Internet of Things News of the Week, July 7, 2017

Intel lays off 140 working in IoT: This isn’t unexpected after the decision to stop producing several maker boards a few weeks back, but Intel has laid of 140 people in Ireland and in the U.S. who worked on its Joule, Edison and Galileo boards. Intel’s IoT business generated $721 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2017, but this is a fraction of its data center operations, which brought in $4.2 billion in the first quarter.  (Fierce Wireless)

FitBit can’t build a smart watch … yet: Jawbone’s liquidation might be good news for FitBit, which has clearly won in the fitness tracking category. However, with such a commodity product, FitBit is trying hard to diversify. That may not be going so well, as Mark Gurman reports the company’s smart watch plans are in trouble. (Bloomberg)

More security thinking for the industrial IoT: As Russian hackers attack power plants in Ukraine and manufacturing executives worry about security on the factory floor, companies must marry their network security reporting to their process reporting. For example, it’s no longer enough to track the temperature of a boiler in isolation. That data must be combined with network intrusion data to understand if the plant’s operations have been breached. This type of effort should help companies know when they are attacked and perhaps will lead to ways to stop such attacks. Are there products out there that do this?  (IIoT World)

More smart speakers: Both Samsung and Alibaba are making smart speakers with voice assistants a la the Amazon Echo.  Each is designed for their own home markets of South Korea and China, respectively. One of the big barriers in the voice assistant market is language translation, which is making a regional focus relevant again as a competitive differentiator.  (Bloomberg, TechCrunch)

Want to get a broad look at the smart speaker market? This analyst offers a take on the business models, localization efforts and why the smart speaker market is being undercut by low-cost competitors. (Techpinions)

A conversation between NIST and Vint Cerf: Nothing in this conversation is new, but it’s always worth understanding where NIST comes down on cybersecurity, since its policies and efforts will help set standards going forward. Sadly, it’s not actually setting a standard or standards here. It’s merely saying that we need some. (NIST)

The latest OECD broadband data is here: Not a lot of insights to share, but the U.S. has more mobile subscriptions than people and a high number of connected M2M  devices. That number is high, but as a percentage of the overall population, it falls in line with places like Estonia and France. (OECD)

Read about N-ZERO and be amazed: DARPA researchers are building some pretty powerful, but not power-hungry, sensors. (FedTechMagazine)

Spot the problem in this article: The premise of the story is that smart cities could learn a lot from connected stadiums. And in many cases this is true. Stadiums have to provide network capacity for large crowds of people, handle security, direct traffic and more. However, stadiums are not public spaces. They are designed for consumption, not civics. The goal is to get data from people to enable them to have a personalized experience and buy more stuff. That changes how everything from cameras to phone data is used. I’m not sure I want my city optimizing for revenue collection just yet. (Developer Zone)

How Bosch saves on its A/C bills in Singapore: The industrial giant lets people control ceiling fans over tables in the company cafeteria. By pressing a button, they can decide if the fan goes on or off. By running fans, Bosch can keep the temps in the cafeteria higher, and save money. In this case, everyone wins. The company saves money (and energy) while employees get some measure of control over their environment. (Bosch)

Your future fridge might have a nutritional scanner built in: The future is closer than you may think, and it’s currently being tested on dairy cows. This story gives us an update on a company making a handheld scanner that can determine the nutrients inside food. For now, food giant Cargill is using the technology to scan food for dairy cows, but the company behind the SiCO scanner is also talking to appliance makers so consumers might see the tech embedded in their fridge or microwaves. (The Spoon)

The Verge reviews the Amazon Echo Look: The camera that lets Alexa judge your outfits apparently does more for Amazon than you. Surprise! (The Verge)