Industrial giant General Electric has announced that its Predix IoT platform generated $1bn in revenue over the past year, and that it now plans to open up the platform to other companies in 2015, and has just launched the Predix App Factory to speed up developer’s deployments. GE has also added Verizon as an M2M partner, who now joins AT&T in providing the global backhaul for the data generated by GE’s sensors. Verizon and GE plan to develop a single global SIM standard, but have yet to announce concrete timeframes or criteria. Intel and Cisco have also begun developing Predix ready devices. The announcement was made at GE’s Minds + Machines conference. Predix is a software platform developed in-house by…