Spark Labs, the same folks that made this open-source Nest-like thermostat, has raised $4.9 million in Series A funding led by Lion Wells Capital, and with participation from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, SOSventures, and Collaborative Fund, as well as a host of angel investors.
An alliance of big tech companies has formed to create standards for communications related to the Internet of things and all electronic devices.
The Open Interconnect Consortium wants to deliver an open-source specification for wirelessly connecting devices. The members include Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Samsung, and Intel’s Wind River embedded-software division. The group seeks to accelerate the development of the Internet of things.
The Open Interconnect Consortium’s first open-source code will target smart homes and office solutions.
Form and function: A small, cheap, low-power Wi-Fi card equipped with cloud software that manufacturers and hobbyists can use to help build smart devices such as Web-connected appliances.
In its third round of institutional financing, mobile sensor-maker mCube has announced that it has raised $37 million.
The company’s existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, MediaTek, iD Ventures America and DAG Ventures, all participated in the financing round. Additionally, new investors including Keytone Ventures, SK Telecom (China) Ventures and Korea Investment Partners joined the effort as well.
“mCube is well positioned with the world’s smallest MEMS motion sensors to enable this high-growth new market we refer to as the Internet of Moving Things,” said Ben Lee, mCube president and CEO, in a statement on the news.
San Francisco is set to get a new cellular network later this year, but it won’t help fix the city’s spotty mobile-phone coverage. This wireless network is exclusively for things.
The French company SigFox says it picked the Bay Area to demonstrate a wireless network intended to make it cheap and practical to link anything to the Internet, from smoke detectors to dog collars, bicycle locks, and water pipes.
The technology industry is preparing for the Internet of things, a type of computing characterized by small, often dumb, usually unseen computers attached to objects. These devices sense and transmit data about the environment or offer new means of controlling it.
For more than a decade technologists have predicted and argued about the onslaught of these ubiquitous devices. “There is lot of quibbling about what to call it, but there’s little doubt that we’re seeing the inklings of a new class of computer,” says David Blaauw, who leads a lab at the University of Michigan that makes functioning computers no bigger than a typed letter o.
