IoT news of the week for September 13, 2019

McRock Capital raises C$80M of Industrial IoT fund: McRock Capital, a Canadian venture fund that invests in companies trying to serve industrial firms, has raised C$80 million of a planned C$100 million fund. The company has now launched the fund, and partner Scott MacDonald says it will begin making new investments. He says McRock invests across North America and Europe and is looking for companies with at least C$1 million in revenue and preferably C$3 million to C$5 million at the time of the fund’s investment. McRock partners look for vertically-focused IoT in energy, mining, construction, logistics, city infrastructure, and agriculture. MacDonald emailed to say, “We are very focused on AI and data analytics and are always looking for good industrial cybersecurity companies.” (McRock Capital)

ProGlove raises $40M: A German company that makes a barcode-scanning glove for industrial environments has scored $40 million in funding. The round was led by Summit Partners and brings ProGlove’s total funding to about $60 million. I saw this technology a little over two years ago at Bosch IoT World in Berlin, and people there were lined up to see the demo. The scanners help employees on manufacturing lines, in warehouses, or in other jobs scan items faster and with more accuracy than they would otherwise. The scanner is embedded in a module packed with electronics that slides onto the gloves. The module can be swapped out as needed and are recharged on a custom-made device that sits on the factory floor. (VentureBeat)

Well, this take on AI certainly sucks: Most white-collar workers are likely thrilled when AI takes away their scut work. For example, I was an early lover of Expensify, which automated most of the process of filling out expense reports. But as AI becomes smarter, it’s going to also take away some of the easy (and even fun) decisions that we make on a daily basis, leaving us only with the toughest parts of our jobs. That’s the message from a former data engineer at Kickstarter. For some professions, such a shift might prompt employees to pursue more interesting work, but for others, it just means that they will have to tackle the orneriest decisions without having the break of making a few easy calls. I hadn’t really thought about this before, but there is a certain joy in putting off a tough story to write something a bit easier or tackling a few easy emails while you procrastinate about that tough one. And as AI gets better, we’re only going to be left with the tough problems. Maybe we can hope for more breaks? (The Atlantic)

How to adopt the IoT: There’s nothing terribly new in this op-ed about how to get your IoT project out of pilot purgatory, but it does cover all of the challenges associated with new tech projects and how to get over them, including the culture change that many companies seem to leave to chance. If you’re currently stuck, read this for a quick hit of inspiration. (MITech News)

Good talk on segmenting IIoT devices: This article discusses the downfalls of firewalls for industrial IoT security, saying they are too complicated and expensive. And it offers up network segmentation as a solution. But what caught my eye was how it notes that in IIoT networks, companies will be dealing with a lot of east-west network traffic. This is something I hadn’t really considered before. With east-west traffic, information is flowing across a network internally, whereas with north-south traffic, data is coming into and leaving the network. It’s a shift that happened a decade or so ago in the big data centers as information was being shared among apps and services on sites such as Google and Facebook. It also led to those companies rethinking their physical infrastructure and networking methodology. I wonder if the spread of IoT in enterprises and factories will do something similar for corporate IT. (Network World)

Control4 systems get Google Voice: CEDIA, the trade show for home automation professionals, is happening this week, so there is a ton of news on the pro smart home front. For example, Control4 said that now its Control4 Smart Home OS 3 connects the Control4 system to Google Voice. Control4 was purchased this summer by SnapAV, which is also expanding the number of products it sells. This week it added Sonos. Essentially what is happening is a concerted effort to add more brands that have weathered the consolidation and confusion in the smart home to pro channels. (DigitalTrends)

Konnected grows up with a new sales channel: Also at CEDIA, a startup making a computer board that plugs into existing alarm systems to tie them into today’s home automation services launched a new board and unveiled a pro dealer strategy. Konnected, which has sold about 20,000 of its alarm converters to date, has a new product that adds home automation to existing alarms without replacing those old systems. It will work alongside your alarm as opposed to replacing it. It also launched a plan to sign up professional dealers trying to get in on the smart home excitement. This is a good second step for the company since, unless you are a hardcore nerd, the current product is pretty intimidating to install and use. (Konnected)

Avnet has signed a partnership with Trusted Objects: Avnet, which is betting big as an integrator of IoT projects and distributor of IoT components, has signed a deal with Trusted Objects. The deal will put Trusted Objects’ security software on microcontrollers that Avnet sells, helping to create security that can stretch from device to network to cloud. The partnership falls into the large category of efforts by big-name companies to make IoT security easier, and is also part of the trend that realizes both the device and the cloud will have a role in security. (Embedded Computing Design)

The Economist tackles IoT in its latest tech quarterly issue: There’s not a lot that’s new here, but if you are trying to get smarter about the internet of things, it offers a nice overview. It covers cybersecurity (as we add more tech in more places, there’s more stuff to hack, and that stuff has a much higher impact on the real world!), business models (everything will be sold as a service), and for those worried about surveillance, the looming panopticon. Yay! (The Economist)

The FDA just approved an AI-based medical device: The FDA has approved a neural network trained to detect a collapsed lung in an X-Ray as part of a new product from GE. This is a pretty big deal, because as new data is gathered, most researchers expect to feed that back into the algorithm to train it to perform better. But it’s unclear how the FDA will manage that process and test the efficacy of updates. I wrote about the agency’s soul-searching on this topic here. (CNBC)

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