This is my 20th monthly IoT update.
As EV ownership surges, it's clear that public EV charging provision still has a long way to go. We just completed a big survey of public funding for EV charging, summarised in our "Pain Points" white paper, finding that Scotland provides more than 4x the funding per-capita than England, with England lacking not only funding but also clear leadership. Meanwhile I note that Uber is going to contribute £5m towards London EV charging. Consolidation is a sign that a new market is "crossing the chasm" into the mainstream, so it is interesting to see the slew of new consolidated EV payment services including Zap Pay and EV Roam. More generally in renewable energy it's worth reading Bloomberg New Energy Finance's 2020 report for a great "what's next" level of understanding into how the fundamentals of our energy infrastructure are changing. It's not just the UK govt that needs to get its act together - it's concerning to see the French government considering reneging retroactively on its FIT payments (why destroy investor confidence in green investment?).
Another sign that a market is maturing is when your customers start to be able to define what "good" looks like, and then insist on it - generally by enforcing a Service Level Agreement. We've done a deep-dive on this important topic in our paper on SLA management.
In other news:
- Twilio buys Segment (big data geeks will enjoy their article on Centrifuge)
- u-blox now offers security-as-a-service bundled with their modules
- Here's an update on ARM's Project Triffid - a potential game changer for intermittent computation / batteryless computing
- In IIoT, Sparkplug B has won over at least one die-hard MQTT sceptic
- With wildfires costing £100bn in economic damage (let alone their ecological cost), Dryad have created a monitoring network
- Swim looks like an interesting "continuous intelligence" platform for applying machine learning to streaming data
- Toronto-based sensor vendor Smartwave has acquired Multi-tech, one of the top names in IIoT gateways.
- Nice to see TransCelestial raise a $10m Series A for their free-space laser network
As we go back to the Moon, this time to stay, it's good to know that the descendants of the trusty Nokia 3310 will work there. Meanwhile back on Earth, Starlink's "better than nothing" beta is achieving 150Mbps+ for rural beta testers - as long as they agree that Mars is a Free Planet, of course.
Until next month,
-Pilgrim
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