Connected Devices Weekly Update/2017-01-12

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Program		Passed Gate	Status	Notes
Project Sensor Web	David/Julie	Gate 1	On Target	Community Developer Board Announcement via Twitter Board schematics on Github SensorWeb blog
Project_Haiku	Liz/Mahe	Gate 1	Moved to Backlog	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Platform and Tools	Sandip/Mahe	N/A	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Project Magnet	Wilson/Maria	Gate 0	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
HomeWeb	Ben/Mahe	Gate 0	Merged to Platform	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Lighthouse	Preeti/Julie	Gate 1	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Participation Update	Michael/Brian	N/A	On Target	Bulleted list item Bulleted list item
Market Developments Update	Irina	N/A		READ-ONLY Amazon Alexa at CES Voice control is coming to smart home devices and appliances in a big way, judging from the many such product introductions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Alexa clearly dominated CES, and it has quite a head start over the other two big contenders. Google Home launched just last fall, two years after the Echo, and Apple HomeKit adoption has been slow because of the extremely involved approval process. “Amazon is taking a very aggressive early lead,” says Tuong Nguyen, principal research analyst with Gartner. “I feel there’s still a lot of opportunity for competition, and I’m not sure if it’s going to be an either-or situation.” Among appliance makers at CES, LG, Whirlpool, GE, and Samsung all showed off products that take orders from Alexa. Samsung introduced a robot vacuum that you can start by issuing a command to an Echo. The forthcoming LG Smart InstaView Door-in-Door refrigerator will have a disembodied Alexa built right in, so you can ask it to pull up recipes on the touchscreen or order food directly from—you guessed it—Amazon Fresh. As for Whirlpool, all of its connected appliances in 2017 will also integrate Alexa voice control, including fridges, ranges, microwaves, washers, and dryers. (Nobody’s figured out yet what to ask a dishwasher to do.) GE announced a suite of appliances last fall that can be controlled by Alexa-equipped devices. FTC files to protect consumers’ security in the Internet of Things. On January 5, 2017, the FTC filed a complaint against computer networking equipment manufacturer, D-Link Corporation, alleging that the company failed to take reasonable steps to secure routers and Internet-protocol cameras from “widely known and reasonably foreseeable risks of unauthorized access,” leaving consumers vulnerable to data privacy and security risks. The D-Link case is the FTC’s third case in the Internet of Things (IOT) space. Verizon announced a partnership with Qualcomm to introduce ThingSpace-ready modules for deployment using the chip designer’s CAT-M1 LTE Modem, according to a press release from Qualcomm. Further, Verizon is making a development kit available to the public that will help with the easy creation of various IoT solutions using its ThingSpace platform. This is a strong move for both companies, and it speaks to the increasing importance of IoT platforms like ThingSpace as the IoT proliferates. The Federal Trade Commission announced that it is challenging the public to create an innovative tool that will help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities in the software of IoT home devices. The agency is offering a cash prize of up to $25,000 for the best technical solution. The FTC is asking IoT Home Inspector Challenge contestants to develop a tool that would address security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software in IoT devices. An ideal tool might be a physical device that the consumer can add to his or her home network that would check and install updates for other IoT devices on that home network, or it might be an app or cloud-based service, or a dashboard or other user interface. Contestants also have the option of adding features such as those that would address hard-coded, factory default or easy-to-guess passwords.
Other Announcements / Questions		N/A