Why Cellular IoT was ripe for reinventing

Ever wondered why it is so hard and expensive to build and deploy connected products and IoT solutions based on cellular connectivity? And how it can be done better?

Learn from Electric Imp CEO Hugo Fiennes — the guy who built the iPhone at Apple and architected the first Nest thermostat — about how Electric Imp reinvented cellular IoT.

https://www.electricimp.com/impcellular-cellular-iot-reinvented/

Electric Imp announces advanced AMQP support and fully integrated ‘All-Azure’ Solution

Lots of exciting developments lately. Please check our new Microsoft announcements, including advanced AMQP support, Azure IoT Hub integration, and fully integrated ‘All-Azure’ offering with private cloud.

Cheers,

— Terrence

Check out Electric Imp at IoT World 2017

Headed to IoT World 2017 Santa Clara next week? Check out the Electric Imp booth … lots to see, people to meet, answers to get. 

Read all about it here.

Cheers,

— Terrence

Join us at Hannover Messe, April 24-28

Electric Imp will be participating at Hannover Messe next week, as part of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) pavilion and Industrie 4.0 – IIC security demonstration. 

If you are in Hannover, please visit us in Hall 8, Stand C24 (IIC Pavilion), Booth 13. Or schedule a briefing with us.

Cheers,

— Terrence

Electric Imp announces impWorks™ Developer Tools

Electric Imp is excited to announce our new impWorks Developer Tools Release 1. 

In this first release, impWorks includes the Builder Preprocessor and the Sublime Text Editor Plugin, which combine to boost the efficiency, control, and workflow of the software development process. Read all about it here and try it out today.

Cheers,

— Terrence

EmbeddedWorld 2017: See the Electric Imp sessions

Electric Imp has a big EmbeddedWorld 2017 presence at four partner booths: Arrow, ST Microelectronics, Cypress, and Murata. For more information, see our blog. 

Hugo Fiennes, our co-founder and CEO, and myself are also doing several sessions with live demos of our latest technologies explaining how you can rapidly build and deploy industrial-strength IoT solutions using Electric Imp:

Tuesday, March 13:

• 12:00-12:45, Cypress theatre (Hall 4A-148): IIoT using LoRa Gateway integration with Electric Imp and IBM Watson IoT
• 15:00-15:45, ST Microelectronics forum (Hall 4A-238): Secure IoT: using Electric Imp to deploy and scale your applications successfully

Wednesday, March 14:

• 12:00-12:45, Cypress theatre (Hall 4A-148): Simplifying IoT Prototyping with Electric Imp imp005-ez

Thursday, March 15:

• 12:00-12:45, Cypress theatre (Hall 4A-148): IIoT using LoRa Gateway integration with Electric Imp and IBM Watson IoT
• 16:00-16:45, Cypress theatre (Hall 4A-148): Simplifying IoT Prototyping with Electric Imp imp005-ez

See you there!

Cheers,

— Terrence

Upcoming Webinars with Electric Imp

We have two webinars with partners coming the next couple of weeks, be sure to reserve your free spot:

IIoT Endpoint Security – The Model in Practice (Feb 22, 8 am PT)

This is a webinar in the IIC (Industrial Internet Consortium) webinar series. 

Debunking the Top 5 Urban Myths of IoT: Getting IoT-Ready

This is a webinar together with our partner mnubo (Feb 14, 9 am PT)

Hope to see you there.

Cheers,

— Terrence

Fast Track your IoT project with the QuickStart Family

A key challenge in getting IoT projects off the ground is evaluating technologies, architectures, and concepts – you need to be able to easily build a proof-of-concept and evaluate a platform and design in terms of security, hardware capabilities, integrations, and other key requirements you have … often with limited engineering budget and on a short time frame.

Typically, these evaluations take weeks or even months and involve significant custom hardware and software design just to even get to a prototype. And once you’ve validated the prototype you often have to throw that away and start over to develop a production-grade design. This approach incurs a lot of cost, risk, and delay in getting to market with a robust and complete IoT solution.

The Electric Imp platform is designed from the start to be pre-integrated, secure, production-ready, and easily adaptable – allowing you to go from evaluation to production with minimal engineering effort, short time, and high confidence. 

To accelerate this process even further, Electric Imp is today announcing the QuickStart Family of impAccelerator Solution Kits, which are off-the-shelf hardware platforms that you can use to kick-start your prototyping and evaluation. impAccelerator Solution Kits allow you to plug-and-play different hardware and software components and assemble and evaluate production-grade end-to-end IoT solutions in record time.

Find out more about the technical details, pricing, and availability in the official announcement:

QuickStart Family helps Fast Track Industrial-Strength IoT

Cheers,

— Terrence

See Industrial-Strength IoT in Action at Electric Imp @ CES

Electric Imp is gearing up for our largest presence at CES to date. Visit us at our booth and learn about real-world industrial-strength IoT from our customers and partners. More in this blog post.

Cheers,

— Terrence

ZigBee IoT Worm Attack: The Importance of Integrated Security

The ZigBee Alliance recently issued a Statement on Security, prompted by the widely reported attack “IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction”.

 

While this attack may not be based on a weakness of the ZigBee standards it does highlight a key weakness in the way most IoT deployments are architected today, which is by integrating a number of disjunct technology components and services from different suppliers and then facing the challenge of maintaining security of the combined result for years to come.

 

This approach has a high risk of mistakes, resulting in unproven designs, integration gaps, or weak links, and makes it very difficult to rapidly address security vulnerabilities because fixes need to percolate through the entire integration chain before becoming effective. By that time, the damage is often done.

 

The below diagram illustrates the topic:

 

We at Electric Imp believe the problem needs to be addressed with a very different approach: By offering a fully integrated and tested silicon-to-cloud security architecture with ongoing platform and security maintenance. Security not only at deployment, but over the lifetime of the solution. 

Defense-in-Depth and Defense-over-Time. It’s how IoT Security needs to be done.

Cheers,

— Terrence

Update Nov 18, 2016:

Yesterday, the Z-Wave Alliance also made an announcement for plans to beef up security. This highlights the challenge of retrofitting existing deployed devices and the moving target security presents.