![]() Most of today’s gains were due to the 2.2% jump in the share price of Bank of Valletta plc which climbed to a near four-week high of €2.28 across 12,327 shares.Despite today’s drop, week-on-week the RF MGS Index still registered a gain of 0.11%. In response, soon after the ECB unveiled its decisions, the 10-year and the 20-year benchmark German Bund yields initially surged to 0.453% and 0.961% – the highest since 28 January 2016 and 11 March 2016 respectively. Although the ECB President Mr Mario Draghi promised to keep the central bank’s stimulus measures for longer if needed in order to aid a still fragile economic recovery and dismissed any talk of tapering, many financial analysts viewed these latest moves as the first step by the ECB to normalise its current ultra-loose monetary policy. Although the ECB extended its quantitative easing programme by nine months till December 2017, it decided to scale down its size to €60 billion a month from €80 billion starting April 2017. On the bond market, following the strong gains registered on Tuesday and Wednesday, the RF MGS Index lost 0.38% to 1,143.759 points today – the sharpest decline in three weeks – as euro zone sovereign bond yields climbed (bond prices fell) due to the outcome of yesterday’s monetary policy meeting of the European Central Bank (ECB).Week-on-week, the local equity index advanced by 0.79% – the best performance in the last four weeks. Download a copy of today’s Equity Market Summary. Trading volumes improved to €0.26 million – the highest in the last eight trading sessions. The MSE Share Index closed higher for the fifth consecutive trading session as it advanced by a further 0.19% to an over three-week high of 4,506.009 points.The connected fridge will probably always be little more than a comical self-parody, but there is now real money being made from IoT, just in a grown-up, understated way. Here’s a LoRa base station, which is around the size of a box of cereal.Īll this seems to have translated to success for Actility, with the company benefitting from a perception of it as a leader in its field and potential customers actively seeking it out. A network costs tens of millions of euros to build, an amount that operators now seem willing to invest. Hersent explained that it is the best technology for smaller, less data-hungry applications and is significantly cheaper to deploy, use and maintain than NB-IoT (see diagram at bottom). ![]() Having decided to be a platform provider Actility is keen to be seen as LPWAN-agnostic but it clearly still has a big soft spot for LoRa. They’re not all boring, however, as this connected mousetrap shows. ![]() One of the reasons for this is that we seem to have come to terms with the fact that the money in IoT comes from relatively dry, boring, B2B applications such as logistics and utilities. We asked Hersent if he agrees with the conclusion from our recent meeting with Jasper that after decades of empty hype, IoT is finally at the beginning of its real growth phase, and he did. It wants to be the operating system for the internet, but views itself as operating in a different part of the IoT ecosystem to fellow platform provider Jasper. To be effective over narrowband software needs to be written a lot more efficiently than usual and Actility claims to provide drivers for every device. ![]() One major challenge it focuses on is an apparent mismatch between the devices and the apps worlds. “What is zero multiplied by several billion?” he said.Īctility was previously more focused on the radio access part of the IoT puzzle, with a strong affiliation to the LoRa LPWAN technology, but now it sees itself as more of an enabling platform, with a focus on ensuring a smooth, reliable connection between all these billions of devices and the internet. Speaking to at the event Olivier Hersent, CTO and Founder of IoT specialist Actility, revealed his company’s evolution mirrors that of the broader industry in that his focus is very much on monetization now, with any talk of scale irrelevant unless you get that in place. The word on the show floor at MWC 2017 is that tech megatrend IoT is finally moving on from the years of hype and is delivering commercially. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |