The Week In Review: IoT

Finance
Particle, the provider of a full-stack Internet of Things device platform for enterprises, has raised $20 million in Series B funding, bringing its total venture funding to $30 million. Spark Capital led the new round, with participation by Qualcomm Ventures and existing investors in the IoT startup. Machina Research estimates cellular IoT connections will increase from 334 million in 2015 to 2.2 billion by 2025.

Startups
Thinnect, a two-year-old startup that provides IoT technology to manage cooling, heating, and lighting in buildings, has only 14 employees; management is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., while the engineering team works in Tallinn, Estonia. The company is working with Estonia-based Cityntel to develop intelligent street lighting. Earlier this year, Thinnect received more than $1.7 million in private funding from the Band of Angels in Silicon Valley and other investors.

Cybersecurity
Senrio, an IoT cybersecurity platform firm, warns that a new vulnerability dubbed “Devil’s Ivy” could take control of security cameras and other connected devices through a zero-day exploit. It estimates millions of devices that use the gSOAP open-source code could be affected. Genivia, the company that provides gSOAP, has offered a patch for the software vulnerability. Other cybersecurity researchers believe the problem may not be as widespread as Senrio believes, while not calling into question whether this is a significant vulnerability.

Deals
Arrow Electronics is partnering with IBM to provide IoT offerings in the Asia Pacific market. Arrow services will be combined with IBM’s Watson IoT platform. The companies will work with CASCADEMICS Solutions, an Industrial IoT provider. IDC estimates the number of connected devices in Asia Pacific will grow from 3.1 billion to 8.6 billion by 2020, fostering a market opportunity of $583 billion.

Organizations
Envision Energy announced the formation of the Energy IoT and Smart City Technology Alliance, intended to bring together companies interested in the development of those markets. Accenture, ARM, and Microsoft are taking part, with other companies expected to sign on and participate. Envision will provide its EnOS IoT platform; ARM’s mbed operating system will be used to collect intelligence from physical assets to feed into EnOS. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform will provide computing and data storage, while Accenture brings its Enterprise Service expertise.

EdgeX Foundry, an open-source project hosted by The Linux Foundation that is working on a common open framework for the IoT, announced the addition of eight new members. They are Absolute Software, IoT Impact Labs, inwinSTACK, Parallel Machines, Queen’s University Belfast, the RIOT community, Toshiba Digital Solutions, and Tulip Interfaces.

Connectivity
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group this week rolled out its long-awaited mesh networking specification. Bluetooth mesh can be added to any device supporting Bluetooth 4.0 or 5.0. The wireless technology is expected to find applications in smart-home products. Meanwhile, a low-power Wi-Fi specification is under development, and the ZigBee mesh networking standard has its adherents and supporters, providing competition for Bluetooth.

Comcast plans to roll out its machineQ IoT network in a dozen U.S. metropolitan markets by next summer. The wireless network will serve hospitals and utilities, while also providing access to connected devices for other businesses.

CAS Technologia, Huawei Technologies, PinMyPet, and Vivo are working with u-blox on lab and field tests of narrowband IoT networks in Brazil. The testing began in the first quarter of this year and initially focused on metering and tracking applications.

Actility has a vehicle-tracking offering that combines its ThingPark IoT software platform with Abeeway’s Master Tracker hardware and low-power wide-area network gateways from Cisco Systems. The vehicle tracker will be offered in the U.S.

Market Research
Visiongain forecasts the Industrial IoT market will be valued at $228.4 billion this year. Details on the firm’s Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) Market 2017-2022 report are available here.

Research N Reports estimates the IoT operating system market will show a compound annual growth rate of more than 42% over the next four years. The firm’s Global Internet of Things (IoT) Operating System Market report features such companies as Mentor Graphics, Apple, Google, BlackBerry, and Green Hills Software.

Products
Huawei Technologies has developed the Huawei ME309-562 module, integrating the Monarch LTE-M/NB-IoT platform from Sequans Communications. The module will support IoT and machine-to-machine applications in North America.

Allied Telesis has introduced the scalable SwitchBlade x908 Generation 2 modular switch for IoT and smart-industry applications. Three x908 Gen 2 models will be available during this quarter, while the XEM2-1CQ model can be ordered in the fourth quarter.

Dell is working with Emerson Electric, Innodep, Talisen Technologies, and TSSC to implement IoT technologies in their organizations. A new report by Dell Technologies and the Institute for the Future asserts that all organizations will be technology organizations by 2030.