IoT news of the week for March 1, 2019

And the Oscar for best home hub goes to… Samsung’s SmartThings. That’s according to The Wirecutter, which I used to write for, and which has done a deep dive on smart home hubs. However, it also offers the caveat that most people probably don’t need a smart home hub because Google or Alexa can do the heavy lifting. (The Wirecutter)

Wyze may soon offer a light bulb? The sharp-eyed folks at ReviewGeeks spotted a Wyze-branded light bulb in a recent video posted by the company. Wyze, which makes a $20 connected camera, has become somewhat of a force in the world of consumer IoT, selling 1.4 million cameras as of the last count. Introducing a cheap light bulb makes total sense for the company. By the way, it seems Wyze is also coming out with sensors, which it also teased in the video. (ReviewGeeks)

Greenwaves just raised $8M: Greenwaves, a chip design firm that’s building a low-power processor for the IoT, has raised a €7 million ($8 million) Series A round. I had profiled the company after it launched last year, and CEO Loic Lietar came on the podcast recently to discuss RISC-V architectures and IoT. With this funding from Huami, Soitec, and other investors, the company says it will bring its first product, GAP8, to market. (Greenwaves)

And Li-Fi is back in the news: Signify, the light bulb company that spun out of Philips and makes the Philips Hue brand of smart bulbs, is testing Li-Fi installations with 30 customers. Li-Fi is a technology that uses light to deliver data between a bulb and a device. Several companies have experimented with the technology, from retailers to Disney. The challenge is that the light has to be able to shine on the device — a phone, for example — in order for the device to receive the data. And that means that phones in pockets or bags won’t work in such a system. This feels like a big hurdle, but Signify seems to be using the feature as a selling point by stressing its security. Because the data transmitted via light can’t be read without being in the room with the light, such communications are more secure. (LighTED)

From the privacy is dead department: It’s not your imagination. The business model that built the internet, namely selling your personal data for better advertising, is creeping into more areas of our lives. With the rise of the internet of things, we could see everything from our fridges to our thermostats trying to monetize our usage and patterns. Dystopian? Yes, but as this article points out, there may be an upside: the devices spying on you might get cheaper. Insert a sarcastic “yay” here. And let’s please buy products that don’t embrace this business model. (USA Today)

Tulip raised $18.4M for industrial IoT: This is both a cool startup alert and a funding announcement. Tulip is a company that makes a no-code industrial IoT platform that gives manufacturing engineers access to machine data and lets them manipulate it in a visual format. I’m intrigued by the idea and can’t wait to talk to the company to learn more because I don’t think every ops or manufacturing engineer out there is going to magically learn to code, nor do I think every IT person wants to take a crash course in how manufacturing works. (Pulse 2.0)

A good update on Wind River’s new plan: After Wind River was purchased by Intel and then later disgorged to go it alone once again, I have kept an eye on the company. As one of the elders of the embedded world, Wind River has a sense of what the industrial IoT needs on both the operations and on the IT side. At Embedded World this last week, the company launched a new platform for the IoT that tries to encapsulate its past and bring it into the more IT-driven future. This article does a good job explaining what the new Helix platform is all about. (CRN)

Ray Ozzie’s new company sounds like several other companies: The man who created Lotus Notes and put Microsoft in the cloud is back with a new startup aimed at connecting devices using an IoT platform and a connection from AT&T. The startup, Blue Wireless, sells a module that comes with cellular radios and a set fee that will cover the cost of the board and the data used. Basically, Ozzie’s company deals with AT&T so you don’t have to. This is a compelling offering, but it’s also something that other companies such as Particle, Electric Imp, and others also offer. (Axios)

Zededa raises $15.9M for industrial IoT: I wrote about Zededa almost a year ago and spoke to the company fairly recently about its edge device management software. Now the firm has raised more money as part of the general trend of VCs doubling down on startups that have gained traction in the hot industrial IoT market. (VentureBeat)