IoT news of the week for Feb. 7, 2020

California is taking a mulligan on its consumer privacy law: California just enacted a privacy law, but efforts are underway to tweak it by passing a new law that could go into effect in 2023. Passage of the new law is uncertain, but Protocol has an in-depth look at the interests that shaped the law and what it could mean. If you’re into understanding how your legal sausage gets made, this story is fascinating. If you just want someone else to worry about the law and tell you what to think, skip it. (Protocol)

The Feds say they are close to a privacy bill: California may not get the chance to redo its own legislation if the U.S. Congress can manage to pass its own federal privacy bill, and lawmakers say they are getting closer. Apparently, lawmakers are optimistic that this could happen by 2020, although so far commenters aren’t keen on the bill and it leaves several issues off the table. I’m not holding my breath. (The Hill)

IoT connectivity platform nets $21.5MM in funding: Another day, another IoT platform. This one is called floLive and it has built a distributed connectivity offering for companies that want to add cellular network support to their products without having to strike deals with different carriers. Carriers work with floLive, which provides an abstraction layer that will handle billing, traffic service level agreements, and other network management for customers. The $21.5 million funding round was led by 83North, and included notable venture capitalists: Dell Technologies Capital, Saban Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures LLC. The new funding round lets floLive expand internationally. (BusinessWire)

The Eclipse Foundation introduces a compliment to MQTT: MQTT is one of the most popular messaging protocols for the internet of things, but it still has holes. For example, it can be hard to tie two devices or services together without doing a lot of additional coding. To help make the protocol faster and easier to implement, the Eclipse Foundation is launching Sparkplug, a layer of software that runs on top of MQTT and creates a way to easily link services and devices without requiring custom code. MQTT is a publish and subscribe messaging model, which means if I had a stream of data to publish, I’d list the topics I have on that data and interested parties can subscribe to it. Sparkplug defines the topics uniformly so an entity can subscribe to the data it wants to receive. It also defines what type of data is coming down the messaging queue and helps define a way to manage state if the data contains state. All of these things, if adopted by the entire industry, will help make messaging easier. Chevron is one of the backers of this project and already the Eclipse Foundation is talking to Amazon, Microsoft and other providers of MQTT services to get on board with a standard here. (The Eclipse Foundation)

Particle has canceled its mesh network and shown exactly how to cancel a connected product: Roughly a year after launching a board for building an IoT mesh network, Particle has decided to kill the effort. Last week Particle said it would end the development of Particle Mesh, which used the 802.15.4 radios for ZigBee and Thread networks. In a blog post, Particle’s CEO Zach Supalla wrote, “Unfortunately, the decision boiled down to weighing the major investments necessary to make mesh networking totally seamless and invisible against the realization that 802.15.4 mesh networking turns out to not be the right solution for most of the customers who wanted to use it.”  Particle says it will stop selling the boards and promised a store credit. It also noted that the Particle Device Cloud will support setting up new Particle Mesh devices through the end of this year and said that the last software release to include mesh support will be in March. The blog post was apologetic, and the company included a detailed roadmap for deprecation and hosted a Live Q&A. It’s never fun to kill a device, but I’m impressed with how Particle is communicating and handling the process. (Particle)

Check out a gesture-controlled house that keeps the ML local: Ahead of the Tiny ML Summitt in California next week, I’m finding all sorts of delightful projects that highlight how people are trying to use relatively low-powered processors to run machine learning algorithms. This project features a dollhouse where all of the home control commands are gestures made with a motion controller. And those gestures are recognized on a Pi Zero or a straight-up Raspberry Pi. The project is a big how-to for others, so if you want to build a wand to open and close your shutters or control your ceiling fan, check it out. (Max Offsky)

Samsung is apparently doing a Wi-Fi lock: Last month at CES I was overwhelmed by the number of locks I saw. So many new Wi-Fi locks, locks that use NFC and many other variations on the humble mechanism. Well, soon there may be one more. Samsung has filed with the Federal Communications Commission to approve a Wi-Fi-enabled smart lock with a PIN screen and fingerprint sensor. (FCC)

For those looking for the next big thing: Surprisingly, IoT and AI aren’t a huge focus in this presentation from former Andreesen Horowitz partner Benedict Evans, which is highlighting the macro and micro trends in technology for the year. However, the presentation provides a good rubric for understanding the influx of tech into everyday life and for the increasingly complex number of regulatory conversations we’re going to be having in the next few years. Check it out.  (Benedict Evans)