IoT & Embedded Technology Blog

Cloud service provider LogMeIn hosted its first Xively Xperience conference on October 1-2, 2015 in Boston. As an invitation-only event, it attracted approximately 200 C-level executives and industry experts for keynotes and panel discussions on the current and future state of the IoT. Although the conference included several demos of technology from LogMeIn and it’s IoT cloud service Xively.com, by and large it was devoted to the IoT as a whole, and not merely a sales pitch for LogMeIn/Xively. As such, it was more an early market effort to help grow the whole IoT pie, rather than carve out a bigger slice for the host company.

Keynote speakers included Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation (among his many accomplishments), and renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil (now a Director of Engineering at Google). Speakers and panelists representing a cross-section of Xively customers and ecosystem participants discussed the real-world benefits and risks of implementing IoT. Read more

Members of the VDC Team spent the last two days at the inaugural IoT Security event on the beautiful Boston waterfront, where Steve Hoffenberg, VDC’s Director of IoT & Embedded Technology, spoke alongside a diverse and distinguished panel of guests that included various leaders of government, research, and industry.

One of the main themes that emerged throughout the two-day conference was the growing importance and adoption of Security as a Service. If it makes more sense from both a financial and an operations perspective to outsource computing, storage, applications, and infrastructure to specialized providers in order to capitalize on economies of scale and aggregated outside expertise, then it follows that portions of IoT security can also be outsourced effectively. Read more

VDC's Director of IoT & Embedded Technology will be speaking at the IoT Security conference in Boston, September 22-23. He'll be hosting an Analyst Breakfast Briefing roundtable discussion on Wednesday, September 23, and also on that same day, he'll be participating as a panelist in the session entitled, "Maximizing Technology to Safeguard the Business of IoT." Read more

In case you missed it, VDC’s IoT & Embedded Technology was recently in Santa Clara for the 2015 Embedded Systems Conference – Silicon Valley. We had the opportunity to meet with and get updates from a number of companies, both at the show and several nearby corporate headquarters. Vendors we spoke with were pleased with the volume and quality of the attendees and many training sessions operated at full capacity.

As we have for the past decade, VDC Research presented the annual Embeddy Award to the organization judged to have announced the most significant advance in the embedded software and hardware industries at ESC. Read more

VDC’s IoT and Embedded Technologies team recently attended NIWeek 2015 in Austin, TX. National Instruments (NI) put on an excellent conference and we had the opportunity to take in a great deal. There were inspiring and informative keynote presentations, great partner stories, the heat, interesting panel sessions, helpful one-on-one meetings with NI executives, the strange layout of the Austin Convention Center (it allegedly has a floor 2, but I’m not buying that), demos on the exhibit floor…and, well, did I mention the heat? Read more

Homomorphic encryption is a method of encryption that allows computations to be performed upon fully encrypted data, generating an encrypted result that, after decryption, will match the result of the desired operations on the plaintext, decrypted data. In other words, homomorphic encryption allows a user to manipulate data without needing to decrypt it first.

Daniele Micciancio states the problem that is solved by homomorphic encryption in a 2010 journal article entitled A First Glimpse of Cryptography’s Holy Grail. Read more

According to Microsoft's privacy statement for Windows 10 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.aspx), for the Input Personalization feature, "...your typed and handwritten words are collected to provide you a personalized user dictionary, help you type and write on your device with better character recognition, and provide you with text suggestions as you type or write. Typing data includes a sample of characters and words you type, which we scrub to remove IDs, IP addresses, and other potential identifiers."

Some observers have likened this feature to a keylogger, and it is turned on by default in Windows 10.

In addition, Windows 10 Input Personalization, "collect[s] your voice input, as well your name and nickname, your recent calendar events and the names of the people in your appointments, and information about your contacts including names and nicknames." Read more

The tremendous growth potential of the IoT has created a market battle between many large, well-known companies such as Amazon, Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. But how do smaller companies and startups become competitive in the race for IoT success? One answer: create or exploit a niche within the IoT. PubNub is a notable entrant in this respect.

Streaming of real time data is useful in a variety of IoT applications, including finance, weather, traffic, communication, E-commerce, security, systems control, home and vehicle automation, advertising, and gaming. Since PubNub's founding in 2009, the company has firmly established itself in the market and claims to be the only global-scale network for real time data streaming for web, mobile, and IoT devices. Read more

• Several new Freescale processors announced from secure MCUs to multicore SoCs
• FTF product showcases spanned automobiles, hospital beds, IoT gateways, and much more
• NXP integration ongoing; expected to wrap up end of year
• Merger adds embedded security capabilities, ID solutions, sensors

Freescale hosted another successful Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) last week in Austin, TX at the brand new JW Marriott and the company kept everyone buzzing with its new product announcements, updates on the NXP merger, and product showcases. In addition, we were treated with expansive and interactive keynotes by CEO Gregg Lowe who demonstrated a variety of ways in which Freescale is fostering an ecosystem dedicated to accelerating the development of next-generation systems as well as Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. Read more

Microsoft recently announced that the company will open two datacenters in Canada, to provide its Azure cloud service to the Canadian Government and businesses operating in that country. Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, said “this substantial investment in a Canadian cloud demonstrates how committed we are to bringing even more opportunity to Canadian businesses and government organizations, helping them fully realize the cost savings and flexibility of the cloud.” (To read the full press release from Microsoft, see here.) In an article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper about the announcement, Janet Kennedy, president of Microsoft Canada, said, “there is no technical reason to do it.” The main reasons are data sovereignty and residency.

Data residency deals with where data is physically located and where it should not go without agreement from its owner. Data sovereignty focuses more on why and how a government should protect the data located within its jurisdiction, regardless of its ownership, from foreign government agencies. Read more