Year: 2019

Google said there’s absolutely, positively, nothing to worry about the secret microphone in your Nest Secure smart home hub that it didn’t tell you about. Nope, not at all. Just an oversight, said Google. No need to be alarmed. Everything is just fine.

When Google announced earlier this month that its Nest Secure would double-up as a Google Assistant, it sparked anger. Google hadn’t told anyone that the security hub had a microphone inside to begin with. There was no mention of the microphone on the initial list of tech specifications, nor was it mentioned after the company announced Google Assistant integration. (It’s there now.)

After Google, which owns Nest, realized its customers didn’t like being deceived or having their privacy violated, the company swallowed its pride and admitted fault

“The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs,” said Google spokesperson Nicol Addison in an email to TechCrunch. “That was an error on our part. The microphone has never been on and is only activated when users specifically enable the option.”

Business Insider first reported the news.

Google said that security systems “often use microphones to provide features that rely on sound sensing and included the microphone so it could “potentially offer additional features to our users in the future, such as the ability to detect broken glass.”

No doubt it’s a smart, if not terribly executed idea.

You can forgive a company for not wanting to drop the ball on its own future product line-up announcements, but not disclosing the inclusion of a microphone in a device that sits in your home just looks bad. And it couldn’t come at a worst time for tech giants, as they try to clamber back any ounce of respect they have from privacy-conscious consumers.

It makes you wonder how many other devices you have in your home — and out in the world — that could be used to spy on you.

Just this week, Singapore Airlines landed itself in hot water after passengers discovered cameras embedded in the in-flight entertainment systems. The airline said in a tweet that the cameras were included as standard by the original manufacturer and that it has “no plans to enable or develop any features using the cameras.”

No plans doesn’t mean “never.” And, just like the Nest device, the customer would have no way of knowing if it was in use anyway.

Sports streaming service fuboTV and Viacom this morning announced a new carriage deal that will see fuboTV carry Viacom’s entertainment networks as a part of its TV packages. The deal includes channels like MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., BET, CMT, Comedy Central, VH1, Paramount Network, TeenNick and many others. A selection of these will be added to fuboTV’s base package, while an expanded group of channels will be made available to fuboTV’s premier package, “fubo Extra.”

FuboTV originally began as a soccer-focused streaming service, but the company has been steadily expanding its lineup beyond sports channels in recent months. Today, it’s carrying networks like CBS, AMC, NBC and FX, for example, and now describes itself as a “sports-first streaming service.”

That is to say, fuboTV is positioning itself to cord cutters as the service to choose if you’re ditching traditional pay TV, but mostly care about access to sports — with a little entertainment mixed in for variety.

As of last fall, fuboTV had grown to nearly 250,000 subscribers.

The new deal with Viacom will make fuboTV even more of a competitor to rival live TV streaming services like Sling TV, DirecTV Now and Philo — all of which also carry Viacom’s channels.

Viacom says it’s making its nine core media networks — BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., Paramount Network, TV Land and VH1 — available to fuboTV’s base package, “fubo.” Those included in the “fubo Extra” package will include BET Her, BET Jams, BET Soul, Logo, MTV2, MTV Classic, MTV Live, mtvU, Nick Music, Nicktoons and TeenNick.

Meanwhile, fuboTV’s Spanish-language package, “fubo Latino,” will receive Viacom’s Telefe and MTV Tr3s networks.

The deal will bring some of Viacom’s top shows to the sports streaming service, like Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” MTV’s “Jersey Shore: Family Vacation,” Nickelodeon’s “Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and others.

“FuboTV is quickly evolving as a major force in the streaming television space, and the addition of Viacom’s media networks as a cornerstone of fuboTV’s entertainment offering demonstrates the power and popularity of our global brands and programming,” said Tom Gorke, EVP, head of Distribution and Business Development, for Viacom, in a statement. “This is a great opportunity to continue to grow our reach and audiences across the OTT landscape and connect with our fans wherever they consume content,” he added.

The move to offer further entertainment comes at a time when fuboTV’s rivals — like Dish’s Sling TV and AT&T’s DirecTV Now — are seeing declining growth, as the streaming TV space becomes more competitive. Customers now have several choices in this market — and with the rising prices of over-the-top live TV, they expect to get a well-designed, stable and expansive selection of channels on whichever service to which they choose to subscribe.

FuboTV has been able to capitalize on this demand by targeting cord cutters with a service that has had to work well from day one in order to keep up with the demands of streaming live sports, while also rolling out more advanced features like recommendations and support for 4K HDR, for example.

With this significant expansion into entertainment programming through the Viacom deal, fuboTV may be able to pick up more subscribers who are frustrated with the more basic streaming services offered by Dish and AT&T. These customers may not have previously considered fuboTV because it didn’t have as many entertainment options as others.

The Viacom channels have not yet gone live on fuboTV, but will be available “soon,” the companies said, without providing an exact launch date.

At the end of 2016, Plain Vanilla founder Thor Fridriksson left the company he founded with the intent to take at least a year off of work.

His product QuizUp, a social trivia game that raised more than $40 million and said it had more than 100 million users, never truly found a way to monetize. After a few missteps, including a proposed TV deal that eventually got cancelled, Plain Vanilla was acquired by Glu Mobile for a deal reportedly valued at $7.5 million.

Fridriksson was only a few weeks into his planned yearlong vacation when he became restless and asked a few members of his core team at QuizUp — Gunnar Holmsteinn, Johann Thorvaldur Bergthorsson, and Ymir Finnbogason — to start brainstorming with him about the future of mobile gaming.

That’s where the seed was planted for what would eventually become Teatime.

“The main thing we kept focusing on, and it seems straightforward and common sense but these things often do in retrospect, is why people play games,” said Fridriksson. “One of the main value propositions of playing a game is not about the game itself but about the human interaction you have while playing with someone – talking to the people you’re playing with and seeing their reactions.”

Teatime Live is a mobile gaming platform that allows users to interact with one another, face to face, while playing games on their phone through a built-in video chat. On top of the video chat, Teatime Live offers users Snapchat-style face filters called Game Faces, that are unique to each individual game on the platform. Players can take their earned game faces from one game to other games, and eventually, Fridriksson sees the opportunity for these items to be collectibles.

Most forms of games or sports have a social element built in. Whether it’s board games or physical sports or even video games, players have been able to communicate with one another in some way shape or form. That simply hasn’t been the case on mobile, which means that it’s still unclear what the best possible game for this platform looks like.

Teatime is debuting the platform with Hyperspeed, a simple racer game that the company developed in house. Teatime will continue to operate as a studio and build out other titles on top of the Teatime Live platform, but it also plans to work alongside other game developers as a publishing partner.

There are obvious concerns around enabling live video chat among strangers across the internet, and Teatime has tried to take steps toward preventing abuse.

To start, users are not allowed to play Teatime games as a guest. All players must sign up with Facebook, Gmail, or a phone number, which means bad actors will have a more taxing time getting back on the platform with a new username.

More importantly, Teatime’s game-face filters require facial recognition technology, which means that the system knows when there is no face visible in the camera. Unless a user is playing with someone that they’ve friended, Teatime will blur the picture whenever a face isn’t visible in the camera.

As per usual, Teatime also has a team of moderators going through profile pictures, etc. and a user reporting system.

Teatime hopes to build games around relatively proven models in mobile gaming to earn revenue on its own games, while sharing revenue with other game developers who build on the platform.

Teatime has raised $9 million in Series A funding from Atomico and Index Ventures.

Mike Sepso has joined the board of directors for 100 Thieves, an esports and content creation brand.

Sepso cofounded Major League Gaming in 2002, bringing the first true semblance of infrastructure to competitive gaming. MLG became the biggest independent esports league in the world, and played a big part in the evolution of esports as we know it today. In fact, MLG secured the first televised esports series ever with NBC sports, and eventually launched its own esports streaming platform.

MLG was acquired for $46 million by Activision Blizzard in 2016, but still lives as an esports content hub for Activision Blizzard titles like Call of Duty and Overwatch.

Sepso joins the 100 Thieves board alongside 100 Thieves founder and CEO Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag, President and COO John Robinson, Jake Cohen from Detroit Venture Partners, and Scooter Braun (entertainment industry mogul who represents Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande) on the 100 Thieves board of directors.

“Mike is the godfather of esports,” said Haag. “The most influential thing that happened in my career was seeing Halo 2 competitions on Major League Gaming on TBS on the weekends. It was just mind-blowing that kids like me could play games competitively.”

Currently, Sepso serves as chariman and cofounder of the Electronic Sports Group, which is an advisory firm for executives across the finance, media, advertising and sports industries as they navigate esports deals.

“[Haag] been able to move quickly and build something that transcends esports and esports teams and has became an increasingly significant mainstream brand, and that opens up a lot of business opportunities,” said Sepso. “The strategy that 100 Thieves has put in place, using esports and gaming personalities as a way to bring this brand to market, I think it could eventually be much more than that.”

Before founding 100 Thieves, Haag was a decorated pro player in his own right and continues to be a popular Twitch streamer and YouTuber. Many esports orgs are founded by former pros, but Haag has taken a Silicon Valley approach to building out 100 Thieves, at least with regards to pace.

100 Thieves built out professional teams for a variety of titles very quickly. The company also secured capital from the likes of Sequoia, Marc Benioff, Drew Houston, Dan Gilbert, Tao Capital and Advancit Capital. Alongside traditional VCs and tech angels, 100 Thieves has also gotten investment from Scooter Braun and Drake.

Total funding for the org is $25 million.

Beyond titles and professional teams, 100 Thieves is diversifying its product early as well, with a content creator house and a line of apparel coming this spring.

The company recently signed a deal with Totinos (yes, the pizza rolls) that includes an upcoming docuseries that offers a look behind the scenes at the 100 Thieves Call of Duty team.

For the longest time, Arm was basically synonymous with chip designs for smartphones and very low-end devices. But more recently, the company launched solutions for laptops, cars, high-powered IoT devices and even servers. Today, ahead of MWC 2019, the company is officially launching two new products for cloud and edge applications, the Neoverse N1 and E1. Arm unveiled the Neoverse brand a few months ago, but it’s only now that it is taking concrete form with the launch of these new products.

“We’ve always been anticipating that this market is going to shift as we move more towards this world of lots of really smart devices out at the endpoint — moving beyond even just what smartphones are capable of doing,” Drew Henry, Arms’ SVP and GM for Infrastructure, told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “And when you start anticipating that, you realize that those devices out of those endpoints are going to start creating an awful lot of data and need an awful lot of compute to support that.”

To address these two problems, Arm decided to launch two products: one that focuses on compute speed and one that is all about throughput, especially in the context of 5G.

The Neoverse N1 platform is meant for infrastructure-class solutions that focus on raw compute speed. The chips should perform significantly better than previous Arm CPU generations meant for the data center and the company says that it saw speedups of 2.5x for Nginx and MemcacheD, for example. Chip manufacturers can optimize the 7nm platform for their needs, with core counts that can reach up to 128 cores (or as few as 4).

“This technology platform is designed for a lot of compute power that you could either put in the data center or stick out at the edge,” said Henry. “It’s very configurable for our customers so they can design how big or small they want those devices to be.”

The E1 is also a 7nm platform, but with a stronger focus on edge computing use cases where you also need some compute power to maybe filter out data as it is generated, but where the focus is on moving that data quickly and efficiently. “The E1 is very highly efficient in terms of its ability to be able to move data through it while doing the right amount of compute as you move that data through,” explained Henry, who also stressed that the company made the decision to launch these two different platforms based on customer feedback.

There’s no point in launching these platforms without software support, though. A few years ago, that would have been a challenge because few commercial vendors supported their data center products on the Arm architecture. Today, many of the biggest open-source and proprietary projects and distributions run on Arm chips, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Suse, VMware, MySQL, OpenStack, Docker, Microsoft .Net, DOK and OPNFV. “We have lots of support across the space,” said Henry. “And then as you go down to that tier of languages and libraries and compilers, that’s a very large investment area for us at Arm. One of our largest investments in engineering is in software and working with the software communities.”

And as Henry noted, AWS also recently launched its Arm-based servers — and that surely gave the industry a lot more confidence in the platform, given that the biggest cloud supplier is now backing it, too.

Traditional industries like oil and gas and manufacturing often use equipment that was created in a time when remote access wasn’t a gleam in an engineer’s eye, and hackers had no way of connecting to them. Today, these devices require remote access and some don’t have even rudimentary authentication. Xage, the startup that wants to make industrial infrastructure more secure, announced a new solution today to bring single sign-on and role-based control to even the oldest industrial devices.

Company CEO Duncan Greatwood says that some companies have adopted firewall technology, but if a hacker breaches the firewall, there often isn’t even a password to defend these kinds of devices. He adds that hackers have been increasingly targeting industrial infrastructure.

Xage has come up with a way to help these companies with its latest product called Xage Enforcement Point (XEP). This tool gives IT a way to control these devices with a single password, a kind of industrial password manager. Greatwood says that some companies have hundreds of passwords for various industrial tools. Sometimes, whether because of distance across a factory floor, or remoteness of location, workers would rather adjust these machines remotely when possible.

While operations wants to simplify this for workers with remote access, IT worries about security and the tension can hold companies back, force them to make big firewall investments or in some cases implement these kinds of solutions without adequate protection.

XEP helps bring a level of protection to these pieces of equipment. “XEP is a relatively small piece of software that can run on a tiny credit-card size computer, and you simply insert it in front of the piece of equipment you want to protect,” Greatwood explained.

The rest of the Xage platform adds additional security. The company introduced fingerprinting last year, which gives unique identifiers to these pieces of equipment. If a hacker tries to spoof a piece of equipment, and the device lacks a known fingerprint, they can’t get on the system.

Xage also makes use of the blockchain and a rules engine to secure industrial systems. The customer can define rules and use the blockchain as an enforcement mechanism where each node in the chain carries the rules, and a certain number of nodes as defined by the customer, must agree that the person, machine or application trying to gain access is a legitimate actor.

The platform taken as a whole provides several levels of protection in an effort to discourage hackers who are trying to breach these systems. Greatwood says that while companies don’t usually get rid of tools they already have like firewalls, they may scale back their investment after buying the Xage solution.

Xage was founded at the end of 2017. It has raised $16 million to this point and has 30 employees. Greatwood didn’t want to discuss a specific number of customers, but did say they were making headway in oil and gas, renewable energy, utilities and manufacturing.

The UK’s Department for Transport has said today that an expansion of drone ‘no-fly’ zones to 5km around airport runways will come into force on March 13.

Anyone caught and convicted of flying a drone inside the restricted zones could face a fine and years in prison.

Last month the government said it would tighten restrictions on drones flights around airports, after the existing 1km limit was criticized for being inadequate — saying it believes expanded no-fly zones will help protect airports from drone misuse.

The 1km drone exclusion zone around airports, and a 400ft drone flight height restriction rule, only came into force last July. But ministers came in for sharp criticism following the Gatwick Airport drone fiasco when a spate of drone sightings near the UK’s second busiest airport caused a temporary shutdown of the runway and travel disruption for thousands of people right before Christmas.

Heathrow, the UK’s busiest airport, also briefly halted departures after further sightings of drones last month.

“The law is clear that flying a drone near an airport is a serious criminal act. We’re now going even further and extending the no-fly zone to help keep our airports secure and our skies safe,” said transport secretary, Chris Grayling, in a statement today.

“We are also working to raise awareness of the rules in place. Anyone flying their drone within the vicinity of an airport should know they are not only acting irresponsibly, but criminally, and could face imprisonment.”

The government and the Civil Aviation Authority have announced a partnership with online retailer Jessops to help raise public awareness about the new drone rules — and encourage what they dub “responsible drone use” — as part of a national awareness campaign.

The government also said work is continuing on a new Drones Bill. Although the planned legislation is already almost a year behind schedule — and is still only slated for introduction “in due course”.

The bill will give police officers powers to stop and search people suspected of using drones maliciously above 400ft or within 5km of an airport, the government said.

It added that the planned legislation will give additional new powers to the police to clamp down on those misusing drones and other small unmanned aircraft, including the power to access electronic data stored on a drone with a warrant.

Additional powers for police were trailed back in 2017 when the drone bill was first floated by the government. It re-announced its intention to beef up police powers to tackle drone misuse last month following the Gatwick fiasco.

The government added today that the Home Office is still reviewing the UK’s approach to countering the malicious use of drones, writing that it will “consider how best to protect the full range of the UK’s critical national infrastructure — including testing and evaluating technology to counter drones”.

In related news this month, drone maker DJI announced upgrades to its geofencing systems across Europe — applying stricter and more detailed restrictions around airports and other sensitive sites after switching its mapping data provider from US based AirMap to UK based Altitude Angel.

Mobile World Congress, the mobile industry’s annual shindig, is next week but Xiaomi can’t wait reveal its newest top-end phone. The Chinese company instead picked today to unveil the Mi 9.

Once again Xiaomi’s design ethic closely resembles Apple’s iPhone with a minimal bezel and notch-like front-facing camera but Xiaomi has gone hard on photography with a triple lens camera.

There are two models available with the regular Mi 9 priced from RMB 2999, or $445, and the Mi 9SE priced from RMB 1999, or $300. A premium model, the Transparent Edition, includes beefed-up specs for RMB 3999, $595.

The phone runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 chipset and the headline feature, or at least the part that Xiaomi is shouting about most, is the triple lens camera array on the back of the device. That trio combines a 48-megapixel main camera with a 16-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera and a 12-megapixel telephoto camera, Xiaomi said. The benefits of that lineup is improved wide-angle shots, better quality close-up photography and performance in low-light conditions, according to the company.

The premium Mi 9 model, the Transparent Edition, sports 12GB of RAM and 256GB internal storage and features a transparent back cover

There’s also a ‘supermoon’ mode for taking shots of the moon and presumably other night sky images, while Xiaomi touts an improved night mode and, on the video side, 960fps capture and advanced motion tracking. We haven’t had the chance to test these out, which is worth noting at this point.

Xiaomi also talked up the battery features of the Mi 9, which ships with an impressive 3300mAh battery that features wireless charging support and Qi EPP certification meaning it will work with third-party charging mats. Xiaomi claims that the Mi 9 can charge to 70 percent in 30 minutes, and reach 100 percent in an hour using 27W wired charging.

Alongside the Mi 9, it unveiled its third three wireless charging products — a charging pad (RMB 99, $15), a car charger (RMB 169, $25) and a 10,000mAh wireless power bank (RMB 149, $22.)

Xiaomi, as ever, offers a range of different options for customers as follows:

• Mi 9 with 6GB and 128GB for RMB 2999, $445
• Mi 9 with 8GB and 128GB for RMB 3299, $490
• Mi 9 with 12GB and 256GB for RMB 3999, $595 (Transparent Edition)
• Mi 9SE with 6GB and 128GB for RMB 1999, $300
• Mi 9SE with 6GB and 128GB for RMB 2299, $342

Notably, the Mi 9 goes on sale February 26 — pre-orders open this evening — with the SE version arriving on March 1. As expected, the launch market is China but you can imagine that India — where Xiaomi is among the top players — and other global launches will follow.

Xiaomi said it plans to announce more products on Sunday, the eve of Mobile World Congress. It recently teased a foldable phone so it’ll be interesting to see if it will follow suit and join Samsung, which had its first foldable phone outed by a leak.

Note: The original version of this article was updated to correct the Transparent Edition price and specs.

China’s largest selfie app maker Meitu has been busy working to diversify itself beyond the beauty arena in China. On Wednesday, the Hong Kong-listed company announced in a filing that it has agreed to pay about HK$2.7 billion ($340 million) for a 31 percent stake in game publishing company Dreamscape Horizon.

Dreamscape Horizon, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed games group Leyou, specializes in making video games for personal computers and consoles and owns 97 percent of Canada-based studio Digital Extremes. This global connection will potentially hasten Meitu’s overseas expansion and the foray into games, on the other hand, will help the Xiamen-based firm capture more male users. (Operating out of Xiamen might have also been convenient for Meitu to meet the coastal city’s booming hub of game developers.) Out of Meitu’s 110 million monthly active users overseas, only 30 million are male.

“The collaboration with Leyou is not only focused on mainland China but also the global market,” says a Meitu spokesperson in a statement. “Mainland China currently accounts for the majority of Meitu’s earnings. The acquisition will broaden our business scope and diversify the geographic streams of our income.”

The overseas move appears to be a tactful one as the domestic gaming market is crowded with established players like Tencent, NetEase and hundreds of smaller contenders. The local environment has also turned hostile to gaming companies as Beijing steps up scrutiny amid concerns of titles being violent and harmful to young players. The result was a months-long halt in game approvals that dragged down Tencent’s stock prices and prompted a major reshuffle in the giant. And before long Tencent announced it would deepen its ties with Garena to distribute games in Southeast Asia. The hiatus ended in December, but companies are still feeling the chill as China is reportedly mulling a further pause this week.

Meitu is most famous for its suite of photo-editing and beautifying apps, but hardware has been its major income source for years. For the first half of 2018, the company generated 72 percent of its revenues from selling smartphones optimized for taking selfies, a category proven popular in a country where touched-up photos have become the norm. But Meitu’s hardware business is shrinking as smartphone shipment slows in China and phones from mainstream brands like Xiaomi and Huawei now come equipped with filters. It has, however, found a new home for its barely mainstream smartphone brand after Xiaomi gobbled it up in November to lure more female users.

Like virtually every big enterprise company, a few years ago, the German auto giant Daimler decided to invest in its own on-premises data centers. And while those aren’t going away anytime soon, the company today announced that it has successfully moved its on-premises big data platform to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. This new platform, which the company calls eXtollo, is Daimler’s first major service to run outside of its own data centers, though it’ll probably not be the last.

As Daimler’s head of its corporate center of excellence for advanced analytics and big data Guido Vetter told me, that the company started getting interested in big data about five years ago. “We invested in technology — the classical way, on-premise — and got a couple of people on it. And we were investigating what we could do with data because data is transforming our whole business as well,” he said.

By 2016, the size of the organization had grown to the point where a more formal structure was needed to enable the company to handle its data at a global scale. At the time, the buzzword was ‘data lakes’ and the company started building its own in order to build out its analytics capacities.

Electric Line-Up, Daimler AG

“Sooner or later, we hit the limits as it’s not our core business to run these big environments,” Vetter said. “Flexibility and scalability are what you need for AI and advanced analytics and our whole operations are not set up for that. Our backend operations are set up for keeping a plant running and keeping everything safe and secure.” But in this new world of enterprise IT, companies need to be able to be flexible and experiment — and, if necessary, throw out failed experiments quickly.

So about a year and a half ago, Vetter’s team started the eXtollo project to bring all the company’s activities around advanced analytics, big data and artificial intelligence into the Azure Cloud and just over two weeks ago, the team shut down its last on-premises servers after slowly turning on its solutions in Microsoft’s data centers in Europe, the U.S. and Asia. All in all, the actual transition between the on-premises data centers and the Azure cloud took about nine months. That may not seem fast, but for an enterprise project like this, that’s about as fast as it gets (and for a while, it fed all new data into both its on-premises data lake and Azure).

If you work for a startup, then all of this probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, but for a more traditional enterprise like Daimler, even just giving up control over the physical hardware where your data resides was a major culture change and something that took quite a bit of convincing. In the end, the solution came down to encryption.

“We needed the means to secure the data in the Microsoft data center with our own means that ensure that only we have access to the raw data and work with the data,” explained Vetter. In the end, the company decided to use thethAzure Key Vault to manage and rotate its encryption keys. Indeed, Vetter noted that knowing that the company had full control over its own data was what allowed this project to move forward.

Vetter tells me that the company obviously looked at Microsoft’s competitors as well, but he noted that his team didn’t find a compelling offer from other vendors in terms of functionality and the security features that it needed.

Today, Daimler’s big data unit uses tools like HD Insights and Azure Databricks, which covers more than 90 percents of the company’s current use cases. In the future, Vetter also wants to make it easier for less experienced users to use self-service tools to launch AI and analytics services.

While cost is often a factor that counts against the cloud since renting server capacity isn’t cheap, Vetter argues that this move will actually save the company money and that storage cost, especially, are going to be cheaper in the cloud than in its on-premises data center (and chances are that Daimler, given its size and prestige as a customer, isn’t exactly paying the same rack rate that others are paying for the Azure services).

As with so many big data AI projects, predictions are the focus of much of what Daimler is doing. That may mean looking at a car’s data and error code and helping the technician diagnose an issue or doing predictive maintenance on a commercial vehicle. Interestingly, the company isn’t currently bringing any of its own IoT data from its plants to the cloud. That’s all managed in the company’s on-premises data centers because it wants to avoid the risk of having to shut down a plant because its tools lost the connection to a data center, for example.