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Smart irrigation controller GreenIQ is integrating its Smart Garden Hub with Nest’s Protect, that firm’s smoke detector and alarm.

When Nest Protect detects a fire, it will alert the Smart Garden Hub, which will activate sprinklers to avoid a garden fire. In the event of an emergency, the hub will activate any outdoors lights to alert the family and neighbors to the event.

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The sprinklers will remain on for 20 minutes, unless the user manually turns them off. Users can also set the GreenIQ sprinklers to continuously run regardless of the Nest Protect’s status, to ensure that all areas in the garden are damp.

Over 2,500 people lose their lives and 12,000 suffer injuries from house fires in the United States annually. As well, with extreme drought conditions in several western and southern states, small fires can quickly spread through dried out gardens and threaten neighborhoods.

GreenIQ hopes that the integration will lower that number, and also lower the amount of direct property loss due to fire damages, which was estimated at $7.3 billion last year.

“It has always been our mission to help make gardens smarter and allow people to feel more connected to their green spaces,” said Odi Dahan, founder and CEO of GreenIQ. “Our integration with Nest is taking it one step further by not only helping our customers save money and conserve water, but also helping to decrease any anxiety people may have about potential fires.”

GreenIQ Smart Garden Hub is one of a growing list of garden IoT systems, focused on ensuring plants and grass have enough water to grow while lowering the amount of water used everyday. The system offers a smart analytics platform to tell the customer how much water should be used, the most optimal position for sprinklers, and the best ways to keep their garden alive, all from the smartphone app.

German tech firm tado°, a smart home play focused on climate control, has announced that it copped nearly $23 million in its latest round of funding. This is in addition to the nearly $34 million raised previously.

tado° is focused on its primary Smart AC Control, a wall-mounted device that help turn remote-controlled air conditioning units into smart climate devices by linking them to a central control unit located inside the house that connects via the internet to your smartphone.

Using infrared technology, the same technology used in remote controls that come with portable air conditioners as well as window and in-wall units, tado°’s Smart AC Control is able to control multiple air conditioning units throughout your home.

It’s been a bit of a rocky time for smart home tech, with the bricking of Nest’s Revolv smart home hub. Consumers may be becoming leery about splashing out on new tech that may go dark before it pays off for them.

“We have had the benefit of seeing the hyperscale of Nest, and learning what has and hasn’t worked in their product line and marketing efforts — and clearly the Revolv hub was a failure, that not many other Smart Home innovators could afford to repeat,” tado° founder and CEO Christian Deilmann told ReadWrite. “At tado°,  we have a very clear product roadmap, and we’re committed to further evolving our product to satisfy this very large, underserved market.”

He added they’re reaching “millions of people around the world with remote-controlled heating and cooling units looking for a smart climate control option, which is not covered by Nest or comes at a cost significantly more than our products.”

What does this mean for users? It means that you can control your air conditioners from your smartphone wherever you might be, and you can set it up so that as you move from one room to another, the room’s climate control system activates ensuring that you use less electricity and have a comfortable space wherever you might be.

The Smart AC Control can also be set to turn you unit(s) on as you head back home from work. This feature set is remarkably similar to that of popular Nest thermostats, which are used to control central air conditioning units and has recently grown as a product line to connect a wide range of devices to the home network.

It is Wi-Fi enabled so it connects to the Internet through your home’s router, has Bluetooth capability which senses when you are home, contains humidity and temperature sensors, a capacitive touch surface for easy control, and an LED matrix which indicates which mode and status it is currently in.

This latest round of funding by tado° is intended to assist in its global expansion, especially into the US market. Recently, tado has added its products to Amazon, Best Buy, and Home Depot and partnered with AT&T in its Digital Life program.

tado° has a unique place in the connected home market. For the millions of homes that rely on smaller non-central heating and air solutions, it certainly has a lot of promise. CEO Deilmann said savings depend on the home and number of AC units installed but he estimated savings for a US household of $200 to $800 a year.

Lutron Electronics has added its Caséta Wireless system to the growing list of devices that support Amazon Alexa range, which includes the Echo, Dot, Tap, and Fire TV.

The Caséta Wireless system features various connected LED lights that can change color or brightness on demand. The integration of Alexa allows users to change the lights through voice commands, an ideal solution when you cannot find your smartphone.

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Amazon has been steadily improving the range of voice commands for the Echo, to the point it can now hear you from a few meters away. So if you want to turn the lights on when you enter your house late at night, there’s a good chance your Echo will hear you from the porch.

Lutron already provides a mobile app, available on iOS, Apple Watch and Android, for turning on and changing the light’s colors. The system also supports other smart home hubs like Works with Nest and Apple’s HomeKit, so this is a completion of the smart home package to make sure all consumers are happy.

These aren’t the first lights to take advantage of Amazon’s Alexa platform, Philips Hue, LIFX and Belkin WeMo are already integrated and offer similar functionality.

Lutron’s Caséta Wireless kit currently retails for under $100, and most wireless lightbulbs launched after 2014 are compatible with the system. You can check Lutron’s compatibility page for more information.

Hundreds of other devices are starting to integrate with Amazon’s platform, as customers start to realise the benefits of the Echo, Dot, and Tap in everyday life. Even platform hubs like the Nest thermostat and SmartThings are integrated with Alexa, taking advantage of the voice commands and APIs Amazon has on offer.

Smart homes’ connected technologies are leaving homeowners vulnerable to data and privacy theft, according to a new study that examined several common IoT consumer devices.

IoTTech News reports that research by Romanian internet security software maker Bitdefender identified four common IoT products that were susceptible to cyber attack: WeMo switch, LinkHub, LIFX Bulb and the MUZO Cobblestone audio receiver.

Bitdefender undertook the study as IoT smart home systems proliferate globally, making them more subject to hackers’ attention. It examined how these devices communicated with its mobile app, as well as how they connected the cloud and the Internet more broadly. The research recommended that manufacturers need to take greater steps to prevent sensitive data from being overheard as the increasing array of devices communicate with each other.

Though not one of the devices in this report, at a recent conference university researchers easily showed how one of the most popular smart home devices, the Nest thermostat, can be hacked especially with physical access to the device. In under 15 seconds, bad guys could remove the Nest from its mount, plug in a USB cable, and back-door the device without the owner’s knowledge. The hacked Nest can then be used to spy on the household or serve as a platform to attack other networked devices.

“IoT vendors need to prioritize security before their devices become hugely popular, leaving millions of people at risk from cyberattacks,” said Bitdefender malware researcher Radu Basaraba.

“The IoT opens a completely new dimension to security where the Internet meets the physical world,” he said. “If projections of a hyper-connected world become reality and manufacturers don’t bake security into their products, consequences can becoming life-threatening.”

For the Bitdefender report, the research found that hackers could use the LIFX Bulb to reroute users to a fake hotspot while the LinkHub smart lighting system was sending unencrypted data. The WeMo remote switch was made vulnerable by weak access point authentication, and the MUZO receiver suffered from weak initial credentials that left the device open to hacking.

Communications giant Huawei has revealed its vision for 2016 at its annual analyst summit (HAS), with a focus on the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality, and 5G internet.

The Chinese firm was one of the first to begin 5G tests, working with Japanese wireless carrier NTT Docomo last year on field tests. It expects to see a rollout in the next five years, but in the meantime Huawei plans to upgrade its LTE Advanced service.

See Also: Google is Readying its Own Internet of Things OS

The two other areas hinge on faster internet speeds and more bandwidth, according to Huawei. It claims that LTE Advanced might be enough for artificial and virtual reality, though an IoT system in every home might require much faster Wi-Fi and cellular speeds.

Huawei didn’t announce any individual devices for the IoT market at the summit, but wants to become a provider of entire systems for consumers. This is being attempted by Nest and Apple, through Works with Nest and HomeKit, but without a strong consumer platform like the Nest thermostat or iPhone it might be hard for Huawei to get off the ground.

It already has its own IoT ecosystem, Lite OS, but only a few IoT applications and services utilize the ecosystem. Indian Express points to one app for smart parking, which allocates a parking space for a car before it enters the facility, lowering the amount of time searching for a space.

That’s not exactly the most innovative app in the IoT world, but Huawei seems committed to building its ecosystem and partnering with more developers in the future.

On the virtual reality front, Huawei recently released a VR headset to compete with Samsung’s Gear VR. It works with the P9 and P9 Plus devices, similar to Samsung’s VR, but uses its own ecosystem that offers 4,000 movies and 30 video games for free.

That might be enough in the short-term for customers, but it will need to constantly update its store to keep users interested. That is why Samsung’s partnership with Oculus made sense, so that developers weren’t forced to develop for yet another VR platform.

All in all, the real excitement here is the onset of 5G in the next five years. We’ve heard data speeds reaching up to 800Gbps in UK research labs, though we expect 2-10Gbps when it initially arrives in 2020, enough to hopefully power an IoT home without any hiccups.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) market begins to boom, we are bound to see the government take a more active role in investment and policing what is right and wrong in the industry.

That’s what an April 6 notice on the Federal Register by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) seems to suggest, asking for all parties involved in IoT to discuss with the administration about the evolution of IoT and shifts in global economies from the new technology.

See Also: Will IIoT Bolster Industrial Automation Investments? 

“NTIA seeks broad input from all interested stakeholders — including the private industry, researchers, academia and civil society — on the potential benefits and challenges of [Internet of Things] technologies and what role, if any, the U.S. government should play in this area,” said NTIA in the notice.

While it reads civilly enough, the U.S. government has shown a lack of enthusiasm for major projects like commercial drones, which we shut down by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2015.

That might worry IoT stakeholders that want to see the market grow unhindered. If new regulations or subsidies are set in place, it might change the dynamics of the market drastically.

Federal Times explains that the comments will be added to a green paper, which will be given to the government to “identify key issues impacting deployment of these technologies, highlight potential benefits and challenges and identify possible roles for the federal government in fostering the advancement of IoT technologies in partnership with the private sector.”

While IoT has been around for a decade now, it has only gained its bearings in the last three years. The growth in the consumer sector, with devices like Nest’s thermostat, Philips Hue, and Amazon Dash Button selling well, has brought more interest from all across the industry, which Gartner claims will balloon to 26 billion IoT devices by 2020.

It doesn’t appear to be a market desperate for government intervention, though no doubt some will argue for and against government assistance.