Image: Erwin Danckaarts/Shutterstock
This week in IoT saw funding success for some growing start-ups while rural Australia made plans to connect to smart devices via space.
There was some considerable success for one of a growing number of internet of things (IoT) start-ups this week with news that US platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Ayla has raised $60m in Series D funding.
Led by Chinese group Sunsea Telecommunications, the funding will be used to further expand Ayla’s product capabilities within large enterprises. This includes extracting IoT data and turning it into business intelligence to expand its ecosystem network of partners and application providers.
As part of the new venture, Ayla and Sunsea IoT, a subsidiary of Sunsea Telecommunications, are forming a new company named Ayla Sunsea, which will sell and deliver Ayla’s offerings to customers with headquarters in China.
“Ayla has won some of China’s largest manufacturers, especially in the home appliance and air conditioning segments,” said Phillip Chang, Ayla co-founder and now general manager of Ayla China.
“The partnership with Sunsea will make available far more resources to support our customers, and Sunsea’s China market knowledge and relationships will allow us to expand much faster in the large telco and enterprise opportunities inside China.”
Satellite IoT tech coming to rural Australia
A start-up called Myriota is claiming that it can help bridge the connectivity gap between urban and rural Australia with a ‘direct to orbit’ solution next year.
According to ZDNet, the company’s CEO, Alex Grant, said that his firm is already trialling the technology with the agricultural sector through livestock and water monitoring. In addition, the company has started to work in other areas such as marine science, defence and the tracking of utilities.
Myriota’s chips claim to have a battery life of four years and it hopes to have geolocation technology installed in the future that won’t be reliant on satellites above, as well being more secure.
Going so far as to call its own product the “holy grail” of remote IoT services, Myriota aims to take advantage of the growing number of nanosatellites being launched into orbit for telecommunications purposes.
Waymo closer to having autonomous cars on the road
Google’s autonomous car division, Waymo, appears to be getting closer and closer to an official launch after car retailer AutoNation announced that the two have come to an agreement.
Under the multi-year deal, AutoNation will maintain and repair Waymo’s fleet of vehicles when they actually start to become commercially available.
According to Engadget, AutoNation CEO Michael J Jackson said it will be a big task for his company.
“These vehicles need to be in service for hundreds of thousands of miles, much more than personal-use vehicles, to make them economically viable,” he said.
“You have to do much more proactive, preventative maintenance than what a normal person would do with a car.”
5G infrastructure market to be worth $33.72bn by 2026
The infrastructure that will drive the mass adoption of 5G connectivity is expected to be a lucrative area, with a new report from MarketsandMarkets estimating that by 2020, it could be worth $2.86bn.
Then, just six years later, this would multiply to $33.72bn, driven by increasing demand for mobile data services, rising importance of software implementation in communication network, growth of machine-to-machine communication in industries, and growing demand for high speed and large network coverage.
The area believed to hold the largest share of the 5G infrastructure market is consumer electronics, as more smartphones become available with compatibility for the standard.
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