Things like IoT, gadgets and tools.

3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 263

News 1. Nothing is sold out

Nothing technology launched the long-awaited first gadget, “ear”, and it’s sold out. With the latest functions of noise cancelling — one can regulate the level of noice cancelling. Remember? Nothing was launched by OnePlus’s founder Carl Pei with the ambition of “doing everything, every step of product development differently”. “ear” is the first result and sold out quickly. Opinion: 99€ is a very good price for the quality, compared to the AirPods. Sold out? That could be a well calculated launch strategy to ship smaller amount to increase attractivity — a well-known launch exercise in premium and luxury.

Would you buy one? Replace your AirPods?

News 2. The new IoT champion is Wiliot

Wiliot is both, tags with radio frequency and a cloud platform to manage the tags. The Israeli IoT startup gathered $200m investments from mighty Asian VC 83North, NTT, and Softbank Vision Fund. At the core is the “IoT Pixel”, a chip (bluetooth low energy and wireless Micro Controller Unit (MCU). With functions like memory of up to 1 KB for programme, identity and security.

Opinion: The intention is clear: scaling. Wiliot put forward three verticals: retail (stickers on clothes), food & beverages (traceability) and Health & Pharmacy (inventory).

Wiliot, the champion of tags!?

News 3. IoT and the blockchain: Helium

Helium’s ambition is to build a decentralised network of IoT — called “The People’s Network”. It is built and incentivised with the Helium Blockchain and currency that remunerates those who are building the network, a network of LoRa (Low-power wide-area network) and existing solutions like sensors, devices and gateways that can be configured to run on the network. The crypto coin is HNT.

Opinion: A complicated story to explain with all tech buzz of today: IoT, IoT network, blockchain, crypto currency. Helium is a very interesting project built on the same principle of the blockchain itself, but with a decentralised network of devices (LoRa). Helium, a closed system that finances itself with its own currency and ICO!

Learn Helium and know all latest tech trends!

Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon Innovations (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting innovations in main tech geographies, AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with an opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch.

Come back next Monday and share your opinion.