The technology and “business model transitions” are trends that “favor” Jabil Circuit, CEO Mark Mondello said on a Wednesday earnings call. “Consumers demand more and more devices be connected, connected to each other, connected to the cloud and connected to the end user -- automobiles, appliances, meters, home security systems, drones, just to name a few,” said Mondello, whose firm provides contract-manufacturing and supply-chain services to companies like Cisco, HP and Sony Mobile Communications, but counts Apple as its top customer. “This world of massive connectivity assures that more and more data will be generated. This in turn requires more bandwidth, which requires more computing power and more storage.” Mondello thinks mobile devices “are here to stay,” because they “monitor and control an infinite number of connected devices as well as connect all of us in our daily lives,” he said. “Apple remains dominant in this space.” Representatives at Apple didn't comment Thursday.

Cloud computing and big data firms are expected to drive much of the global threat and vulnerability management (VM) market's predicted expansion over the next four years, which is expected to increase the market's revenue from $5.8 billion in 2015 to $8.6 billion in 2020, ABI Research said Wednesday in a report. Cyberattacks are driving an uptick in the use of VM services, with vulnerability assessments alone netting $2.1 billion revenue in 2020, ABI said. Software security testing should generate $6.9 billion in revenue in 2020, ABI said.

Western European consumers will buy 24.5 million connected fitness trackers and 20.8 million smartwatches in 2020, Parks Associates said in a Tuesday report. “The expansion of mobile device platforms to wearable form factors creates many opportunities for developers to build new services and applications,” it said. “For the smart watch, its location on the body and easy access put it in a great position to act as a remote control for smart home features, a role currently occupied by the smartphone.” Parks estimates that 10 percent of broadband homes in Spain own a smartwatch, followed by 8 percent in the U.K., 7 percent in Germany and 6 percent in France. In the U.S., a third of broadband homes own a digital health and wellness device, and 10 percent plan to buy a smartwatch by midyear 2016, the researcher said.

Amazon’s introduction of its low-cost Fire tablet has sparked “a significant change in the tablet industry’s competitive landscape,” ABI Research said in a Monday report. At $50, the Fire’s price “is significantly lower than the average vendor selling price of $323,” ABI said. “It is a calculated risk that Amazon can afford to take as the company shifts its revenue focus away from solely hardware and toward recurring digital content sales.” ABI Research estimates Amazon sold 5 million units of its various tablet models in Q4 2015, it said. That was enough to rank Amazon third overall for branded tablet shipments in the quarter, behind Apple (16.1 million units) and Samsung (9 million), it said. For calendar 2015, Amazon sold 7.6 million tablets, ranking it fifth behind Apple (49.6 million), Samsung (34.1 million), Lenovo (11.1 million) and Huawei (7.7 million), it said. Most tablet suppliers are taking a “wait-and-see approach” to Amazon’s $50 Fire, ABI said. Going for such a low-ball price is “a path only few can follow, as vendors without content distribution rights and value-added services can only rely on the transaction price of their hardware to stay in business,” it said. “Conversely, content owners may find value in broadening their ecosystems by striking relationships with tablet vendors to get their programming in front of more users.”

SaaS (software as a service) platform Shopgate added Apple TV apps to its roster of shopper channels, joining iPhone, iPad and Android apps, it said Friday. The Apple TV apps were to launch Saturday during Shopgate’s South by Southwest launch party, said Shopgate. The large-format interface for Apple TV apps is customizable with drag and drop widgets, said Shopgate. The company said it simplifies content management by connecting a merchant’s e-commerce store to its Shopgate account and automatically syncing products and orders. Shopgate’s persistent shopping cart allows customers to complete purchases in the Apple TV app or jump among devices without starting over, Shopgate said.

Harman completed its buy of cybersecurity company TowerSec (see 1601050057), it said Friday. TowerSec specializes in onboard network protection for connected vehicles. Harman expects the transaction to be dilutive to operational earnings by about 5 cents per share in FY 2016, and it will be reported as part of Harman’s Connected Car division, it said.

ICANN’s 2017 meetings will be in Copenhagen, Johannesburg and Abu Dhabi, it said Friday. ICANN will meet in Copenhagen March 11-16, 2017, in Johannesburg June 26-29 and Abu Dhabi Oct. 28-Nov. 3. ICANN also confirmed this year's June 27-30 meeting will now be in Helsinki, Finland. It said in February it would move the June 27-30 meeting from Panama City amid concerns about the outbreak of the Zika Virus in Panama and other nations in Latin America (see 1602080015). ICANN will meet Oct. 29-Nov. 4 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Toshiba became the first Japanese company to join the OpenFog Consortium, whose other members include Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University’s Edge Laboratory, Toshiba said in a Thursday announcement. The consortium “brings together key players” in the IoT “ecosystem” to promote the deployment of “fog computing,” Toshiba said. It defined fog computing as a “paradigm for expanding cloud computing” to enable the creation of storage and network services between devices and cloud data centers “in a highly virtualized manner.” OpenFog “works to accelerate innovation and industry growth through new business models and applications enabled by an open fog-based architecture,” Toshiba said. “The OpenFog architecture brings seamless intelligence from the cloud to IoT endpoints using an open standardized approach.” IoT’s “prevalence” has made it possible to monitor and control many types of devices over the cloud, Toshiba said. “The cloud receives and analyzes data to provide visualized information for use in prediction, efficiency optimization, downtime reduction, and performance improvement,” it said. “Companies also expect to add new functions to the IoT devices. All of these factors increase network traffic and pose a challenge to fast data.”

ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee continued debating Tuesday into early evening whether to adopt a document that would say the GAC is still unable to reach consensus on supporting or rejecting the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability's (CCWG-Accountability) proposed recommendations for changing ICANN accountability mechanisms. The GAC is expected to say in its response it “has no objection” to the ICANN board transmitting the existing CCWG-Accountability proposal to NTIA. GAC members indicated they fully support nine of the 12 recommendations included in the CCWG-Accountability proposal but weren't sure whether divisions about three other recommendations mean they shouldn't partially support the proposal. GAC, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization and the Generic Names Supporting Organization all need to reach a conclusion by Wednesday whether they support or reject the CCWG-Accountability proposal. The ICANN board is to vote on the CCWG-Accountability proposal and a final Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition plan Thursday as part of ICANN's meeting in Marrakech, Morocco (see 1603040065). GAC's main sticking point in reaching consensus in Marrakech again involved how to handle CCWG-Accountability's recommendations on GAC's status within ICANN after the IANA transition. CCWG-Accountability recommended the ICANN board be allowed to reject consensus ICANN advice via a 60 percent majority vote. The working group also included a carve-out in its proposal that would bar the GAC from participating in final community votes on taking enforcement action when an ICANN community member objects to ICANN board implementation of GAC advice. GAC Vice Chairwoman Olga Cavalli, also one of Argentina's GAC representatives, led France and six other Latin American nations in objecting to both portions of the CCWG-Accountability proposal (see 1602190047). GAC told CCWG-Accountability in January it wasn't able to reach consensus on whether to support an earlier version of the accountability proposal amid similar concerns about earlier versions of the GAC-related recommendations (see 1601260067).

The U.S. District Court in Los Angeles directed ICANN not to issue the .africa generic top-level domain (gTLD), granting a temporary restraining order sought by the DotConnectAfrica (DCA) Trust that halts delegation of the gTLD until after a ruling is issued in DCA’s lawsuit over its claim to the gTLD. ICANN had chosen to delegate the gTLD to ZA Central Registry over DCA and issued an emergency resolution Thursday “to prepare to move forward” with delegation of the gTLD. DCA disputed ICANN’s delegation decision and won a binding independent review process ruling at the International Centre for Dispute Resolution in 2015 that found ICANN violated its bylaws after DCA’s earlier 2013 challenge to the .africa delegation decision. U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner in Los Angeles ruled Friday there are “serious questions going to the merits” of DCA’s case. The registry “has demonstrated that once the [generic] TLD is issued, it will be unable to obtain those rights elsewhere. Moreover, the injury it will suffer cannot be compensated through monetary damages,” Klausner said in his order. ICANN claimed “the African governments and the ICANN community will suffer prejudice if the delegation of the gTLD is delayed,” Klausner said. The restraining order “will allow the Court time to consider arguments” from DCA, the registry said in a news release. ICANN said it plans to file a brief on the case March 14 and will participate in oral argument April 4, “after which the Court will make a decision about whether or not ICANN can proceed to delegation, even though the lawsuit is still proceeding.”