IoT news of the week for April 27, 2018

Google loses $621 million on Nest in 2017: Alphabet announced its quarterly results this week, and due to Nest moving from Alphabet back into Google this past February, the company restated its Nest financials for 2017. They were not good. Revenues from Nest products and servers totaled $726 million, but the segment had $621 million in losses. Which speaks to our mantra of “hardware is hard,” even for the big players in the IoT industry. And while Google didn’t tell us how many Nest products were sold, clearly it’s costing too much to either develop, produce, market, or support them. That may be OK for a company that finds ways to monetize data captured from users, but it’s not a solid long-term strategy. Even for Google. (Variety)

AWS continues to be a big part of Amazon’s income: Amazon’s quarterly earningslanded late this week and AWS is big. Really big. While IoT doesn’t account for all of the AWS revenues, it’s a large part of the segment’s growth (and is the preferred cloud platform of IoT developers). AWS brought in $5.44 billion in sales and $1.4 billion in operating income — which accounted for a whopping 73 percent of the company’s total operating income for the quarter. (CNBC)

The perils of employee surveillance: Harvard Business Review takes an interesting look at how employees react to sensors and cameras that monitor them on the job. Most employees don’t like the “Big Brother” approach, it found, even when employers may have good reason to add such devices to the workplace. And although employees initially feel like they’re always being watched, eventually they find ways to “disappear” by not standing out. That can make it harder for bosses to understand their employees, which can, in turn, create even more mistrust and yield additional monitoring systems. It sounds like a vicious cycle, so if you’re thinking of adding them to your workplace, be sure to clearly explain what, exactly, any monitoring devices are being used to watch. (HBR)

The do’s and don’ts of industrial IoT: Stacey published an insightful piece on IEEE Spectrum this week explaining a two-path approach to industrial IoT projects. One way is to focus on short-term ROI on a small project, while the other is to focus long-term on changing or adding to an existing business line platform. Smart advice that IoT startups should consider. (IEEE Spectrum)

Alexa’s natural language processing will be more like Google’s: In order to reduce the friction from a query-based conversation, Amazon outlined some upcoming changes to its Alexa assistant. There will be less reliance on users specifically requesting a skill, for starters. If Alexa can parse your query and match it with an existing skill, you won’t have to first ask her to start the skill — you’ll just get the contextual answer. But you won’t have to offer specifics on follow-up questions. Asking “Alexa, how’s the weather in Portland?” followed by “How long does it take to get there?” should return the travel time to Portland, for example. This is much more natural than having to say “Portland” in the second request since Alexa understands the context of the conversation. (Amazon Alexa Developer Blog)

Should businesses trust Alexa in the office? Chexmark cleverly created a proof-of-concept Echo Skill, a simple calculator skill, that appeared to do one thing —  crunch numbers. Turns out it was also eavesdropping in the background. And it wasn’t that hard to do. Amazon is aware of the demonstration effort and will take more steps to vet skills to stop this from happening in the wild. Still, notes Armis co-founder and CTO Nadir Izrael, that’s scary, especially given that 82 percent of enterprises use an Echo, typically in an executive office. (Wired)

Video surveillance on the border gets a boost from FreeWave: This week FreeWave announced a product partnership with McQ Inc. that will be used later this year for U.S. border surveillance. What’s unique about this solution is that it uses unlicensed 900 MHz spectrum to show video over long distances, with relatively low power consumption. Video streaming typically has high-bandwidth and high-power requirements, but this effort can be powered by solar, wind, or fuel cells — without needing Wi-Fi or cellular capabilities. (FreeWave)

Connected device efforts at AT&T are on the rise: In its latest quarterly earnings report, AT&T noted that its Business segment added one million connected devices — think cellular-capable IoT devices — in a single month for the first time ever. The mobile operator also announced a multiyear IoT deal with Caterpillar for connected machinery in more than 155 countries, and a new cloud-based IoT device management platform called Multi-Network Connect. As smartphone saturation hits the U.S., AT&T is smart to focus on IoT opportunities going forward. (AT&T)

Tesla loses an Autopilot chip exec: Jim Keller, Tesla’s VP of its Autopilot program, is leaving after being with the company since 2015. Keller came to Tesla by way of AMD and prior to that, the now Apple-owned PA Semi. Where’s he heading? It sounds like Intel, which recently bought Mobileye for its computer vision and processing products in the self-driving car segment. (Electrek)

Do you want an Alexa-powered robot? I do, and I said as much just a few weeks ago on our podcast. In fact, I was thinking of getting a battery for either an Echo Dot or Google Home and grafting an assistant onto a Roomba in my house. Sounds like I may not have to, since Amazon is reportedly building a domestic robot for a possible 2019 release. Chime in on the comments and let me know if I’m out of my mind, even though there are some definite benefits to having such a device. Personalized presence detection is just one of them. (StaceyOnIoT)