IoT news of the week for Dec. 31, 2021

Editor’s note: This missed its scheduled publication date, so I’m publishing Sunday instead of Friday. Apologies. 

Why IoT ExpressLink was the big news from AWS Re:Invent: This is a story I wanted to write based on conversations with a few IoT platform folks who build on AWS, but I never got around to it leading into the holiday. I say this so y’all will run over and read why the launch of IoT ExpressLink is such a big deal, including understanding why Amazon is betting big on machine identity to build trust in the IoT. Incidentally, machine trust is also why I think the blockchain will be so essential for the internet of things as well. (VentureBeat)

Is it the how or the what that makes something creepy? This story about Fitbit (now owned by Alphabet) filing a patent for developing games as a way to assess mental acuity and dementia risk portrays it as a less-creepy alternative to using voice analysis for the same tasks. But I think in this case, it’s not how a tech giant measures mental acuity that is creepy, but that it wants to gather this information at all. I’ve been thinking a lot about how tech firms can use IoT and AI to help people without being creepy, and it’s becoming clear that until they change their business models to selling tech from selling eyeballs, they probably can’t. By this I mean that if my doctor wanted to prescribe some games on my Fitbit to test my risk of dementia or Parkinson’s, I’d probably do it, because I trust that my doctor is incentivized to care about my overall health. Thus Alphabet should try to provide tools to the medical world that can assist in their jobs, not develop a parallel diagnostic track that seems to elicit disinterest from doctors and privacy concerns from users. (TechRadar)

I like these startups: Y’all may recall that for me, most of the 5G hype is still hype, and while I think the lower latency offered by 5G will eventually find a home in factory settings, we are not there yet. But I will keep an eye on these four startups highlighted by Verizon that are using 5G for manufacturing use cases. The use cases involve wayfinding, a robotic arm, computer vision for tracking safety violations, and robotic vehicles. (Verizon)

Speaking of 5G…: When we talk about 5G, we tend to focus on the capacity or the low latency, since you can send massive amounts of data over some swaths of spectrum used for 5G and low latency is built into the standard. But Qualcomm has written a blog post explaining how the technology can also deliver ultra-accurate positioning in areas where GPS or other satellite options might fail. Positioning is built into upcoming releases of the 5G radio standard; it’s made possible by the fact that 5G requires a lot of antennas with ultra-narrow beams. Those can be used to calculate angles of arrival for very close distances, which gives ultra-precise location. My hunch is that 5G will require more battery and more CPU power than other methods, but for use cases where location is important, it’s going to find a home.  (Qualcomm)

Here come the Wi-Fi HaLow devices: The Wi-Fi Alliance certified the long-range, low-power Wi-Fi HaLow standard in November, and now we’re seeing sensors and gateways designed to use the tech. Deviceworx, a company that makes sensors and gateways, and Newracom, a company that makes systems on a chip, have announced products designed to work with the Wi-Fi HaLow standard for the industrial sector. These products will ship in Q2 of 2022, and I can’t wait to see how demand shapes up for this version of Wi-Fi designed specifically for the IoT. (Newracom)

IoT security firm Claroty purchased a medical device security company: Claroty, fresh on the heels of raising $400 million for IoT security, has now purchased a startup called Medigate. Medigate makes custom software for health care practitioners and clinical environments. Hospitals are currently a popular target of ransomware, but in addition to taking down IT departments, security breaches could also infiltrate connected medical devices and directly affect patient care. That hasn’t publicly happened, yet, but every health care IT worker has a tale to tell about unpatched Windows machines on medical equipment or vulnerabilities found in monitoring equipment. The Medigate purchase gives Claroty, which is known for its OT security monitoring expertise, an entry point into the health care market.  (IoT World Today)

Why not embrace some predictions? I loathe year-end prediction coverage, and now that I don’t have to listen to an editor, I generally don’t do them. But people like them, so I thought I’d share some published predictions that jibe with my own (if I were willing to write them down). Most of these are pretty obvious, but that does make them more likely to happen. In fact, they are mostly all happening right now and I predict they will continue to expand in the coming year. (IoT Tech News)

Two perspectives on web3: Look, I get that we’re all hyped up about web3 or Web 3.0 or whatever we’re calling this conflation of decentralized ledgers, computing, and creation, and I’m down for that. But honestly, when everyone still has a different definition of something, it’s hard to talk about it, much less figure out how it might fit something as broad as the internet of things. So I figured I’d share two perspectives that have me getting closer to understanding. If you want a definitive take from someone who has bought into the web3 concepts, @gillesdc is the one to read. If you want less propaganda and someone asking good questions and bringing up facets of the conversation worth having before we start making definitive predictions, Tim O’Reilly is your man. Together they offer a good baseline to start your own journey. (@gillesdc, O’Reilly, )