This is my 16th monthly IoT update.

So that our customers can easily bring their device estate into their overall customer experience management process, we've announced integrations with almost every CRM tool on the planet. We also announced two new features: multi-metric KPIs (great for reporting) and the ability to interactively "slice" dashboards by any property, e.g. so that a dashboard which shows availability KPIs across all your sites can quickly be "zoomed-in" to explore a specific site, or a specific customer.

I was lucky to join an interesting panel "What next for the IoT ecosystem" hosted by The Things Industries (Enterprise LoraWAN providers) with senior IoT folks from Microsoft Azure, Ericsson etc.

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." A great Bill Gates quote from our partners POD Group's recent report into Harnessing Automation on the Path to Digital Transformation.

ARM is spinning-off its IoT business into two new companies, under parent Softbank Group, to concentrate on its core (core) business. Treasure Data (acquired in 2018) will be spun back out, alongside its IoT platform business (Pelion, mBed, and presumably Stream Technologies). Whilst the news outlets all parroted the same message that ARM has seen quite a bit of success in IoT (as indeed it has by the metric that billions of ARM chips are sold into IoT), my take is that ARM struggled to extend its IP business into the very different business of selling services, so transferring them all into separate entities makes a lot of sense.

Interesting to see Electric Imp acquired by Twilio. EI's founder Hugo Fiennes is a bit of a legend (he designed the early iPhones and the Nest thermostat) and it's fascinating that a company which specialises in delivering super-simple APIs for communications now sees super-simple IoT deployment as its obvious next step.

Other news:

• As politicians debate how to get the economy going again post-lockdown, Michael Liebriech's thinking is always worth reading: "Energy Efficiency is the Swiss Army Knife of stimulus spending"
• With the UK government having just allocated £500m to rapid EV charging, this seminar by Cornwall Insights and PWC is a great overview on the future of EV charging
• I'm intrigued by the Keg Tracker crowd-funded campaign - a classic use-case for IoT which has often been thwarted in the past by the very harsh environment (metal kegs and wireless are not good bedfellows) 
• Our friend Usman shared some great thoughts on the Smart City and Xanadu
• Ubuntu Appliance brings dedicated IoT appliances to Raspberry Pi, e.g. set up your Pi to be a dedicated media server or home automation hub
• Our lead developer Tom guested on the Serverless podcast
• Interesting to see ML learning how to run sustainable power grids
• If you have an EV plus a variable electricity tariff, check-out Intellicharge or EV.energy to charge them at minimum cost - I'm currently achieving around 4.5p($0.06) per kWh.
• Can you really charge a Tesla Model 3 at 250kW? Yes.

Finally, when I was little I enjoyed science-fiction stories which started with the family unboxing their newly-arrived home robot (just press the start button and stand back), and so it felt like the future had arrived as I watched this unboxing video of Spot the robot dog (yours for only $75k).

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

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