Cyberattacks are growing in number and scope due to rapid increases in interconnectivity and mobile data. In response, Moody's Investors Service announced that the credit implications associated with cyber defense, detection, prevention and response should start to take a higher priority within its credit assessments and analysis.

While physical gift card purchases and receipts are still preferred over digital, both awareness and actual use of digital gifts is growing, with male shoppers leading the way, says research from Stored Value Solutions. The research also suggests that adoption can be accelerated by making users, both givers and receivers, comfortable with the form factor.

Over-the-top headlines and estimates of the size of the IoT market create more confusion and skepticism about hype than a real understanding of how big the market really is. There needs to be a framework for understanding IoT market size.

With robots like BigDog and the Terminator-like Atlas, Google's robotics efforts have been a smash success - if you measure by YouTube views and buzz. Amazon's work has been more behind scenes (apart from the widely discussed plans for delivery drones). But Amazon's energies in robotics have also had a more immediate payoff than Google's "moonshots." The differing philosophies illustrate how Amazon and Google have taken starkly different paths so far in the race to automate the physical world.

Long tails can get, well, rather long. Some see this as a mandate to hunt down and kill off the items furthest out on the tail.

While vast "smart products" opportunities are allowing many high-tech companies to grow and lower their cost of goods sold, 57 percent do not have access to reliable product genealogy information, and 72 percent believe their product data is less than 80 percent accurate.