IoT news of the week for Nov. 22, 2019

Alexa continues to dominate the smart speaker market: When it comes to smart speaker sales, Amazon continues to boost its lead, according to Q3 data from IHS Markit. Amazon shipped twice as many smart speakers as Google, thanks in part to Amazon Prime Day, which occurred during the quarter. As expected, the most popular devices in each category were the cheaper Echo Dots and Google Mini. (IHS Markit)

Everything you ever wanted to know about digital twins: Digital Twins are a hot topic for the industrial IoT, and for good reason. Digital Twins can help companies understand complicated systems and failures of those systems as well as act as a resource for a machine’s health. In some instances, companies are starting to license copies of digital twins as a potential source of revenue. So much is happening in this area, that it’s helpful to check out the latest issue of the Journal of Innovation produced by the IIoT Consortium, which is all about digital twins. (The Industrial Internet Consortium)

How should the courts handle AI? Figuring out how to apportion justice when artificial intelligence makes calls that were traditionally made by humans is no longer just an intellectual game. Courts are rapidly seeing cases where people sue based on biased algorithms. But how can we get judges to understand how these neural networks work, or how a company builds and deploys a model? And can we use current legal frameworks to achieve justice for problems caused by algorithms? These questions and more are the topics of several essays published this week by the Brookings Institution. The essays all deal with AI and provide for some thoughtful holiday reading. (The Brookings Institution) — Stacey Higginbotham

IOTech gets $7.5M for an edge computing platform: IOTech is a startup building a business based on the open-source EdgeX platform, which acts as middleware for the industrial IoT. The company has raised $7.5 million led by Dell Technologies Capital, with additional funds from SPDG (Société anonyme de Participation et De Gestion), Northstar Ventures, and the Scottish Investment Bank, which is the investment arm of Scottish Enterprise. IOTech makes money by offering additional products and services associated with the EdgeX open-source code, including a professionally managed version. The EdgeX platform was created by Dell a few years back to help bring data from machines from different manufacturers into one place for standardization. Standardizing allows companies to pull that data into applications and easily see their entire manufacturing operations. Before this, the industrial IoT was simply too fragmented or companies had to pay other vendors to do it for them. (IoT News) — Stacey Higginbotham

Using AI and sensors to concentrate solar energy: Solar energy is awesome because the sun provides gigawatts of power every time it rises. The challenge is how to convert that power into something we can use. For now, we’re using photovoltaics (silicon coated in a variety of materials) to gather and convert it, but the vast majority of it gets lost. Now, however, a startup called Heliogen has applied computer vision and granular control of hundreds of solar cells to concentrate sunlight in a manner that leads to greater usage of the sun’s energy. This has interesting applications for industrial settings where we use non-renewables to process metals. It will also have heating applications. (Heliogen) — Stacey Higginbotham

Interesting bit on future AI jobs for the edge: Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang was interviewed about the plethora of AI chip startups out there, and to no one’s surprise he felt that Nvidia had the experience and deep software stack that some of these other chipmakers lacked. I’m always excited for some trash talking in the chip world, but most interesting about the interview was when he talked about the jobs that AI should handle at the edge next. Computer vision and natural language processing are now taken care of, but Huang believes multimodality and multidomain learning will be the next challenges. Basically, he’s talking about devices that can take in information from multiple devices/locations/apps and then derive context. (VentureBeat) — Stacey Higginbotham

HomeKit support comes to Abode. Apple iOS device users that have either a first- or second-generation Abode Iota DIY security system might want to update the firmware of their Abode devices. This week, Abode announced Apple HomeKit support availability through a software update. Once the Abode firmware is updated, you’ll have direct HomeKit control support for the security system via the Apple Home app and Siri on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and HomePod devices. Although this is a good step forward for Abode, I’m a bit surprised Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video feature didn’t come along for the ride. (Abode) – Kevin C. Tofel

Amazon’s old Dash technology gets a new life in the office. I miss the old Amazon Dash buttons that let you order specific items with a simple button push as you were running of certain home products. While Amazon retired the Dash buttons earlier this year, it appears that some of the Dash fulfillment technology is getting reused, this time for businesses. Amazon this week launched the Amazon Dash Smart Shelf. The idea here is that office supplies are placed on the connected shelf, which is also a scale, and when the level of office supplies has decreased enough, replacements are automatically ordered for you. Long live Dash! (Amazon) – Kevin C. Tofel

Sonos just bought a voice assistant company. In a bit of surprising news, Sonos this week announced that it spent $37.5 million in cash to purchase Snips, a voice-assistant startup. At first blush, this seemed odd, since Sonos has already integrated both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant into its most recent products. But Sonos doesn’t plan to compete with those as an “ask anything” voice assistant. Instead, the Snips integration will be focused solely on music, and all of the language processing will take place on-device, for both faster responses and improved customer privacy. I’ll be interested to see how well such a single-purpose assistant plays out for Sonos. (Variety) – Kevin C. Tofel