IoT news of the week for Oct. 2, 2020

Gatorade has developed a skin sensor for hydration: Marketers are having a heyday with connected devices. PepsiCo’s Gatorade brand has worked with Smart Design and Epicore Biosystems to develop a skin patch that will track your sweat rate and electrolyte balance to let you know if you need more fluids (or Gatorade). The project is cool, and being able to track athletes’ hydration, especially those playing sports in hot weather, could be useful. I wonder how it will actually be used and applied. (Smart Design)

Software AG is doing just fine: Enterprise IoT Insights spoke with Software AG’s CTO Bernd Gross to see how COVID-19 was affecting the software giant. Apparently it’s going well, with Software AG signing contracts in industrial and healthcare to help offset slowdowns in its other businesses. Gross also points out that Software AG expects the pandemic to push many of its customers to continue investing in digital transformation projects that require its integration expertise. So far, in the first half of the year, sales rose by 30%, and he expects some growth to continue through the end of this year. So, good news for those betting on IoT to help keep tech firms on a somewhat even keel. (Enterprise IoT Insights)

The Big Four accounting firms have new standards that could boost the IoT: Well, GAAP accounting just got a bit more interesting. The four major accounting firms have adopted a set of social and environmental standards that could help calculate how companies are performing when it comes to everything from equal pay to carbon emissions. The new framework adopted by the firms contains 21 core metrics and 34 extended metrics, and it’s up to corporations to voluntarily adopt them. But as someone who is constantly harping on how we should be using sensors and IoT to make invisible things like pollution visible, these standards offer a reason for companies to actually invest in products that help them do just that. Because in accounting you need ways of measuring your efforts, and that’s what the IoT is all about. (Financial Times)

The AI behind medical devices and services is getting some new rigor: Plenty of companies tout their ability to diagnose disease using AI and a person’s voice, or AI and some radiology scans, or AI and any number of other inputs. But it’s hard to test those algorithms for efficacy. Now, medical groups are pushing to standardize the tests used to decide how well an AI can perform. By pushing for a peer-reviewed standard process, doctors and consumers will be able to take claims about AI in the medical field much more seriously. (MIT Tech Review)

Microsoft is ON IT when it comes to thinking about IP and data: Last year, Microsoft released a few standard contracts for sharing data and IP around data that I was excited about because they would make deals to share data easier. While most companies view their data as some sort of treasure trove of value, in most cases data is just a bunch of bits until people can apply their knowledge and other data to those bits to derive actual insights. The pre-set contracts made that easier. And Microsoft Assistant General Counsel Dave Green told the American Bar Association that in order for the massive amounts of data we’re collecting to do any good, companies need to open it up and relax their IP strategies around it. The article quotes him as saying, “We have more data now and will have more data tomorrow than we ever will. The incentives that IP provides to produce and create and distribute data just aren’t there.” Go read this article. It’s awesome. (Law 360)

Amazon launches a new time series database: Amazon has made its Timestream time series database generally available. Time series data is essential for the IoT because it track times and states. So sensors that report things like vibration, temperature, open/close status, etc., all tend to file their data into a time series database. Amazon’s Timestream is worth mentioning because it’s serverless, which helps with some of the economic issues associated with connected devices. The Timestream database spins up to accept new incoming information and then spins back down after the device reports, which presumably saves the customer money. (Amazon)

Twilio has a new IoT platform that takes care of security and connectivity: Twilio, the developer platform for telecommunications services, is going big in the IoT with its new Microvisor Platform. I explain more on the site. (StaceyonIoT)