Residents of the Park Slope area of Brooklyn are now able to sell power generated from rooftop solar panels via a microgrid enabled by a blockchain ledger that records every transaction made with a local utility.

Enterprise applications have data and generate content, but it is largely internally generated content. It is content that is generated from transactions occurring inside the four walls of the enterprise. But in the supply chain world we need an end to end view of the supply chain that includes content external to the enterprise. New Content as a Service offerings can help provide this perspective.

Field service technology company Servicemax has partnered with software and services firm PTC to offer an Internet of Things system using radio frequency identification, satellite, long-range low-power (LoRa) RF or Wi-Fi technology to report when a piece of equipment starts to malfunction - even, in some cases, before a user notices the problem.

The IoT revolution is gathering pace, impacting people's lives and the way they interact with the everyday 'things' around them. According to Cisco's 11th annual Visual Networking Index: Global IP Traffic Forecast Update, the number of connected devices will have grown nearly 2.5-fold, from 4.9 billion in 2015 to 12.2 billion by 2020, when global IoT spending is predicted to have reached $1.29tr, as outlined in a new IDC Internet of Things Spending Guide.

Challenge: As a quickly growing business, one of the world's largest infrastructure and irrigation equipment providers realized its existing approach to managing freight invoices wasn't keeping up. An entirely manual process – from tearing envelopes to rubber stamping G/L codes – the company was not only wasting valuable time and resources, but encountering costly errors.

Actility, the European startup battling with rival Sigfox to connect things from fuel tanks to Amsterdam's canals to the internet, has raised $75m from investors in a bid to win business in the industrial sector.