The Week in Review: IoT

Conferences
Internet of Things World 2018 takes place next week at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. Executives of GE Digital, The Chamberlain Group, and UPS will be among those giving keynote addresses during the four-day conference. Monday will see pre-conference workshops, followed by three days of keynotes, presentations, and an expo floor taking in 100,000 square feet of space. KNect365, an Informa business, is expecting 12,000 IoT professionals to attend. See you there!

M&A
Nokia acquired SpaceTime Insight of San Mateo, Calif.; financial terms weren’t revealed. SpaceTime CEO Rob Schilling becomes the head of Nokia’s IoT unit as a result. SpaceTime provides visual analytics software. It counted EnerTech Capital, E.ON, and NEC among its investors.

Finance
Carbon Black completed its initial public offering last week, raising $152 million. The company’s common shares trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the CBLK symbol. The cybersecurity software vendor granted the IPO’s underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to another 1.2 million common shares at $8 a share.

Lehi, Utah-based Owlet Baby Care raised $24 million in Series B funding led by Trilogy Equity Partners. Also participating were Eclipse Ventures, Broadway Angels, Enfield Ventures, and Pelion Venture Partners. Owlet provides health tracking devices for infants. The startup’s private and government funding now totals $33.2 million.

SafeBreach of Sunnyvale, Calif., received $15 million in Series B funding led by Draper Nexus. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, and HPE Pathfinder participated in the new round, bringing its total private funding to $30 million. SafeBreach provides a breach and simulation attack platform.

Drishti Technologies raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Emergence Capital. Andreesen Horowitz and Benhamou Global Ventures, which provided $2 million in seed funding to the startup, also participated in the new round. Drishti (Sanskrit for “vision”) was founded in 2016 and makes its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Using artificial intelligence technology, the company enables digital transformation in manufacturing by digitizing human actions within a factory to provide a dataset on employee efficiency and productivity.

Cybersecurity
Brian Krebs, the cybersecurity researcher, writes about a report by the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information on the Mirai botnet cyberattack of 2016, which took his website and many others offline due to the marshaling of thousands of unsecured IoT devices, such as Internet-connected security cameras, to enable a devastating distributed denial-of-service attack. The report estimates the attack cost IoT device owners nearly $324,000 in bandwidth and power consumption.

Market Research
Frost & Sullivan forecasts worldwide installations of smart water meters will increase from 13.8 million units last year to 82.1 million units by 2026, with China becoming the largest market for such devices in 2019. Smart water meters are part of the trend toward IoT-enabled advanced metering infrastructure, resorting to low-power, wide-area network cellular communications, such as long-range (LoRa) technology and narrowband-IoT, the market research firm finds. Find details on Global Smart Water Meter Market, Forecast to 2026 here.

ON World says IEEE 802.15.4 is the predominant IoT networking technology, thanks to its use in Amazon’s Echo Plus device and wireless mesh sensor networks. The market research firm estimates 500 million 802.15.4 mesh chips have been sold for smart homes and buildings, metering, smart cities, industrial automation, and other IoT applications.

Products/Services
At its Build 2018 developers conference this week, Microsoft announced it is making Azure IoT Edge runtime open source. The company is also providing Custom Vision and other Azure Cognitive Services available on Azure IoT Edge. Edge hardware from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Advantech, and Moxa will be supported by Azure IoT Edge.

At its developers conference, Google debuted version 1.0 of Android Things, for use by IoT device designers and manufacturers. It will enable the use of the Google Assistant technology and Google’s machine learning capabilities. Android Things 1.0 supports Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, and the Weave protocol.

E Ink will collaborate with SES-imagotag on developing retail IoT technology, using digital price tags. As part of the deal, E Ink agreed to invest €26 million (nearly $31 million) in SES-imagotag.

At IoT World, Google Cloud and niolabs will demonstrate distributed computing software integrated with the Google Cloud Platform and Cloud IoT Core.

Renesas Electronics will demonstrate embedded products at IoT World. These include the Renesas Synergy Platform, RZ/G microprocessors, and RZ/N1 microprocessors.

ADLink Technology will work with Lenovo Group to expand its offerings for the IoT.

Rigado introduced the Cascade edge-as-a-service, providing IoT edge connectivity, computing, and security for large-scale commercial IoT deployments.

Silicon Labs is teaming with Wirepas to provide multiprotocol connectivity for mesh networks. The offering pairs multiprotocol switching software from Wirepas with the ERF32 Wireless Gecko radio from Silicon Labs for industrial-grade IoT.