IoT news of the week for Dec. 4, 2020

Take a look at cellular’s expected role in the IoT: Ericsson’s latest Mobility report spends most of its time focused on 5G adoption and deployments, but there’s a page dedicated to the cellular equipment maker’s view on IoT growth. This is fitting because most IoT use cases probably will avoid cellular technologies because of expense. Ericsson believes that the lower-powered wide area network technologies such as NB-IoT and LTE Cat M1 will be about 45% of cellular connections by 2026 with 44% using LTE because the use case requires more bandwidth and has access to power. Overall Ericsson reports that roughly 6 billion devices will have a cellular connection by 2026. To put that in perspective, today we have about 6.6 billion IoT devices online and only 840 million of them use cellular networks estimates ABI Research. (Ericsson)

This is an awesome series of deploying HomeKit and building a smart home: They really should have a therapy program for folks like this guy, myself, and most of our readers who have started out with the simple idea of using home automation to solve a quick problem, and then ended up neck-deep in user forms and troubleshooting radios. Troy Hunt spent 123 days trying to build out a smarter home and his five-part series on how it went down is informative, entertaining, and probably a little too close to many of our lived experiences. It’s awesome. (Troy Hunt)

Flic second-generation buttons get HomeKit support: This is exciting for Apple and HomeKit lovers out there. Flic, a company behind a line of clickable and stackable buttons to control or trigger smart devices, has created a second-generation product that supports HomeKit. I owned a few Flic buttons and found them helpful for creating scenes or turning off lights when voice sometimes wasn’t advised. So if you’re a HomeKit family you can now pick up a few, and if you’re new to the smart home and not on HomeKit, you might enjoy them as well. (Flic)

More buttons, this time from IKEA: For those using IKEA’s Home smart platform and app, there’s good news! The home goods retailer is adding support for scenes in its app, and it will also soon sell a line of buttons designed to trigger those scenes. I’m stoked because I love a good button. I believe that you should have voice, buttons, automation, and even gestures to control things in your home. But I’m also a little crazy about this stuff. (The Verge)

Infogrid raises $15.5 million for smart building retrofits: Infogrid, which makes peel-and-stick sensors to track temperature, humidity, occupancy, and more raised a pretty big $15.5 million seed round from Northzone, JLL Spark, Concrete VC, The Venture Collective, Jigsaw VC, and an unnamed REIT. The company’s sensors are quick to deploy and tie back to an established cloud-based software that users can set up to trigger alerts when things get out of whack. These sorts of easy-to-use systems are gaining a lot of ground as companies try to add some smarts without calling in an entire team of systems integrators and consultants for some kind of digital transformation. These products are also good for companies that want to ship them to retail branches or other locations where non-IT staff will be responsible for setting them up. (TechCrunch)

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chip integrates 5G: Qualcomm just unveiled Snapdragon 888, which combines the brains of a chip with a 5G radio into one integrated package. This integration is what Qualcomm is famous for, and the addition of 5G is a technical feat. Yes, this is silicon designed for smartphones, but it’s worth mentioning because the technologies and designs used for the Snapdragon 888 will trickle down into chips designed for drones, medical devices, cameras, and more. So basically this is the granddaddy of the silicon that will power your 5G drone in three years. (CNET)

I forgot that Ecobee has a smart camera: Ecobee has enabled Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video on its SmartCameras, which means users can send their videos to Apple’s cloud as opposed to Ecobee’s. It also means that users who were using and paying for Ecobee’s Haven service can get similar features without using Haven simply by switching over to using Apple’s cloud and software. The Ecobee SmartCameras already worked with Apple’s HomeKit. (Apple Insider)

Elevāt raises $9.5M for industrial monitoring software: This 5-year-old company has raised a $9.5 million seed round from D4 Investments, members of the Keiretsu Forum, and Emles Venture Partners. The funding will help Elevāt keep up with the demand for its sensors and software as COVID forces industrial customers to figure out how to monitor and maintain factory equipment remotely. (Geekwire)

The department of defense is building an asset-tracking network for ports: The Department of Defense has selected LoRa chip provider Semtech and low-power network operator Ripl Networks to build a network for tracking assets and foreign guests at U.S. ports. The DOD needed a network that would use low-power sensors over a wide area, which means LoRa, or a proprietary network, were the only options. The two companies will also use sensors and software from Avnet in building out the asset-tracking network. (Semtech)