IoT news of the week for Feb. 10, 2023

An update on Matter from Home Assistant: The Home Assistant platform is basically the DIY smart home platform that I hoped SmartThings would become when I first covered SmartThings back in 2013. It is open, highly customizable, and has multiple integrations created by companies and users. This week, it published a blog post with an update on its Matter plans. Home Assistant has pledged to support Matter, and so far Matter works on the platform including support for Thread devices via Thread border routers from Apple and Google. However, the post notes that “the Thread border router in Home Assistant is operational but not integrated until the next release, Home Assistant 2023.3.” But it also offers an explanation of how Home Assistant will handle multiple Thread networks as well as other useful tidbits. It looks like we should spend more time with Home Assistant. (Home Assistant)

It’s the end of the road for Enterprise IoT Insights: Pour one out for Enterprise IoT Insights, a publication I read religiously to keep up with trade news about 5G networks, case studies about digital transformations, and the strongly telco-oriented eye it keeps on the IoT. Enterprise IoT Insights’ parent has decided to shutter the weekly, saying it doesn’t believe there’s demand for a publication covering industry 4.0, enterprise IoT, or whatever it is we call it now. Aside from feeling personally attacked, as a reporter who has covered broadband, cloud computing, and other infrastructure tech over the past 20-odd years, I tend to agree that IoT is no longer a separate category of tech coverage, but rather one of many core underlying technologies that have faded into basic infrastructure status. I often find myself struggling with how to define IoT and instead just rely on picking stories based on whether or not I think they’re interesting. But I encourage y’all to read the goodbye in which James Blackman, a freelancer who wrote consistently for the site, lays out the fatal errors that led to the end of this dedicated IoT publication, because they are relevant and mostly true. And feel free to send your enterprise IoT stories to me. (RCR Wireless)

Stop trying to make the industrial metaverse happen! I couldn’t help but let out a cackle when I saw this headline from The Information about Microsoft killing off its industrial metaverse division. I am mean, I don’t wish job losses on anyone. It’s just that the maw of enterprise hype cycles has been spitting out silly combinations of tech jargon for quite some time, and industrial metaverse was one of my least favorite. No doubt part of Microsoft’s move here was a result of the lack of federal support for its HoloLens product aimed at the U.S. Army. But it’s also an indication that despite the hype there’s no there there yet for an industrial metaverse. Let’s get digital twins standardized first. (The Information)

Avnet creates an IoT platform with AWS: Avnet has teamed up with AWS to launch IoT Connect on AWS, a service that combines AWS computing elements necessary for building out the cloud side of an IoT device. Upon initial launch, IoT Connect will support AWS IoT Core, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and AWS Lambda. Later releases will include support for AWS IoT Greengrass, FreeRTOS, AWS IoT Analytics, and AWS IoT SiteWise. The idea behind the service is to help device makers build connected products without having to become experts at building out cloud infrastructure. Avnet will provide the platform on a variety of hardware so device makers have flexibility. It’s akin to some of the services provided by Ayla or Tuya. And this makes sense. Everyone is building connected products, but not everyone needs to become a cloud specialist. I’d look for something similar to help those who want to use Microsoft Azure next. (Avnet)

Two standards orgs in the industrial IoT will now collaborate: The Digital Twin Consortium and the OPC Foundation have announced they will work together to harmonize their respective standards and work toward interoperability. The Digital Twin Consortium wants to build interoperable schema for labeling and managing the creation and use of digital twins while the OPC handles standards for sharing data across different platforms. So with the two working together, OPC standards should also be able to create digital twins that can work for anyone using the Digital Twin Consortium standards. Since a digital twin will only become useful outside of its creating company if there are standards in place, this is a good sign, although it probably won’t really move the needle widespread use of digital twins just yet. (Digital Twin Consortium)

How a water treatment authority is using AI: Usually when a public affairs official tries to hop on a trend, the results can be painful, but some enterprising communications pro at the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District decided to ask two long-standing employees about the use of AI in the wake of all of the excitement around generative AI such as ChatGPT and Dall-E. The results are great! The post describes how the sewer district is now able to remotely monitor three of its wastewater plants from a central location with crews of only two or three employees thanks to remote sensors, and how it’s using ChatGPT to help with code documentation for the apps and services employees are using. Go check it out. (Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District)

Kudelski becomes the latest company to certify Matter devices: As I’ve written before, the Matter smart home interoperability standard has a big focus on security. One element of that security is a certificate that confirms that the device trying to join a home network has been certified as a Matter device (this is to prevent unauthorized devices that might spoof the Matter badge from joining). As part of that process, a device maker has to contract with a company to get the certificate in question. Digicert and StrongKey are already providers of this root of trust certification and now Kudelski has joined their ranks. (Kudelski Group)

NIST approves new lightweight cryptography algorithms for the IoT: When a programmer wants to encrypt data she turns to cryptography, which is just a fancy way of saying math. Most of the time the math requires quite a bit of computational power to encrypt and decrypt data. This is bad for constrained IoT devices, which don’t have the computing power or the battery power to handle robust cryptography. It’s also why it’s nice that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released algorithms designed for the needs of constrained IoT devices. The federal agency held a public evaluation and has chosen a group of cryptographic algorithms called Ascon, which was developed by Graz University of Technology, Infineon Technologies, Lamarr Security Research, and Radboud University. The algorithms have undergone years of testing, and will be published later this year. (NIST)

InfluxData scores $81M for IoT database: Earlier this week I wrote about more money for InfluxData and how it plans to use that funding to reach profitability and keep plugging away during what is probably going to be a rough funding environment for tech startups. (Stacey on IoT)