Baseball’s new song is “It’s Raining Home Runs.” Albert Pujols just hit #702 for his career, and Aaron Judge tied the Roger Maris record at 61 for the season, with four games left to take the lead. Let’s avoid foul tips and go straight to newstips.

No surprise, the smart speaker market leader in the U.S. is Amazon, followed by Google, with Apple a distant third, according to a recent Omdia report.

Parks Associates discusses how connected home growth opportunities are moving from hardware to services.

Builtin lists 12 IoT smart city vendors, starting with Cisco.

Falling prices and the 5G rollout are transforming logistics per “IoT: The Fast Track to Digitalization.”

In smart cities news, the International Institute of Information Technology Smart City Living Lab in Hyderabad (IIIT-H) teamed up with Silicon Labs to launch a Wi-Sun network that includes all 100 streetlights on campus.

AWS users may already know that the AWS IoT FleetWise Service is now generally available.

A trillion IoT devices doesn’t have to mean a trillion batteries, and research in energy harvesting keeps accelerating. Powercast has ways to harvest energy from 600-900 MHz mobile carrier bands.

CEA and Astrocast announced a new IoT satellite communications module for wireless networking.

Another IoT security article, this time from an exec at Axis Communications.

RFID Journal calls it “hygiene” but quality of life is also a good name for Hong Kong’s public health project with Thinxtra and LBS Smart Technology using Sigfox OG networks to track air quality, rodent presence, and status of public restroom dispensers.

Security Boulevard explains why the IoT needs PKI.

Many don’t yet have 5G, but the push is on for 6G as evidenced by the Open6G industry-university cooperative research center supported by the Department of Defense.

Most gas meters get read once a month, but the new utility network project from Kiwi Technology uses Semtech’s LoRa devices on a LoRaWAN network to let customers check natural gas consumption in near real time as well as monitor for leaks. A shutoff feature in case of natural disaster increases safety.

One of Forbes’ Technology Council partners outlines ways IoT is transforming manufacturing.

Peat traps carbon dioxide, a good thing, but it’s being damaged and needs monitoring. IoT in the form of FarrPoint services using SIM cards and cellular data tracks the health of the peat.

From our friends at Hackster.io:

This project examines, tests, and reviews the new Arduino UNO PRO Ver 2.