LG has officially taken the wraps off its latest handset, the LG Velvet. For a phone designed with mid-range specs, we have to say that its asking price is a little disappointing.

Amber Solutions, an IoT product company that sells smart outlets, switches and circuit breakers closed Series A Preferred Stock round of financing that equals $3.3M in gross proceeds. Amber will use the funds to support the commercial development of Amber's core technologies.

One of Amber’s product is solid-state circuit interrupter (GFCI) that basically stops harmful levels of electricity from passing through a person. It operates as a safety device alerting the homeowner of electrocution incidents in real time.

Amber Solutions’ core markets are builders that prepare smart home/smart building ready infrastructure, certified electrical contractors or remodelers, and electrical manufacturers.

Other latest funding news include Owlet’s $24M Series B, Axonize’s $6M Series A round and addition of Deutsche Telekom as its strategic investor, and $30M Series B raised by Palo Alto-based Armis.

Smart baby monitor company Nanit raised a $14M Series B round led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP). Other investors that participated include existing investors Upfront Ventures, RRE Ventures, Vulcan Capital and Vaal Investment Partners. The latest investment brings total equity funding of Nanit to $30M.

Nanit announced it will use the funding proceeds to expand its team of computer vision and machine learning engineers and grow its sales in Europe and Canada.

Nanit’s baby monitor helps new parents oversee nursery conditions as it has built-in temperature and humidity sensors. The camera lets parents remotely monitor baby’s crib whereas sound and motion are detected via smart sensors.

The monitor’s insights can be accessed via an accompanying mobile app. Nanit charges $10 per month for its premium package.

The key use cases of Nanit’s baby monitoring technology include sleep insights, behavioral analysis, expert guidance, and nightly video summaries. The company currently sells its smart monitors via its website.

Siemens Building Technologies division announced it will acquire Enlighted Inc., a smart IoT building technology provider. The transaction is expected to close in Q3’18.

Enlighted Inc.’s core element is an advanced lighting control application. It is based on a patented, software-defined smart sensor that collects and monitors real-time occupancy, light levels, temperatures and energy usage.

The sensor can gauge temperature, light level, motion, energy, and has Bluetooth connectivity.

The Enlighted system works by collecting temperature, light and motion data via its smart sensors. A gateway device carries the information to Energy Manager, a secure browser-based interface to create profiles and adjust settings of the entire Enlighted Advanced Lighting Control System. The Energy manager operates as an analytics device.

The whole system consists of multi-function sensors, distributed computing, a network, and software applications run by Enlighted Inc.

Enlighted Inc.’s main target market is commercial real estate. Key use cases of its intelligent Lighting Control System are energy efficiency, controlling heating, ventilation and air conditioning, and building utilization reports.

Use the Postscapes 'Connected Products Framework' to understand the smart home and buildings eco-system.

Smart Lock Company LockState raised $5.8M Series A in new investment to fund its aggressive sales and marketing and partner development plan. The company previously raised $740K seed round and $1M in a round led by angel investors. The lead investor in latest round was Iron Gate Capital. Other investors include Kozo Keikaku Engineering Inc, Nelnet and Service Provider Capital.

The company’s Wi-Fi-enabled RemoteLock is used by 1000s of Airbnb and other vacation rental hosts. It helps hosts remotely provide access to guests. Locking/unlocking codes can be generated via a host’s computer or smartphone.

RemoteLock’s prices start at $299 which is its algorithmic ResortLock. The most pricey lock by LockState is its ‘RemoteLock 7i Black WiFi Commercial Smart Lock’ which costs $479.

Another core product of LockState is its cloud-based remote access platform for internet-enabled locks. It implies users can remotely manage their (internet-enabled) locks via LockState’s cloud platform.

Unlike smartphones and watches, customers don’t look forward to upgrading their smart locks or buying one when new models are launched. Thus, smart lock companies offset this disadvantage by partnering with property management and short-term rental companies to get new customers.

LockState has partnered with vacation rental brands like Airbnb, HomeAway, and other listing partners to automate guest access.

Igloohome a Singapore-based smart lock company also raised an investment of $4M in April this year.

There has been so much hype about the “Internet of Things” (IoT) that it is refreshing to hear about a cutting-edge development project that can bring concrete benefits to millions of people. That project is the ongoing development of the Google Smart Contact Lens, and it was detailed in a keynote speech June 8 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015).

The keynote speech was given by Brian Otis (right), a director at Google and a research associate professor at the University of Washington. The “smart lens” that the project envisions is essentially a disposable contact lens that fits on an eye and continuously monitors blood glucose levels. This is valuable information for anyone who has, or may someday have, diabetes.

Since he was speaking to an engineering audience, Otis focused on the challenges behind building such a device, and described some of the strategies taken by Google and its partner, Novartis. The project required new approaches to miniaturization, low-power design, and connectivity, as well as a comfortable and reliable silicon-to-human interface. Otis discussed the “why” as well and showed how the device could potentially save or improve millions of lives.

Millions of Users

First, a bit of background. Google announced the smart lens project in a blog post in January 2014. Since then it has been featured in news outlets including Forbes, Time, and the Wall Street Journal. In March 2015, Time reported that Google has been granted a patent for a smart contact lens.

The smart lens monitors the level of blood glucose by looking at its concentration in tears. The lens includes a wireless system on chip (SoC) and a miniaturized glucose sensor. A tiny pinhole in the lens allows tear fluid to seep into the sensor, and a wireless antenna handles communications to the wireless devices.

“We figure that if we can solve a huge problem, it is probably worth doing,” Otis said. “Diabetes is one example.” He noted 382 million people worldwide have diabetes today, and that 35% of the U.S. population may be pre-diabetic. Today, diabetics must *** their fingers to test blood glucose levels, a procedure that is invasive, painful, and subject to infrequent monitoring.

According to Otis, the smart contact lens represents a “new category of wearable devices that are comfortable, inexpensive, and empowering.” The lens does sensor data logging and uses a portable instrument to measure glucose levels. It is thin, cheap, and disposable, he said.

Moreover, the lens is not just for people already diagnosed with diabetes—it’s for anyone who is pre-diabetic, or may be at risk due to genetic predisposition. “If we are pro-active rather than re-active,” Otis said, “Instead of waiting until a person has full-fledged diabetes, we could make a huge difference in peoples’ lives and lower the costs of treating them.”

Technical Challenges

No one has built anything quite like the smart lens, so researchers at Google and Novartis are treading new ground. Otis identified three key challenges:

• Miniaturization: Everything must be really small—the SoC, the passive components, the power supply. Components must be flexible and cheap, and support thin-film integration.
• Platform: Google has developed a reusable platform that includes tiny, always-on wireless sensors, ultra low-power components, and standards-based interfaces.
• Data: Researchers are looking for the best ways to get the resulting data into a mobile device and onto the cloud.

Comfort is another concern. “This is not intended to be for the most severe cases,” Otis said. “This is intended to be for all of us as a pro-active way of improving our lifestyles.”

The platform provides a bidirectional encrypted wireless link, integrated power management, on-chip memory, standards-based RFID link, flexible sensor interface, high-resolution potentiostat sensor, and decoupling capacitors. Most of these capabilities are provided by the standard CMOS SoC, which is a couple hundred microns on a side and only “tens of microns” thick.

Otis noted that unpackaged ICs are typically 250 microns thick when they come back from the foundry. Thus, post-processing is needed so the IC will fit into a contact lens.

Furthermore, the design requires precision analog circuitry and additional environmental sensors. “Some of this stuff sounds mundane but it is really hard, especially when you find out you can’t throw large decoupling capacitors and bypass capacitors onto a board, and all that has to be re-integrated into the chip,” Otis said.

Sensor Challenges

Getting information from the human body is challenging. The smart lens sensor does a direct chemical measurement on the surface of the eye. The sensor is designed to work with very low glucose concentrations. This is because the concentration of glucose in tears is an order of magnitude lower than it is in blood.

In brief, the sensor has two parallel plates that are coated with an enzyme that converts glucose into hydrogen peroxide, which flows around the electrodes of the sensor. This is actually a fairly standard way of doing glucose monitoring. However, the smart lens sensor has two electrodes compared to the typical three.

In manufacturing, it is essential to keep costs low. Otis outlined a three-step manufacturing process:

• Start with the bottom layer, and mold a contact lens in the way you typically would.
• Add the electronics package on top of that layer.
• Build a second layer that encapsulates the electronics and provides the curvature needed for comfort and vision correction.

Beyond the technical challenges are the “clinical” challenges of working with human beings. The human body “is messy and very variable,” Otis said. This variability affects sensor performance and calibration, RF/electro-magnetic performance, system reliability, and comfort.

The final step is making use of the data. “We need to get the data from the device into a phone, and then display it so users can visualize the data,” Otis said. This provides “actionable feedback” to the person who needs it. Eventually, the data will need to be stored in the cloud.

As he concluded his talk, Otis noted that the platform his group developed may have many applications beyond glucose monitoring. “There is a lot you can do with a bunch of logic and sensing capability,” he said, “and there are hundreds of biomarkers beyond glucose.” Clearly this will be an interesting technology to watch.

Richard Goering

Related Blog Post

- Gary Smith at DAC 2015: How EDA Can Expand Into New Directions

SmartClient version 120 suffers from information disclosure, local file inclusion, remote file upload, and XML external entity injection vulnerabilities.

Energy generation and consumption is rapidly transforming into a decentralized, decarbonized, and digitized model due to a number of market forces. The declining costs of solar energy systems, as well as the increasing price of energy from the grid has led to grid parity. This has caused PV proliferation to accelerate to such an extent that in the past five years alone, PV installed capacity has increased by 300%. Simultaneously, the EV market is also on the rise and is expected to reach the electrification tipping point by 2030. This is due to support from governments trying to limit the effects of climate change, thus leading to automotive manufactures transitioning their fleets from standard petrol- and diesel-powered cars to EVs. As a result of the acceleration of both of these markets, EV charging has created demand patterns causing an even steeper and faster ramp-up in the evenings than the PV duck curve. , This is causing the grid’s balancing act to be increasingly complex. In order to support this new energy dynamic, advanced management software is required to ensure grid stabilization and to unlock the value of these energy resources.

Cities and renewable electricity have, respectively, become the habitat and energy of choice globally. The two are increasingly inseparable. Urbanization and electrification trends have turned cities and the grid into leading platforms for human activity, presenting unique opportunities for today’s utilities to partner with municipalities to achieve their smart city goals.

German-headquartered integrated energy company, Innogy, has selected distributed computing solutions provider, Intertrust, to help smart home consumers to securely manage data.

New state energy goals and innovative utility program offerings have been making headlines in recent months. These types of regional policies and incentives are important, especially as we face challenges ranging from grid constraints and fluctuating electricity prices to environmental concerns, but significant portions of the country are outside of the direct influence of energy use mandates and incentives.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) is funding a study that it hopes will result in lower utility bills for customers and more control over electricity load for utilities. The project will involve 100 homeowners in Southern California who will install various types of distributed energy resources (DER) such as thermostats, load control switches, batteries, water heaters and eventually electric vehicle chargers.

A decade ago, Maine regulators faced dueling proposals to meet projected load growth north of Portland: upgrade a long-distance transmission line to carry more power, or strategically install batteries and distributed generation.

Big Oil wants to put a box in your hall closet that works like a human brain, can cut the lights, stop the refrigerator and will know how you move about in the privacy of your home better than you do.

Warren Buffett wants to tell you the best time to wash your clothes. Or at least his energy company in the U.K does. Buffett’s Northern Powergrid Holdings Co. is working with Siemens AG to test a so-called smart grid that has the ability to control when consumer appliances will be used in the home.

Cities and renewable electricity have, respectively, become the habitat and energy of choice globally. The two are increasingly inseparable. Urbanization and electrification trends have turned cities and the grid into leading platforms for human activity, presenting unique opportunities for today’s utilities to partner with municipalities to achieve their smart city goals.

Big Oil wants to put a box in your hall closet that works like a human brain, can cut the lights, stop the refrigerator and will know how you move about in the privacy of your home better than you do.

Energy generation and consumption is rapidly transforming into a decentralized, decarbonized, and digitized model due to a number of market forces. The declining costs of solar energy systems, as well as the increasing price of energy from the grid has led to grid parity. This has caused PV proliferation to accelerate to such an extent that in the past five years alone, PV installed capacity has increased by 300%. Simultaneously, the EV market is also on the rise and is expected to reach the electrification tipping point by 2030. This is due to support from governments trying to limit the effects of climate change, thus leading to automotive manufactures transitioning their fleets from standard petrol- and diesel-powered cars to EVs. As a result of the acceleration of both of these markets, EV charging has created demand patterns causing an even steeper and faster ramp-up in the evenings than the PV duck curve. , This is causing the grid’s balancing act to be increasingly complex. In order to support this new energy dynamic, advanced management software is required to ensure grid stabilization and to unlock the value of these energy resources.

The idea of a “smart grid” has taken center stage — an evolution of advanced technologies that make the availability of a smarter, more efficient electrical power grid possible. These technologies aim to address the complex challenges facing grid systems today, which stem largely from its aging infrastructure and a use case model that has evolved over the years. With power systems over a century old, the field instrumentation on the grid is quickly reaching its life cycle limit, which adversely affects overall grid reliability and efficiency.

The California Energy Commission (CEC) and U.S. Navy (USN) are teaming up to spur deployment of grid-integrated local renewable energy resources and advanced energy storage solutions. On December 1, Imergy Power Systems announced that its ESP30 series vanadium-flow batteries will be used in a CEC-sponsored Smart Microgrid project hosted by the Navy at its Mobile Utilities Support Equipment (MUSE) Facility in Port Hueneme, California.

Although the U.S. made it through a quiet 2014 Atlantic hurricane season this year, it doesn’t mean we’re out of the waters. Natural disasters are an ongoing threat to our infrastructure, and utilities need to be conscious of the present state and future of our power grid. Fortunately, in recent years many utilities across the country have recognized the importance of being prepared for major storms, and have been actively researching and implementing solutions to prepare for the next big one.

Developers across Asia are seeking innovative solutions to help them create more liveable and environmentally sustainable cities, opening up opportunities for Australian designers, constructors and building operators.

Cities and renewable electricity have, respectively, become the habitat and energy of choice globally. The two are increasingly inseparable. Urbanization and electrification trends have turned cities and the grid into leading platforms for human activity, presenting unique opportunities for today’s utilities to partner with municipalities to achieve their smart city goals.

Warren Buffett wants to tell you the best time to wash your clothes. Or at least his energy company in the U.K does. Buffett’s Northern Powergrid Holdings Co. is working with Siemens AG to test a so-called smart grid that has the ability to control when consumer appliances will be used in the home.

The idea of shifting transactions into the digital space dates back to the beginnings of computer science. The development of blockchain technology has uncovered new possibilities for regulating contractual relationships. Parties to a contract now ...

Michelle T Davies Awarded Outstanding Contribution to Smart Energy Michelle T Davies, Partner and International Head of Clean Energy and Sustainability, has won Outstanding Contribution to Smart Energy at this year’s inaugural Women Powering S...

1

Technology is a critical aspect of improving the availability and accessibility of clean water around the world.

Climate-smart and resource-saving farming technologies could be one way to address hunger in Asia.

Microchip Smart Storage Adapters Now Interoperate Seamlessly with MegaRAC® SP-X Management Firmware from AMI for At-Scale Secure Storage Management

NEW DELHI: The Narendra Modi government is set to substantially ease norms for foreign investment in the construction sector, hoping to drum up interest in the prime minister’s plans for 100 smart cities as well his affordable housing initiative. The government is seriously considering the removal of all restrictions on size and minimum capitalisation for the smart cities as well as affordable housing projects. “The discussions are on for exempting smart cities from all FDI conditionalities. We need to give them a push by making it attractive for investors,” said a government official. The new policy is also expected to provide easier exit windows.The proposal could be moved for the […]

SST Announces Qualification of Smartbit™ OTP NVM Technology for ON Semiconductor’s 110 nm CMOS Process

Hopes of a minor fall in interest rates, especially on home loans, were dashed last week after the RBI hiked its key rates in its policy review. Home loan borrowers, especially those crushed by a heavy EMI, have been looking at the RBI for some solace for a while now. Generally, borrowers can do very little other than prepaying a part of the loan (if they have surplus cash) to reduce the interest burden or increasing the EMI (if they can afford it) to reduce the tenure and therefore, the overall interest paid. However, some experts believe home loan seekers and existing borrowers looking to switch lenders can consider experimenting […]