Ofcom is to allocate 10MHz of VHF spectrum in the 55-68MHz, 70.5-71.5MHz and 80.5-81.5MHz bands for the IoT. Currently, licence exempt devices including M2M can access spectrum in the 870-876MHz and 915-921MHz bands. Ofcom says that the low data rates of IoT applications don’t require more spectrum. Business radio licences will continue to be available …

Ofcom allocates spectrum for IoT

Acal BFi, has signed a distribution agreement with Tronics Microsystems and will sell the French supplier’s MEMS inertial sensors to the European markets. The Gypro series of inertial sensors has a bias stability (Allan variance) of 0.8°/hour. Power consumption can be as low as 25mA. Pascal Langlois, chief executive officer of Tronics, writes: “This collaboration …

Acal BFi sells Tronics MEMS sensors in Europe

E-Ink is to de-emphasise its ambitions in the e-book market to focus on labelling, wearables, exterior displays, and auxiliary handset screens. E-ink had revenues of $414 million last year for a loss of $58 million attributable to the closing of its Korean subsidiary Hydis. It had licensing income of $100 million mostly from licensing its …

E-Ink to re-focus away from e-books

LG Innotek has added to its portfolio of ZigBee-enabled products based on Daintree technology and Samsung had announced compatibility with the Daintree platform after announcing a Smart Lighting Module at L+B.

You can now view Amazon Aurora clusters on the RDS console. Managing multiple clusters in your fleet is easier as the cluster view allows you to modify and delete clusters as well as manage the Aurora instances on them. For more information on the cluster view and APIs, read the Amazon Aurora User Guide . To know more about Amazon Aurora, visit our product page. 

You can now launch new Oracle 12c and 11g database versions “11.2.0.4v7”, “12.1.0.1.v4” and “12.1.0.2.v3” that include the January 2016 Oracle Patch Set Updates (PSU). In new versions, we also increased the limit on number of custom Oracle directories to 10,000 and enabled re-granting of read privileges on Oracle dump directories. 

Collins has been promoted from Chief Operating Officer to the position of Chief Executive Officer.

The Wyland National Mayor’s Challenge for Water Conservation is presented by The Wyland Foundation and Toyota, with support from The Toro Company.

The manual snow survey revealed a water content of 97% of historical average — a strong showing, but not strong enough to significantly alleviate the water deficits of the past four years of drought.

Head over to Andy Workshop for a wealth of Gadget Master material, including how he built his own frequency counter (originally looking for a simple tool for another project, he was side-tracked into building one himself). Thus began the “Nanocounter” (see right). “I somehow managed to persuade myself that it’d be a fun and educational project …

Measure the accuracy of Andy’s Android-friendly frequency counter