NEW YORK — It’s the early days of the Internet of Things (IoT), but the largest technology players are moving quickly to stake out their territory. In the past month, Apple announced a new smart home platform, and Google made a similar announcement for Android — moves that pushed both companies to the head of the “Top 10 Most Influential Companies” in a new Influence Study on the Internet of Things, released by Appinions.

The study reveals an increase of almost 70 percent in the volume of influential conversations about IoT between late March and early July, said Appinions. Within this timeframe there was activity from Intel (which modified its managerial structures to increase IoT focus), Cisco (which made three strategic investments), Zebra (which purchased Motorola’s enterprise business for nearly $3.5 billion), and others. As the study documents, these moves got a lot of attention and reaction, with influence scores climbing sharply around each announcement.

Looking at individual products, the Dropcam smart camera and Honeywell’s Lyric intelligent thermostat grabbed the top two spots for garnering the most influential reactions. The Logitech Harmony Remote, Philips Hue Bulb, and Kwikset Kevo E-Lock are among the other top Internet of Things products covered.

“Four months ago, Intel and Microsoft were dominating the conversation” said Larry Levy, founder and CEO of Appinions, “but we’ve seen a tremendous surge on the consumer side with shipping products and these consumer-facing moves from Apple and Google. And while smaller in scale, we also found that the Industrial Internet is garnering a lot of attention in its own right.”

To create this report, Appinions said it identified and analyzed over 40,000 opinions relevant to the Internet of Things from a pool of over 100 million documents plus social media posts. The opinions and the reactions generated were then ranked using a proprietary scoring algorithm, which considers the people or entities that reacted to these opinions, the credibility of the outlet where the reaction was published, and the overall volume of reactions to each opinion.

The Appinions Internet of Things Influence Study is available as a free download at http://dj.appinions.com/iot-july-2014/.

For more information, visit www.appinions.com.

Publication date: 7/21/2014

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