a device for monitoring fruit, not just the area where the fruit is being stored, but the actual temperature inside the fruit. Getting fresh fruit from the grower to the eater is complicated. The potential for spoilage increases the farther it goes and the more times it is transferred. With Wi-Fi enabled Fruit Simulators hidden in cartons of produce, and a mobile Pepwave cellular device, a grower could watch the crop go from the orchard to the final consumer destination.

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That is the question. Telephones are changing, especially in the United States. The traditional copper-wired network is not being innovated, and POTS (plain old telephone service) networks are being phased out. Even if you still have a wired phone service into your building, at some place along the line the call ends up digitized and transmitted, then turned back to analog at the other end. It seems like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is the obvious choice. No so fast. There are reasons why either might work best. It is an even more difficult choice for a business that already has an investment in an analog PBX system.

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One of your kids cleans her room and has good manners, but she’s always late. The other one doesn’t mow the lawn and his laundry is a heap on the floor, but he’s getting straight As. They both look a little like you and your spouse, so you can’t blame anyone else. It seems wrong; why do two kids who are so similar behave so differently? Your cell phone indicates four bars on the AT&T network, but your mobile router will not connect on the same network. It seems wrong; it’s the same network, why can’t it connect? While we will never understand our own children, there are reason why cell connections behave differently.

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We move a lot of product through our warehouse. In addition to our own asset disposition clients, we are the place where many other firms go to sell the retired hardware they removed from your business. Packages come in daily for us to test and repair before we accept them.

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If you spend any time around IT people you might think that in-house data centers and servers are as rare as pay phones. Like many things in popular culture, however, the reality is different from the perception. In the most recent study, released May 1, 2017, the Uptime Institute found, “the percentage of workloads residing in enterprise-owned/operated data centers has remained stable at 65 percent since 2014.” It would be easy to latch on to the 65% number and miss perhaps the most important element in their summary finding, the 65% has remained stable.

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