IoT news of the week for Sept. 18, 2020

Welcome to the cloud as the command-and-control orchestrator: This article provides a very smart look at how edge computing has evolved and the types of computing architecture it needs. It acknowledges that the edge has many layers, with a wide spectrum of computing power and storage, then runs through ways to take advantage of those layers and avoid overloading dumb edge devices. It also explains the computing requirements and emerging architecture needs, in plain English. Now, let’s go find ways to make this work. (InfoWorld) — Stacey Higginbotham

IFTTT tweaks its Pro plan: Last week, IFTTT rolled out some advanced features and said it would charge users a monthly fee to use them. It initially said users could set their own price between $1.99 and $9.99 a month, with the idea that eventually everyone would pay $9.99 a month over time. But because it also limited the free users to just three integrations even though they had been used to as many as they wanted, many complained. Now IFTTT has changed its pricing so if a user becomes a paying customer and sets their own price before October 7, they can pay that price indefinitely. Now I kind of want to go back and change the $5.99 a month I selected to $3.99 a month. (IFTTT) — Stacey Higginbotham

A quick take on the ARM/Nvidia deal: I wrote about Nvidia’s planned $40 billion acquisition of chip design firm ARM. The TL;DR version is that when Softbank acquired ARM in 2016, the deal was about the IoT. Four years later, with Nvidia’s planned purchase, the deal is all about the data center. And cars. I didn’t write this in my original post, but two smart people have told me not to leave out the advantages ARM gives Nvidia when it comes to autonomous vehicles and the future of cars as sensing platforms on wheels. (StaceyonIoT) — Stacey Higginbotham

Facebook glasses are going where Amazon Frames didn’t: This week, at its Facebook Connect event, Facebook spent a rather lengthy amount of time sharing information on Project Aria. To help gather real-world user information, the company has employees wearing glasses frames with front-facing cameras, a half-dozen microphones, and eye-tracking technology. Thankfully, it has no plans to sell these specs because there’s just no way consumers would buy into this concept. Still, it’s an interesting research project to help improve the future of AR and VR, and one that’s worth watching. (Facebook) — Kevin Tofel

Libelium is transforming from a hardware provider into a service: Libelium has long provided custom sensors and software to customers in the smart agriculture, smart cities, and other smart infrastructure industries. Now it is moving from being a hardware provider to a services company, wrapping up packages of hardware, software, and services to create an easy-to-implement IoT solution for customers. Several IoT companies have been shifting their businesses to provide the whole service as customers struggle to bring all of the pieces of an IoT solution together without outside help. (Libelium) — Stacey Higginbotham

A private equity firm now owns several Sigfox networks in Europe: Cube Infrastructure Managers has purchased the company that operates Sigfox’s German IoT network. Sigfox operates a Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN), for which it also provides the proprietary radios. However, it has shifted strategies in some countries, letting Cube take on the network operator role in Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. There is a decided race to be the WAN of choice for connected devices, so I’m curious how this deal helps or hurts Sigfox’s chances. (Enterprise IoT Insights) — Stacey Higginbotham

We are just at the beginning of connected devices: I don’t have any insights here, except that this dress combines sensors, a custom wireless chip to send data to motorized scales all for the purpose of showing the world what the wearer of the dress is thinking. It’s fashion, an engineering feat, and a brain to computer interface. And whenever I read about projects like this I realize we are just scraping the surface of what we can do with the combination of human ingenuity and computing. (IEEE Spectrum) — Stacey Higginbotham