More than a decade after it started, the UK has finally got some mojo into its Smart Meter programme, reaching 10m Smart Meters installed. This is particularly impressive as more than half of these were installed just in the past year, during COVID.  To learn more about this and all the other Smart Energy innovations coming to our homes in the next 5 years, do join us on Wed 24th February for a live webinar on the Future of Smart Home Energy with panellists including Benjamin Kott of BP's Lightsource Labs, Phil Steele of Octopus Energy, Neil Stewart of GlenDimplex, plus renowned Oxford energy academic Sarah Derby and energy analysts Cornwall Insight.

Meanwhile in EV land, Shell announces it will acquire charging provider Ubitricity, and also pledges a massive expansion to 500,000 EV chargers by 2025. There's also some great perspective on the EV journey as Erik Fairbairn, who founded our customer POD Point, interviews Robert Llewellyn, presenter of Fully Charged (or for older readers, Scrapheap Challenge, or for readers as old as me, Kryten from Red Dwarf).

In other IoT news this month:

• The UK now has >1GW of battery storage live, with another 15GW in the pipeline.
• Starship Technologies' delivery bots have reached 1m autonomous deliveries - although not without a few mishaps (including some swimming)
• My home city of Cambridge is planning to deploy autonomous shuttles across and under the city by 2030
• UBlox won a CES innovation award for an LTE module which includes "Security-as-a-service" - even as Telit rebuffs their acquisition
• Is 5G network slicing relevant to IoT? Could be, says the always-excellent Stacey Higginbotham
• Silicon vendor Nordic, who've driven IoT innovation with many wireless chipsets, now launch TinyML on their modules, for machine-learning at the edge
• Osram joins a pantheon of IoT companies who've killed-off their first-born IoT service Lightify

And finally, a couple of items which make me feel like our science fiction future has arrived:

• How about a QR code which renders you invisible on some CCTV systems by triggering their anti-virus?
• US cops are playing pop music on their phones, to stop protesters publishing video of them by triggering Youtube's copyright-violation filters.

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

P.S. This is my 23rd monthly IoT update. Sign up for your own copy here.