Second Economist Article mentioning IOTA:
Another project, called IOTA, operates a similar scheme. Bosch, a German engineering giant, thinks that it could use IOTA to earn money from the data its domestic appliances generate. It has bought IOTA tokens through its venture-capital arm.
These new data markets face stiff challenges. Maintaining individual privacy and monitoring questions to prevent corporate leaks will be difficult. The cryptography securing the network needs to be airtight. Perhaps the biggest challenge will be convincing people to use them. The take-up of similar efforts, such as Solid, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Maidsafe, a Scottish data-sharing network, has been lacklustre. Nevertheless, Fetch says several large European firms are lined up to give it a go. And, like other digital currencies, IOTA’s token value has soared and fallen.