The Week in Review: IoT

Deals
Rambus finalized its acquisition of the memory interconnect business at Inphi. The closing price was $90 million in cash. The former Inphi business became part of the Memory and Interfaces Division at Rambus.

CyberX raised $9 million of private funding in a financing round led by Flint Capital. Glilot Capital Partners, Swarth Group, and GlenRock, all existing investors, were joined by a new investor, ff Venture Capital, and by angel investors. The Israeli startup offers the Industrial Finite State Machine technology for industrial IoT cybersecurity. “We are excited to have Flint Capital onboard and look forward to working together as we continue expanding our operations worldwide and in particular in North America,” CyberX CEO Omer Schneider said in a statement.

Market Research
Machina Research forecasts Internet of Things connections will increase from 6 billion last year to 27 billion in 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of 16%. It predicts worldwide IoT revenue will be $3 trillion in 2025, compared with $750 billion in 2015. Of that revenue total, $1.3 trillion will be derived from end-users, according to the market research firm, with the remainder coming from upstream and downstream sources, including application development, data monetization, hosting, and systems integration.

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm? With IoT technology. Lux Research has a new report, The Internet of Agricultural Things, which says ag IoT startups are being funded by investors, farmers can benefit from irrigation management data for better crop yields, and some farm IoT services may be too expensive at the moment. “Technologies have emerged to combat many of the difficulties inherent to deploying IoT on farms including durable hardware, effective connectivity infrastructure, and powerful information management and analysis platforms,” Sara Olson of Lux Research said in a statement. She added, “Solutions that focus on increasing crop yields and target multiple pieces of agricultural value chains have broader appeal.”

Security
ARM says that one year after it acquired Sansa Security and took on the Israeli firm’s 90 engineers, it has hired about 40 more engineers to work at the Kfar Netter design center. “The technologies we are developing in Israel will have a significant influence on advanced system-on-chip IP for IoT and mobile computing,” Mike Muller, ARM’s chief technology officer, said in a statement. “By almost doubling the size of our Kfar Netter design center in just over a year we have shown our commitment to building our highly successful team in Israel. Their work in areas such as IoT security is helping to form a solid foundation for a smarter and better connected world where data – as our most important new natural resource – is secured by design.”

Trivia
NIWeek, NI co-founder Jeff Kodosky gave a brief history of LabVIEW, which he said was inspired by the 1984 introduction of the Apple Macintosh computer. The platform was later adapted to run on the IBM Personal Computer and on PC clone machines. The LabVIEW FPGA Module, introduced in 1997, “democratized FPGAs,” Kodosky said. “No one asked for it. It’s history still in the making.” The module has helped popularize the use of field-programmable gate arrays over the past two decades, he said.

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