I'm looking forward to speaking on the challenge of what will happen as the EV charging market matures, later this month at the Energy Tech Summit Apr 27-29.

Smart Meters

• New (to me) was the EU's 2019 report into Smart Metering deployment, which gives a great overview of the state of play across each country.
• I blogged on why Smart Meters are finally ready to realise their promise and how to navigate the journey to Smart Home Energy.

EV

• Interesting EU stats on EV charging points in different EU countries here. By end of 2020 there were 224,000 EV charging points and growing at around 40% CAGR.
• Delta-EE ran a great seminar on public EV charging: The Journey towards a Great Customer Experience
  • Slide 13 is interesting – "73% of EU EV owners experience usage problems"

Security

• Another month, another two massive IoT security breaches:
  • 150k commercial CCTV cameras were hacked including hospitals and jails.
  • Name-wreck is the latest vulnerability to hit "at least a hundred million" IoT devices (it's a DNS vulnerability).
• That LG connected washing machine sending 1GB/day is presumably part of a botnet.
• If there is a security equivalent of uptime (i.e. number of days secure) then perhaps it should be called Securetime?
• Poisoning the town water supply has been a trope since at least the 6th Century BCE. Now a hacker has remotely manipulated a Florida water treatment plant.

• "Vital Signs: Why Service Monitoring is a Key Step in Effective IoT Cybersecurity" - our piece in Info:Security magazine. 

IoT comms

• Particle announce a new tariff where first 100 devices are free (for up to 100,000 datapoints/month).
• Flat-rate pioneers 1nce now offer NB-IoT coverage across most of Europe.
• BICS offer a Service Monitoring solution for their IoT SIMs

Other news

• ARM unveiled its v9 architecture, introducing the idea of "realms" (containers on bare metal).
• We did a little blog piece on Asset Management for IoT
• A blocker for ubiquitous, interoperable IoT is "semantic interoperability", e.g. when you say "switch on the light", how does Alexa know that device #14 is a light, and that it can be switched on? Some clever folks are thinking hard about it.
• More Internet of Shit (or, in this case, "Asshole Design"): Printers-and-ink is one of the classic subscription models, and HP have managed to turn it evil: Cancel your subscription and you can't even use the ink remaining in your cartridges

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

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