PRESS RELEASE:
Mist Offers BLE Platform for Scalable, Standards-Based Asset Visibility
Mist, a provider of smart wireless networking systems, has announced a new asset-visibility service. This new service, an extension of the company’s Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) offering, enables companies in almost any vertical to locate mobile devices and assets using standard BLE technology. In addition, Mist has expanded its recently announced BLE Alliance program to include new strategic vendors that share a common goal of using BLE asset visibility to save time and money while improving operational efficiencies.
“Many usage scenarios exist for indoor location services,” said Gartner’s Tim Zimmerman and Annette Zimmerman in a prepared statement. “They differ in the types of people or assets being tracked whose location is needed to improve not only a business process, but also the granularity that is required to make better business decisions, such as optimized maintenance and staffing.”
“Mist is the first vendor to offer an open, scalable wireless networking platform that brings connectivity, indoor location services, asset tracking and IoT together in a seamless and cost-effective manner,” said Sudheer Matta, Mist’s VP of products, in the prepared statement. “The whole Mist platform leverages machine learning and modern cloud technologies to simplify wireless operations and deliver amazing new location based services.”
Example use cases for Mist’s Asset Visibility service include health care—users can locate assets, patients and caregivers and obtain real-time visibility into workflows and resource utilization; retail and warehousing—companies can find associates, forklifts, ladders, pallets and strategic assets; hospitality—businesses can optimize staffing resources based on traffic patterns, connect guests to nearby associates for rapid service, and find mobile resources like luggage carts; transport and logistics—firms can track assets and optimize paths in loading docks and warehouse; and enterprise—users can quickly locate employees in an emergency, check in visitors automatically, find available conference rooms and measure traffic patterns for resource planning.
PRESS RELEASE:
Domino’s Franchise Groups Deploy Unified Office’s IoT Operations Performance Suite
Unified Office, Inc., the leader in managed services offering reliable, hybrid cloud-based virtual communications and IoT services along with advanced business analytics, announced at the Enterprise Connect Show that three more top tier Domino’s Pizza Inc. franchise groups, MAR Pizza of Los Angeles, Domino’s Team St. Pete and Domino’s Team New Bedford, have added Unified Office’s IoT Operations Performance Suite, TCNOPS to their Unified Office Total Connect Now enhanced high availability communications service platform.
“Initially Total Connect Now provided us with a superior quality communications and analytics platform that enabled us to increase our operational effectiveness around store performance and quality of customer engagements. It also helped us to increase the number of orders we could take,” said Robert Scheiper, VP of Operations and part owner of MAR Pizza. “Adding TCNOPS was a natural next step for us that extends our overall operational visibility beyond that already offered by their Visual Performance Suite over our entire footprint. The addition of TCNOPS gives us the added benefit of being able to proactively manage our refrigeration, prep table and store temperatures which helps us to maintain our already high level of quality standards franchise-wide.”
“I learned about Unified Office at a Dominos Franchise Association meeting and made the decision to deploy them throughout our entire franchise,” saidPhil Rands, President, Domino’s Team St. Pete. “Unified Office has greatly exceeded our expectations and the performance of our current incumbent communications platform, a well-established vendor in the marketplace. We really loved the integration that Unified Office provides from communications to IoT. TCNOPS will help us to track, report and manage our food safety compliance requirements. Their remote smart thermostat enables us to ensure the comfort of our dine-in customers and staff, while also helping us to control energy costs.”
TCNOPS is an Internet of Things (IoT) based operational performance suite that enables Quick Serve Restaurants (QSRs) and other SMBs to dramatically improve their operational performance and effectiveness. TCNOPS integrates alerting and reporting functions for business critical information into Unified Office’s industry leading Total Connect Now communications platform with its Visual Performance Suite™ (VPS) advanced analytics offering, and cloud-based resilient service architecture.
“Unified Office is pleased to help Domino’s store personnel increase their customer engagement and to drive operational performance in ways that have a positive impact on their top and bottom lines,” said Ray Pasquale, CEO & Founder of Unified Office. “In today’s highly competitive Quick Service Restaurant marketplace, timeliness and excellence in customer service are key drivers of customer loyalty and growth in same store sales.”
Domino’s franchisees across the US have deployed Unified Office’s flagship Total Connect Now offering which provides store-level and franchise-wide performance and business analytics specifically engineered to provide actionable intelligence to store managers and franchise owners. TCNOPS takes this one step further by monitoring refrigeration, fan exhaust emissions and prep table temperatures, which are crucial not only to maintain food safety compliance but also temperature variations that might result in food inventory waste.
TCNOPS extends beyond simple real-time basic monitoring to proactive and predictive analysis, which can eliminate component failure before it becomes a problem. Unified Office uses the same highly reliable, secure broadband connection (HQRP) to deliver and report on business critical information as it does for its Total Connect Now business communications system which offers higher quality business VoIP and unified communications services.
Total Connect Now is an easy to use managed communications service that integrates voice and video communications, messaging, service-level monitoring, business continuity, and business analytics tools for the SMB or franchise owner to better manage their store operations. Unified Office provides an at-a-glance view of customer service responsiveness in real-time, as well as on-demand and scheduled reporting for any store, or combination of stores, all accessible remotely via the Visual Performance Suite’s web-enabled Manager’s Portal.
PRESS RELEASE:
EEMBC Benchmark Reveals Energy Cost of Using BLE for Internet of Things
EEMBC, the industry-consortium setting the real-world standards for valuable and practical application-specific benchmarks, has announced the availability of EEMBC IoTMark-BLE, a benchmark and analysis tool that measures the energy efficiency of microcontrollers and Bluetooth radios used in IoT edge-node devices (end points).
Battery life is often a critical factor in the development of these end-node devices, especially when they are difficult or inconvenient to access. While many microcontrollers are already designed for ultra-low power, a big portion of the energy budget in an IoT application must be allocated for transmitting and receiving data. As a result, whether the radio function is integrated into the microcontroller or added as a separate module, its energy consumption is often the dominant factor and can vary considerably between competing devices.
“The IoTMark-BLE provides IoT system developers with the means to select optimal microcontroller and wireless solutions for their application by going beyond the limited datasheet specifications that tell only part of the story,” said Brent Wilson, co-chair of the EEMBC IoT-Connect working group and director of applications engineering at Silicon Laboratories. “IoTMark-BLE measures the energy used by the full subsystem including the MCU, the radio, and the protocol stack, while they perform relevant real-world tasks. Each part of the system impacts energy efficiency, so evaluating the whole radio system provides the most realistic evaluation of its battery life.”
The IoTMark-BLE is the first of a suite of benchmarks that the EEMBC IoT-Connect Working Group will deliver. Although the IoTMark-BLE targets IoT devices utilizing Bluetooth for communication, the benchmark runs on a flexible, IoT-Connect benchmark framework that EEMBC developed to accommodate additional benchmarks targeting other communication protocols, including Wi-Fi, 6LoWPAN, and LPWAN.
The Consortium is working to produce a suite of benchmarks that allow comparisons between microcontrollers, radios, and modules as well as between competing communication protocols. The key components of this flexible IoT-Connect framework include 1) an EnergyMonitor to measure energy; 2) a radio manager, to coordinate the communication with the device under test (DUT); and 3) an IO Manager to synchronize activities and to simulate a sensor input on the DUT’s I2C or serial peripheral interface (SPI).
“Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a popular technology for many IoT edge-node applications, such as health monitors, home automation devices, and wearable devices. Each application can vary a range of parameters including payload size, frequency of payload transmission, and transmit power. So EEMBC members had to agree on the specific set of tests and measurements to cover a wide cross section of these applications,” said Mark Wallis, co-chair of the EEMBC IoT working group and system architect at STMicroelectronics. “With IoTMark-BLE and the IoT-Connect framework, we’ve made it as easy as possible for developers to select the parameters and functions to ensure equitable comparisons while providing valuable insight beyond datasheet specifications.”
“The IoT-Connect benchmark framework, which supports IoTMark-BLE, has the flexibility to accommodate various communication protocols, and is also sufficiently portable to work with any vendor’s microcontroller and radio-module products. We also designed the framework to work with our other present and future benchmarks, including IoT-Secure and ULPBench,” said Peter Torelli, EEMBC director of technology. “As always, the EEMBC benchmarks make customers’ AND semiconductor manufacturers’ jobs easier by encouraging the use of industry-standard benchmark results to inform their decisions, rather than having to demystify unsubstantiated claims from competitors.”
All interested parties are welcome to join this working group to help define future profiles of this IoT benchmark, ensuring the maximum coverage and relevance for IoT communication protocols and end-user scenarios.
Current working group members include Ambiq Micro, Analog Devices, ARM, Cypress Semiconductor, Dialog Semiconductor, Flex, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Microchip, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Renesas, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, and Texas Instruments. Contact EEMBC directly for more information; www.eembc.org.
PRESS RELEASE:
Xicato, LumiFi Partner for Multivendor Lighting Control
Xicato, an established manufacturer and thought leader in intelligent, connected light sources, has announced its partnership with LumiFi, a wireless lighting control management platform integrating third party IoT-enabled lighting hardware manufacturers, across multiple wireless protocols, into one seamless lighting experience.
LumiFi offers a simple, scalable, app or web-based control interface capable of controlling lighting systems from multiple vendors, in multiple locations, taking advantage of the individual capabilities of each system. Its award-winning intuitive mobile interface can be customized in appearance and tailored in functionality according to the project type. LumiFi’s web management platform provides a central project and light management portal, including analytics, and its cloud hosting offers sharing of project and profile settings across multiple user roles, permissions or profile authorization codes.
“LumiFi has a very well-thought-out interface that simplifies the management of large numbers of lights, particularly in installations such as a hotel where there are common configurations between rooms, floors, and buildings,” commented Jay Shuler, Director of Product Marketing for Xicato. “Using templates and common scenes, LumiFi can make a single change that applies to all instances of, say, corridor lighting in one or more hotel facilities. This makes it highly scalable from both a commissioning and management standpoint.”
With the availability of the Xicato Intelligent Gateway, LumiFi software is now able to provide real-time lighting control and monitoring of XIM Gen4 devices, exercising the full capabilities of the XIG through the XIG HTTP interface.
“Development to the Xicato interface was very simple and straight-forward, and took just two weeks,” said Beatrice Witzgall, Founder and CEO of LumiFi. “LumiFi can now control and monitor Xicato lighting as part of an overall lighting install, through a single, centralized control interface.”
PRESS RELEASE:
Fujitsu, VMware Expand Strategic Collaboration to Offer IoT Solutions for Automobile Industry
Fujitsu and VMware have announced an expanded strategic collaboration to bring innovative IoT solutions to customers in the automobile industry. Extending Fujitsu and VMware’s longstanding collaboration, the Fujitsu OTA Reprograming Solution will be combined with VMware IoT solutions, enabling automobile manufacturers and partners to drive robust solutions in the future with connected cars and autonomous driving.
The automobile industry is rapidly moving toward incorporating more advanced technologies for connected cars, including automated driving. Several automobile manufacturers are investing in these technologies for connected cars, which will use new cloud services in the future.
As the number of electronic control units (ECUs) that manage automotive parts increases in cars, the software that is embedded into the ECUs has become more sophisticated, and in turn, is becoming more challenging to manage. Automobile recalls due to software issues can pose challenges for automobile manufacturers. With more technologies being integrated into vehicles, it is imperative for automobile manufacturers to have the ability to quickly and easily reprogram software as required, while also being able to manage and monitor software versions individually.
To help global automobile manufacturers and their tier 1 components manufacturers, Fujitsu will team with VMware to provide a one-stop service to meet automobile manufacturers’ reliability requirements by integrating VMware IoT solutions into Fujitsu’s OTA Reprograming Solution.