In addition to pursuing sales of the Pixo in the developing world through 90 distributors, Dickinson sees plenty of opportunity for the machine in food safety and research labs in the U.S. Academic researchers must often wait to get time on a lab's PCR machine.

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"Improving the way management engages with workers gives them an opportunity to be something greater than part of a machine, " says Ian Spaulding, a senior partner at the firm, which is based in Hong Kong.

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As the Internet of things evolves, the M2M (machine to machine) space is going to provide big opportunity as the number of connected devices is forecast to grow from 1 billion to 50 billion by 2020, according to Forrester.

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