The Week In Review: IoT

Conferences
The Internet of Things World conference is on tap next week at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. There will be more than 250 exhibitors on the show floor, with 11,000 attendees expected. More than 400 speakers will make presentations over three days, May 16-17-18. ON Semiconductor will have a number of IoT-related products to demonstrate at its booth, including its IoT Development Kit and battery-free wireless sensors. Distrix Networks of Vancouver, B.C., will be returning to the conference, one year after winning the Project Kairos Innovation of Things award; Distrix CEO Eric Winsborrow will speak during the Start Up Academy program on Tuesday, May 16. See you there!

Products
Coventor this week introduced its CoventorMP 1.0 platform, meant to provide a simpler, unified environment for designing microelectromechanical system devices in IoT applications. The platform brings together the company’s CoventorWare and MEMS+ design software tools. With the platform, MEMS sensors and actuators can be integrated into system-in-package components for IoT devices.

Microsoft announced Azure IoT Edge at its Build developer conference in Seattle. IoT Edge can run on Windows or Linux, Microsoft said, and on a variety of devices, such as Raspberry Pi, taking up just 128 megabytes of memory. “Azure IoT Edge enables IoT devices to run cloud services, process data in near real-time, and communicate with sensors and other devices connected to them, even with intermittent cloud connectivity,” Microsoft’s Sam George said in a statement. “By enabling processing, analytics and action to happen closer to the source of the data, Azure IoT Edge empowers you to make faster and smarter decisions, while reducing bandwidth costs by sending only critical information to the cloud for further analysis.”

Comark Instruments, a Fluke subsidiary, has introduced the Kitchen Manager, a food safety system that uses IoT technology to monitor hazard analysis and critical control points in food-service operations. The Kitchen Manager is a Web-based system for checking temperatures in food-storage areas. It can be used with Comark’s Bluetooth Pocketherm Thermometer.

M&A
Lochbridge, a Detroit-based developer of IoT offerings for automotive, financial services, health care, and manufacturing applications, was acquired by DMI of Bethesda, Md. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. DMI, a mobility technology firm, enters the connected car and IoT markets with the purchase.

Happiest Minds Technologies has acquired Cupola Technology, a provider of specialized IoT services; terms weren’t revealed. Cupola was established in 2011. Happiest Minds provides engineering and information technology services.

Finance
March Capital and GE Ventures led the Series A funding for IoTium, a developer of secure network infrastructure for the Industrial Internet of Things. The round raised $8.39 million for IoTium. Other investors include Juniper Networks, OpenSource Ventures, and Pankaj Patel, former executive vice president and chief development officer at Cisco Systems. IoTium’s IIoT network technology is a network-as-a-service offering.

Deals
IAR Systems is teaming with Ayla Networks to provide a comprehensive IoT product development environment. The IAR Embedded Workbench is being paired with Ayla’s IoT platform, used around the world for developing IoT products.

Honeywell Process Solutions and SKF are working together on an Industrial IoT pilot project at a copper mine in Latin America. The companies are jointly developing a user-friendly digital ecosystem to capture and analyze data from a plant operator’s machinery.

Organizations
Altair Semiconductor has joined the GSM Association as an associate member. The chipset company will work with the GSMA on adoption of cellular IoT technology.

Market Research
Grand View Research forecasts the worldwide Industrial IoT market will see a compound annual growth rate of 27.8%, increasing from $109.8 billion last year to $933.62 billion by 2025. Details on their new report are available here.

Future Market Insights sees the IoT embedded security market rising from $2.525 billion last year to more than $11.1 billion by the end of 2027, with controller chips accounting for the greatest part of such growth. More details here.

A new report estimates the IoT operating system market will grow 42.9% a year during the next five years, from $289.2 million this year to $1.72 billion by 2022. MarketsandMarkets.com has the market research report here.