More than 99 percent of things in the physical world are still not connected to the Internet. The Internet of Everything (IoE) has the potential to connect the unconnected, thereby opening up unprecedented opportunities. But, it's not just things that are connected to the Internet. People, such as athletes, are looking to utilize technology, such as our IoE, to improve their performances.

Verizon re-launched on Oct. 8 the Verizon Innovation Center West in downtown San Francisco. The newly-expanded Innovation Center is comprised of collaborative lab environments, private lab space, demonstration and seminar areas, as well as office space that engineers and member companies can utilize to work with others to advance wireless technologies.

Several new and beta technology demonstrations are on display at the innovation center.

One application is the "Connected Athlete"(see photo below),which leverages the Cisco Intelligent Network, ACM System's smart-insole wireless sensor technology, Cisco helmet impact telemetry system and Verizon's 4G LTE network to help enable trainers to improve their athlete's performance and reduce the chance of injury by providing real-time and historical analytics of motion and pressure data. The demo also includes an application that showcases how fans can use this technology to interact real-time while in stadiums and enhance their connected mobile experiences.

Other demonstrations at the Verizon Innovation Center West include:

• Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) lets enterprises and service providers deliver customized location-based mobile services to people in retail stores, hospitals, hotels, and other environments.
• Cisco Meraki cloud-managed edge and branch networking solutions that simplify enterprise-class networks.
• Cisco 819 Integrated Services Router Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Gateway that supports third- and fourth-generation (3G and 4G, respectively) wireless WAN. The Cisco 819 ISR extends corporate 3G and 4G wireless WAN network services to billions of nontraditional Internet Protocol devices such as ATMs, kiosks, vending machines, digital signage, or small remote branch offices, as well as to stationary and mobile network nodes across wired and wireless links.

Verizon Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Tony Melone praised the efforts of Cisco for our support of the Verizon Innovation Centers.

"We believe the success of our Innovation Centers program is the direct result of a close working relationship with Cisco, who, as a founding partner of our centers in San Francisco and Boston, has helped bring the Centers' solutions to life," said Melone.

Cisco shares Verizon's passion on incubating innovations and leveraging wireless and cloud technologies to advance the cause of the Verizon Innovation Program.

"Being part of the Verizon Innovation Center for Cisco is a natural evolution of the partnership that we have with Verizon which began 25 years ago" said Jim Cassella, vice president of Verizon account team at Cisco.

I invite you to view a replay of a live broadcast from the Verizon Innovation Center-West featuring Verizon and Cisco.