M&A, Strategies, Alliances Imagination Technologies is donating several of its MIPS appliances to the Debian Project, to help advance the open source OS on the 64-bit MIPS architecture that ImgTec licenses. ARM has acquired Apical for $350m, to branch into vision-based IoT technology. Startup IoT platform Afero has announced a Series A round of $20.3m, with support for its Bluetooth module and back-end service mostly coming from Samsung. Orange has joined the board of the LoRa Alliance. Verizon has joined the International City/County Management Association, as an executive partner. Forecasts, Reports, and Blue Sky Thinking Schneider Electric has conducted a survey that has found that there is growing optimism in the IoT, which counters some previous reports that seemed…