IoT news of the week for June 11, 2021

Bosch opened a fully connected chip-making plant: Bosch, an industrial giant that also makes specialty sensors and chips for automotive and industrial use cases, has opened a new 300 millimeter chip-making plant in Dresden, Germany. Bosch made a big deal of it being a 300 mm wafer plant, which means the chips are made on top of 300 mm wafers as opposed to the smaller 200 mm wafers that older chip plants use. But 300 mm has been the standard for almost two decades. Bigger wafers do show how confident Bosch is in the demand, but the real feats of the factory have to do with the inclusion of technologies like AR glasses for workers, digital twins of the machines in the plant, and sensors that will help boost productivity and yields. (Enterprise IoT Insights)

ADT “hacker” gets 52 months in jail: Remember the former ADT technician who installed home security systems for clients and then added himself as an administrator on the accounts so he could spy on women he fancied? I thought he was less of a hacker and more of a voyeur who saw ADT’s poor notification processes as an opportunity. After all, if ADT had let people know when someone new was added to their account, most people would have clued in. Still, I’m happy to report he will receive 52 months in prison for computer fraud. (Department of Justice)

More on Apple’s HomeKit and Matter plans: If you had more questions about Apple’s use of Matter after watching its WWDC keynote, check out its session from Thursday that explained how Apple will combine HomeKit and Matter going forward. (Apple)

Want to understand privacy regulations in the U.S.? If you have the time, this paper is an excellent overview of the current status of data privacy regulations in the U.S., which asks if the FTC should regulate privacy or if the federal government needs a new privacy regulator. The U.S. is alone among OECD countries in not having a separate agency handle privacy, and the report looks at six different metrics to assess which strategy makes the most sense. (Spoiler alert: It concludes that either approach could work.) But it’s the context and information about privacy regulations and enforcement that makes this report so valuable. (New America)

Monogoto gets $11M for connectivity as a service: Monogoto started in 2018 with a plan to create the Amazon Web Services of cellular connectivity for developers trying to build connected devices. The Tel Aviv-based company has recently raised $11 million to build out its platform. The platform reminds me of services such as Twilio in that it buys the connectivity from carriers and then provides access to cellular through access to its platform. However, its CEO and co-founder Itamar Kunik says the company has advantages on top of that because it lets developers build cellular connectivity services that include private networks and public cellular networks. As more companies embrace private networks for their plants or campuses the ability to build devices that roam from public to private is worth focusing on. Maybe Twilio should give Monogoto a call. (Monogoto)

A new self-driving vehicle platform raises $83.5M: Waabi, a Toronto startup that hopes to use AI in new ways to build a self-driving car, has raised an enormous round of funding. The startup has raised a Series A funding round of $83.5 million led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Uber, Radical Ventures, 8VC, OMERS Ventures, BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund (WIT), and Aurora Innovation Inc. The round also includes several leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, such as Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li. Rather than trying to teach the AI driving a car how to “see” the world as humans do, the company is building an AI that is capable of understanding the rules and edge cases associated with driving. This will theoretically reduce the need for millions of test miles to teach the AI how to react in every situation. (Waabi)

Networking and cloud needs for the IIoT: One of the challenges for companies trying to bring their facilities and factories online is that the networks connecting nodes in those systems are proprietary and fragmented. Your fire alarm isn’t using Ethernet, for example. But as the desire for digital transformation grows, companies need to rethink their old networks and figure out how to get things onto IP networks and into the cloud. And they have to do so securely. This article, even though it is authored by a vendor, does a good job of laying out challenges and the way to think about this. As someone familiar with IT networking, I found it especially helpful in trying to understand the needs of a more industrial system. (Design World Online)

Want to play with a Bluetooth sensor board? We get a lot of questions from people trying to learn more about IoT development and the IoT in general. While there are now degree programs, one of the best ways to learn about IoT is by doing. Most people are either really good at hardware or software, and the fun of the IoT is that you’re combining both. This means everyone is learning something new, and you’ll find a lot of people who are willing to help solve problems. Increasingly, however, people are also trying to layer machine learning on top of that, which can be a new challenge. So if you want to start playing with hardware and edge-based ML, this review of the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board provides some real talk about what’s entailed and the challenges in getting a local ML model running on the device. (Make Magazine)