This is my 18th monthly IoT update.

As IoT moves beyond a fascination with whizzy new technology ("Can we do it?", "How do we do it?"), everyone is starting to evaluate their hard, financial return-on-investment ("How do we do it profitably?). 

We're seeing this happen throughout the supply-chain, from device vendors, communications providers, cloud services … and of course in Service Monitoring, too. After more than three years of commercial experience helping customers to successfully scale and become profitable (and a lot of years before that doing it ourselves at previous companies), we've now gathered enough examples to be able to quantify seven different ways in which Service Monitoring typically drives revenue up and costs down, whilst enabling growth – to deliver a great return-on-investment (RoI).

To summarise all that experience, we have just released a new 4-part whitepaper to quantify the financial benefits of Service Monitoring – also available as a brochure.

Speaking of RoI, here's ARM's nice calculator to estimate the RoI of connectivity management.

And speaking of connectivity, our partners EMnify just gave a beautiful example of how (and why) to "stream connectivity metadata and build dashboards to monitor your devices in real-time" using DevicePilot.

In the Energy space, a company I've been tracking for several years is Origami Energy, who just published a great article about real-time ML for energy forecasting. Zap-Map launched Zap-Pay attempting to unify EV payment. Having acquired EV players like Greenlots and NewMotion, Shell now wants government to accelerate the EV transition to 2030. Time for the analysts to find another term for "Big Oil".

EDF (with our customers POD Point) have been handed a contract to electrify public-service vehicle fleets. Interesting insight into how Tesla now offers reporting and remote management/upgrading on their destination wall chargers. And ahead of Tesla's much-awaited battery day, news that VW/QuantumScape are claiming a big leap forward in battery tech.

Nvidia has offered to acquire ARM in an attempt to become "the new Intel". It will be fascinating to watch how this transforms the market, as ARM technology goes from a position of being ubiquitous and independent (one of ARM's founders Hermann Hauser described them as the "Switzerland of microprocessors") to being firmly aligned with one, big US player.

• The IoT Security Foundation publishes principles to keep consumer devices secure.
• Information Age kindly let me talk about scaling strategies for IoT
• After Yanzi's bankruptcy last month, it is good to see many of their team transferring to AirThings (COVID has doubtless helped air quality sensing businesses)
• Nice write-up from Antenova (my 2nd startup) about how Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) is now in Apple phones and may be about to (finally) hit the big time.
• Time for the Internet of Bodies?

Finally, the Internet of Shit is of course still with us: here are the crazy instructions for connecting your dishwasher to your WiFi (why?!). There was controversy when a digital pregnancy test was revealed to be just an analog pregnancy test with some digital electronics to read it …and then of course someone worked out how to play Doom on a pregnancy test because, why not.

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

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