The Transforma Insights Blog

In this blog post, Matt Hatton explores the main trends he noted from Mobile World Congress and Embedded World trade shows in March 2026. The over-riding trend with regard to IoT was the technology is taking a back seat to commercial and operational issues. And, arguably, not before time.

For generations, natural gas has been an essential energy source for cooking, heating, electricity generation, and industrial use cases, and increasingly also transportation. It is a non-renewable energy source but is one of the cleanest fossil fuels that causes less harm to the environment. Fortunately, the use of renewable energy sources such as solar energy, wind energy, and biomass is expanding each year. As infrastructure for these energy sources improves, dependence on finite fossil fuel resources like natural gas will continue to decline.

Prior to 2021, smart speakers recorded strong annual growth, reflecting rapid early-stage market expansion. This early surge in smart speaker adoption was fuelled by their novelty, convenience, and promise they served to become a centralised smart home interface. Growth rates declined thereafter, due to market saturation, greater availability of substitute products, and continued privacy concerns. In this blog post, we examine key market factors that are challenging the position of smart speakers, as well as the strategies vendors are employing in response.

In 2024 non-communicable or chronic diseases were responsible for 43 million deaths globally. This has led healthcare organisations to adopt technological solutions such as IoT connected devices to remotely monitor patients to reduce the burden on healthcare staff and decrease the need for hospital visits.

One of our 2026 IoT Transition Topics, that we expect to define the IoT market in the coming year, is ‘The increasing requirement for localisation’. In this blog post we explore the forms that localisation will take, the drivers of it, and the implications for how IoT is delivered. The blog post touches on a number of topics that will be the subjects of reports forthcoming in 2026.

A recent Transforma Insights report on the IoT market for Inventory Management & Monitoring identified a huge growth in the market for electronic shelf labels over the coming decade, and beyond. In this blog post, Suruchi Dhingra examines the reasons for the growth in ESLs and where they are being adopted, in vast quantities.

Back at the end of October, we at Transforma Insights published our annual Communications Service Provider IoT Peer Benchmarking Report, profiling the leading providers of cellular-based IoT connectivity. In this blog post we provide a short summary of our perspectives on the capabilities of each of the players, as drawn from the report.

As we come to the end of 2025, here’s a recap of the most popular Transforma Insights reports, blog posts, webinars and white papers of the year.

Transforma Insights recently published a report ‘The potential for energy harvesting powering IoT devices’ that includes forecasts of the number of IoT devices that can potentially make use of four major energy harvesting sources – Solar, Kinetic, Thermal and Radio Frequency (RF) – and so can potentially operate without batteries or access to an external power source. One of the most interesting and quickly developing energy harvesting sources is RF. This blog post touches upon what RF harvesting means, what the potential for RF energy harvesting in IoT is and which IoT applications are suitable for RF energy harvesting.

In the recent Transforma Insights Communications Service Provider IoT Peer Benchmarking Report, we identified a series of key trends in the cellular IoT connectivity landscape. One of the major macro-level trends was the continuing requirement for MNOs and MVNOs to find mechanisms to differentiate their propositions. In this blog post we explore the 6 'S's used by CSPs for differentiation.