IoT news of the week for March 20, 2020

Smart home growth will slow in 2020: The coronavirus will diminish the sales of connected doorbells, speakers, appliances and more according to Omdia, a research firm.  The firm expects the global smart home market to fall nearly $20 billion short of revenue expectations in 2020. Instead of totaling  Omdia’s previous forecast of $120.6 billion, the research firm expects smart home device sales to fall to $101.1 billion in 2020. Smart home device shipments are now projected to reach 603.5 million units in 2020, down from the earlier forecast of 693.8 million. That’s better than the travel industry, I suppose. (Omdia)

Microchip releases a bunch of secure chips: As more companies embed sensors into their products, the market is expanding for systems on a chip or modules that combine a microcontroller, a radio, a secure element of sorts, and a sensor or actuator on a single chip or board. It cuts space, costs, and development time when chipmakers assemble these devices for companies. Microchip has just released a range of new secure microcontrollers that let users choose from a variety of sensor options and actuators, making the IoT a bit more secure. (EETimes)

Company trying to provide voice recognition for the enterprise gets $12M: Deepgram, a startup trying to provide real-time speech recognition, has raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Wing VC and including Nvidia, SAP, and Y Combinator. Deepgram has built its learning algorithms from the ground up, and claims this has helped it perform better than some of the competition. I personally think that in addition to accuracy and speed, any enterprise voice recognition service should also have authentication, admin rights, and more of the security and compliance features demanded by enterprise customers. (TechCrunch)

Reach out and touch some…thing: Haptics are an underappreciated user interface. In fact, whenever I get a new phone, the vibration-based feedback it generates when I type is one of the first things I turn off. However, there are places where haptic feedback is helpful and even essential. I’ve tested a bike helmet that vibrates faster as a car gets closer to me, providing haptic feedback about my environment in an unobtrusive manner, for example, and industrial settings often use haptic feedback as part of operator controls. But even as people find new uses for haptic feedback, fragmentation and a lack of standards in the required technology stack are making it expensive to innovate in the field and bring in more advanced capabilities. Which is why it should come as no surprise that I join this author in advocating for standardization at the low levels of tech so we can improve the experience for all. (Electronic Design)

Your smart home isn’t about the devices; it’s about the infrastructure: Design wizard Yves Béhar, who co-founded smart lock company August and has designed several smart products on his own, talked to Dwell about what a smart home is and isn’t. The biggest takeaway is that focusing on individual devices is difficult for consumers and most of the smart gear should become part of the home’s infrastructure. I’m all for this, but if we turn the home’s infrastructure into something smart, we are pretty much ensuring that it becomes part of a cloud-based service, which means monthly fees, management by a private entity, and perhaps a lack of choice when it comes to the products we put there. We’re not ready for that on the device side yet, and we’re certainly not ready on the customer side. (Dwell)

Build an on-air light to keep family out of the home office: With millions of kids home from school and workers everywhere working from home, the risks of embarrassing mishaps involving a spouse or child interrupting an important conference call, or just destroying your productivity, are high. Thankfully someone has offered us instructions for how to build a connected light that can signal to your family if they can enter your home office or not. (Advanced users might want to attach a door lock to it). In the creator’s demo, the light works by attaching it to his calendar, and shows red when he’s busy and green when he’s free. Check it out. (GitHub)

Next year’s “it” fashion item is an invisibility cloak: As governments put more surveillance and facial recognition systems in more places, there’s a growing movement to dress in ways that help avoid image recognition technologies. Some of these efforts are more art and anarchy than they are practicality, but this article explains well what people are doing and how facial recognition works. (The New Yorker)

Remember Huawei’s new operating system to replace Android? This consulting firm has taken a look at what Huawei is trying to do with its Harmony OS and concludes that it’s not just for phones, but is in effect an OS for all the things. Those things include computers, phones, car entertainment systems, cameras, doorbells, and so much more. The idea is to “build a secure OS that is decoupled from the underlying hardware” (I have questions about this statement, since an OS it what connects the applications to the underlying hardware). The consulting firm expects to see Harmony in desktop computers, vehicle computers, smartwatches, and more this year. (Futuresource Consulting)