Internet of Things News of the Week, January 20 2017

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What’s your home’s IT budget? Josh Elman over at Greylock has a fairly intuitive post related to consumer spending on IT devices. He proposes that most households have a limited home IT budget that can grow over time as devices that once seemed like a luxury become necessities. And now that everyone considers flat screen TVs and smartphone a necessity, he thinks there’s room in people’s IT budgets for some connected home devices. How he’s trying to think about what makes the cut makes this worth a read. (Greylock Partners)

Hey look, Mattel is now a tech company: The new CEO of Mattel comes from Alphabet. Self-driving Hot Wheels anyone? (WSJ)

This is a good startup: Until Intel purchased it, I kept my eye on Movidius, a chip firm that was able to do computer vision on mobile devices. Likewise, when I saw some Qualcomm tech at CES that offered an image recognition sensor running on minuscule sips of power I was intrigued. That’s because anything involving machine learning (even the less intensive execution of a model) on battery powered devices is impressive. That’s why Neurala, a startup that just raised $14 million and offers a way to execute machine learning models on everything from sensors to servers is worth watching. (TechCrunch)

LoRa startup gets $7 million: TrackNet raised a $7 million Series A funding round from Minol Zenner Group and Gemtek Corporation. The company will use the funds to launch its LoRa-based internet of things platform that will compete with other low power wide area networks from carriers, Sigfox, Ingenu and others.  It plans to launch its first product at Mobile World Congress in February. (TrackNet)

TI has some new Bluetooth chips: They add automotive qualifications, Bluetooth 5 compatibility and more memory. (Texas Instruments)

Intel has $100 million to spend on …. shopping: We mentioned this on the podcast, but it’s worth another pass because this seems like something Intel is really excited about. Brian Krzanich gave a keynote at the National Retail Federation (NRF) conference for Pete’s sake. Intel plans to invest $100 million over 5 years in retail tech. This might not seem like a lot until you consider that this is just one segment of the market. It has broad needs with everything from RFID to computer vision for tracking customers. Intel showed off some crazy stuff such as 3D clothes printing at NRF to boost its tech wow factor at the show. (Intel)

Okay Computer: Amazon has added a new wake word for people’s Echo devices. In an homage to Star Trek (not Radiohead) it has added “Computer” to Alexa, Amazon and Echo as a way to turn on the device. (AFTV News, Twitter)

Samsung has a hackable camera: Anyone with the IP address for a Samsung SmartCam (I had one that worked with my SmartThings hub for a while) can hijack the camera and view its feed. Samsung says it plans to fix the vulnerability in a firmware update. (ZDNet)

Check your hosted databases on Shodan: This is a neat little trick for figuring out if your hosted databases are compromised: run them through Shodan, a site that tracks open ports on devices and much more. This is less about your devices being hacked and more about making sure your passwords aren’t compromised. Let this a be a reminder that when you spin up databases on the cloud you should lock them down. (Information Security Ramblings)

A guide to actually using your IoT data: Everyone likes to talk about how connected products can provide insights back to manufacturers about how those devices perform in the field, but Bosch has gone one better and explained how you actually do anomaly detection with device data. Is it wonky? Yes. But check it out if only to get a kick out of Bosch’s whimsical title tags if you open the link in a tab and click to a different one. I didn’t expect that from a German conglomerate. (Bosch)