The Week In Review: IoT

Products
Intel on Monday unveiled the Responsive Retail Platform, with CEO Brian Krzanich making a presentation at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show conference. “Intel’s Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies touch every link of the retail supply chain. IoT sensors capture data that can be analyzed. Data centers crunch the information and give it real-world usefulness,” he wrote in an online editorial.

Meanwhile, Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat interviewed Rob Topol, general manager of Intel’s 5G business and technology, at CES 2017. “What we announced here at CES, one thing is the Intel Go platform, an end-to-end solution for working with automotive OEMs on autonomous driving. We put a 5G FPGA-based modem in that platform that can now test any sort of — wherever there’s 5G spectrum available, you can test those use cases using upwards of seven gigabits per second. Whether it’s HD map downloads or over-the-air updates to the car or media content, whatever use cases, it’s ready next month for use in cars to develop that,” Topol says in the interview. He adds, “The second announcement was our first-generation global 5G modem. Taking what we’re building in FPGA prototypes, putting it into an ASIC with a transceiver and a base band modem. What I was showing just a minute ago, this is the transceiver we announced. This supports both sub-six-gigahertz and millimeter-wave frequencies. The transceiver is ready now, as well as our millimeter-wave antenna arrays.”

Security
Brian Krebs, a leading cybersecurity researcher and blogger, claims a Rutgers University student was one of the people behind the Mirai IoT botnet, which wreaked havoc across the Web last October.

Government and industry should work together for better IoT security, Anne Hobson of the R Street Institute writes in this blog post. “There will be no single omnipotent cybersecurity fix for the Internet of Things. New cybersecurity devices are part of the solution, but standards set out by government agencies also will play a role,” she concludes.

Standards
The Open Connectivity Foundation is emerging as a critical force in setting IoT standards, Jared Newman writes in this analysis. The OCF, which exhibited at CES 2017, merged last year with the AllSeen Alliance and counts Intel, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, and Sony among its corporate members. Noticeably absent, however, are Amazon, Apple, and Google.

The IPSO Alliance said this week that its Security, Privacy and Identity Working Group has published its charter, laying out a framework for secure IoT interoperability. The initial charter deliverables include white papers in the areas of IoT roots of trust; cross-domain security policy profiles; IoT privacy best practices; and message-level signing, encryption and key management.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has formed an Industry Specification Group on cross-sector context information management for applications in smart cities. The group will have its first meeting at the ETSI facility in Sophia Antipolis, France, on February 9-10.

Market Research
The worldwide Internet of Things market will produce revenue of $1.13 billion this year, according to visiongain, a business intelligence firm. Its “Internet of Things (IoT) Market Report 2017-2022” is available here.

ON World sees the market for industrial IoT wireless sensing, tracking, and control equipment, along with associated services, growing to $35 billion in 2022 for agriculture, construction, industrial automation, and related markets. A free executive summary of the firm’s new report, “Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks,” can be found here.

Conferences
The IoT Tech Expo Global 2017 is next week, January 23-24, at the Olympia Conference Centre in London, England.

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