IoT news of the week for Dec. 9, 2022

This news was first published on Dec. 9 in my weekly Stacey on IoT newsletter. 

UnaBiz needs more money after Sigfox purchase: After acquiring beleaguered Sigfox last year, Singapore-based UnaBiz raised $25 million in Series B funding. This week, that funding round was doubled to $50 million as the company plans to weather any economic storms in 2023. Long a player in the Low-Power Wide-Area Network space for IoT, Sigfox went into receivership — essentially a restructuring bankruptcy — and UnaBiz bought the company. Purchasing a proprietary network technology brings challenges, though, and it seems like UnaBiz could use more capital to manage the integration of Sigfox’s services. UnaBiz says it has “closed down Sigfox’s loss-making entities” and plans to invest the funds in the verticals of utilities, security, facilities management, and supply chain and logistics. (TechCrunch)

Ericsson disconnects itself from the IoT: Although Ericsson’s IoT division brought in $76.9 million in 2021 revenues, the company is pulling the plug. Why sell? Ericsson’s IoT business has been a “key driver” of losses in its enterprise division. But one company’s losses is, potentially, another company’s gain. IoT provider Aeris is purchasing Ericsson’s IoT holdings, which include the company’s IoT Accelerator connectivity management platform and Connected Vehicle Cloud platform. I can’t say I’m surprised. Amazon and Google are both diminishing their IoT investments to a degree. Ericsson following the pack out of certain low-margin efforts just makes sense. Let’s check in on Aeris this time next year and see if it can extract higher margins from the assets and technology. (Enterprise IoT Insights)

Bosch’s connected camera app store is no more: Speaking of shutting down IoT efforts, Bosch is closing its app store for AI-connected cameras. This probably has less to do with profit margins and more to do with building responsible AI-based applications. Originally, Bosch debuted this store as Security and Safety Things, later rebranding it to Azena. But changing names didn’t help anything when Azena was reportedly performing only basic, high-level audits of the AI-based apps in its store. At the time, Azena felt the burden of vetting belonged to device customers, which defeats a key reason to have an app store in the first place. I get that responsible AI isn’t easy, but even a little more effort would have appeared better. Azena also allowed app sideloading to supported cameras, which basically brings an app free-for-all type of situation. (TechCrunch)

Palo Alto Networks strengthens medical device security: At least this week isn’t all doom and gloom on the connected device front. Palo Alto Networks introduced Medical IoT Security, a zero-trust solution for medical devices. The company uses machine learning (ML) to create device rules with automated security responses and verify network segmentation, among other features. The latter is important when it comes to blocking threats from an infected device (not an infected patient) causing havoc across a medical facility’s network. Using ML, Medical IoT Security can detect when a medical device is generating more data than expected, even terminating the network connection to that respirator or x-ray machine. (Palo Alto Networks)

LTE for Raspberry Pi is a thing: Raspberry Pi continues to be the little board that could — except when it comes to a Pi-based IoT project that needs cellular connectivity. As luck would have it, that’s changing courtesy of a funded Kickstarter project bringing 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE modules for the Raspberry Pi. Personally, I’d think any connected project would be better served with a Wi-Fi or LoRaWAN module on a Pi. But there are situations where a cellular connection for the Raspberry Pi might make sense. A 4G LTE Pi HAT will cost you $86, or you can save $7 and go for the LTE dongle instead. (Kickstarter)

Looking for the best fitness tracker? We review fitness trackers and smart watches in this newsletter but we can’t review them all; there are simply too many and we only have four wrists between us. So this overview of some of the best fitness trackers is worth sharing. The Whoop band, which Stacey did review, is atop the list. However, know that it’s really meant for high-performance athletes and you don’t buy the device; you pay a monthly subscription fee. There are others on the list that I wasn’t familiar with, so if you’re in the market for a wearable fitness tracker, you might want to read this article. (Well + Good)

There’s a new time-series IoT database: I read some surprising news from the Apache Software Foundation this week. Apparently, InfluxDB and other time-series database companies need more competition because that’s exactly what Apache has launched. The Apache IoTDB is an open source solution for large-scale IoT data collection, storage, and analysis either at the edge or in the cloud. (Phoronix)

Yes, the robots are taking jobs away: I love me some robots, but I might be loving them a little less after reading this report. In China, an estimated 77% of workers could be replaced by robotic automation. Of course, most of those jobs are on production lines that are well-suited for robots. Even so, the impact of increased automation could reduce total employment by 7.5% in China. For a services-based economy like the U.S., the risk of robot-caused unemployment should be reduced to a point. Then again, I’ve been chatting with the latest OpenAI bot lately and could easily see such technology displace knowledge and service workers here. (IoT Tech News)