The Week In Review: IoT

R&D
National Instruments this week opened the NI Industrial Internet of Things Lab at its headquarters in Austin, Texas. NI and Real-Time Innovations are co-leading the Industrial Internet Consortium’s Industrial Internet of Things Microgrid Testbed, which will be hosted at the NI Industrial Internet of Things Lab. The testbed uses the Data Distribution Service standard and is working to develop an Ethernet-based time-sensitive network distributed control system, enabling the microgrid to run on 100% renewable-energy sources.

Finance
Naspers Ventures has led a $22 million round of private funding for FarmLogs, a precision agriculture startup based in Ann Arbor, Mich. Existing investors Drive Capital, Huron River Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, SV Angel, and Y Combinator president Sam Altman participated in the round, which brought total funding for FarmLogs to $37 million. The startup offers big data analytics and machine learning technology for agricultural applications.

Deutsche Telekom Strategic Investments and others invested $4.1 million in Roambee, an Internet of Things supply chain and enterprise assets visibility startup based in Santa Clara, Calif. Roambee will work with T-Systems, the corporate customer arm of Deutsche Telekom, in a global IoT partnership to provide real-time visibility into assets and goods in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

India’s Napino Auto & Electronics made a strategic equity investment in VVDN Technologies, a provider of cloud-enabled, end-to-end Internet of Things offerings. VVDN is an original design manufacturer based in San Jose, Calif. It will provide engineering services to Napino and outsource the manufacturing of complex embedded systems for Napino.

Products
NXT-ID demonstrated its IoT Stamp miniature module for wearable bands at CES 2017. The product was developed in cooperation with Nordic Semiconductor.

Services
Also at CES, Smartvue announced security upgrades for its portfolio of IoT video micro services. The new features are meant to prevent and mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks, deter IoT-focused hacks, and to improve platform security.

Deals
Hortonworks will collaborate with Neustar to develop open-source identity management and security tools for the IoT. Neustar will extend its OneID identity management to the open-source community, using Hortonworks Data Flow and Hortonworks Data Platform.

Awards
Frost & Sullivan recognized Keysight Technologies as the 2016 Global Frost & Sullivan Company of the Year for test and measurement in the Internet of Things.

Market Research
Mobile Experts forecasts cellular IoT devices will outnumber machine-to-machine devices in shipments within five years. More than 450 million c-IoT and M2M devices will be shipped in 2021, the market research firm estimates, with M2M devices representing fewer than 200 million units of that total.

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