Bridge Alliance, SoftBank Corp. Extend M2M and IoT Partnership
Bridge Alliance and Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank Corp. have renewed their existing partnership to continue their collaboration in enterprise mobility services, machine-to-machine (M2M) and the Internet of Things.
The partnership, according to the companies, will enable them to continue serving global and regional multinational organizations. Through end-to-end managed services, enterprises can procure, manage, operate and optimize mobile communication services, including M2M and the IoT, across all Bridge Alliance member networks.
“Being part of Bridge Alliance has brought great benefit to our business and we have been able to boost our offerings for enterprise mobility and IoT beyond Japan for our multinational corporate customers,” said Hiroshi Akabori, the VP of SoftBank Corp.’s Enterprise Business Development Division, in a prepared statement. “With Bridge Alliance’s combined footprint and expertise, our customers can have access to seamless mobile and IoT solutions without the hassle of dealing with numerous operators.”
“We are pleased to extend our successful partnership with SoftBank Corp., building on existing good ties and paving the way for even stronger synergies,” said Eileen Tan, Bridge Alliance’s chief executive officer, in the prepared statement. “SoftBank Corp. is a valuable member of Bridge Alliance, and together, SoftBank Corp. and all our members will be able to offer superior enterprise mobility and IoT services across 34 markets in the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.”
Inmarsat, Actility Announce Global LoRaWAN IoT Network for Business Apps
Inmarsat, a provider of global mobile satellite communications services, has announced that its LoRaWAN-based network, developed in partnership with Actility, a provider of low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs), is designed to support the Internet of Things. According to Inmarsat, early applications in asset tracking, agribusiness, and oil and gas are helping businesses in remote regions of the world become more efficient, reduce costs and drive new revenue through IoT-based solutions.
The early applications cover:
• Asset Tracking: Monitoring the location, movement, health and other key statistics of cattle on a remote ranch in Australia, replacing the manual process of sending an employee to look for cattle that have strayed. An alert is sent out to the ranch manager when an animal is at risk of being lost, is behaving erratically, or is nearing the perimeter of the ranch, enabling the owner to take immediate action.
• Agribusiness: Monitoring the water levels in reservoirs and soil moisture at the roots of plants across the breadth of a large, remote palm oil plantation in Malaysia to deliver water to where it is most needed and achieve maximum crop yield. This enables smarter resource management in an area and reduces the amount of land required for production.
• Oil and Gas: Remote monitoring of oil platform processes where cellular coverage is patchy or non-existent, to identify potential failure points so that they may be addressed and costly downtime avoided. An upstream production site continuously measures operational parameters and transmits them to a control room where a SCADA system adjusts set-points and provides control settings.
The Inmarsat LoRaWAN network, powered by Actility’s ThingPark LPWA platform, allows customers and partners to bring IoT solutions to market that can be delivered around the world to any type of business, with LoRaWAN-based connectivity on the ground and satellite connectivity as the network backbone. The integrated platform provides an end-to-end solution that transmits site-specific data to applications in the cloud for analysis, delivering insights and supporting decision making, and creating value for the end customer.
“These three early applications are indicative of the industrial IoT market in general: businesses don’t need an off-the-shelf IoT solution for agribusiness or asset tracking; they need a specific solution for a specific problem,” said Paul Gudonis, Inmarsat Enterprise’s president, in a prepared statement. “Through our collaboration with Actility, we have the building blocks to tailor solutions for each specific opportunity, no matter where it is in the world.”
Inmarsat and Actility last year announced a partnership that combines Inmarsat’s global L-band satellite connectivity platform with Actility’s ThingPark IoT management platform to deliver an integrated solution for the IoT, linking connectivity, services and IoT devices from a single application and service management point, to connect objects deployed anywhere on the planet. Actility is now part of Inmarsat’s Certified Applications Provider Program (CAPP), which allows third-party companies to develop applications and solutions that are compatible with Inmarsat’s satellite communications network.
“Actility has worked on many large-scale nationwide LPWA network deployments, but this is bigger: we’re fantastically excited about being part of the first truly global IoT network in partnership with Inmarsat,” said Mike Mulica, Actility’s CEO, in a prepared statement. “Our collaboration with Inmarsat allows us to provide customers with an end-to-end solution to connect their assets and fulfill their IoT business needs anywhere in the world. We’ll be working alongside Inmarsat every step of the way to help global customers address their specific needs with more efficient, best-fit solutions.”
Libelium Adds Industrial Protocols to Its IoT Sensor Platform
Libelium has announced that its Plug & Sense! platform brings the Internet of Things to Industry 4.0 by offering new applications for factory automation, automotive applications, industrial networking, building and infrastructure, transportation, energy applications and military uses. The compatibility afforded by new industrial protocol modules and API libraries for the Plug & Sense! platform allows a user to connect to the cloud.
The new modules support the most widely used industrial communication network protocols, such as RS-232, RS-485, CAN Bus and Modbus, used for processes including industrial automation, building automation and automobile applications, for sensor network capability in remote or factory floor environments. In conjunction with the new modules, Libelium has released a special Plug & Sense! model to connect 4-20 mA sensors (current loop), the most commonly deployed in industrial environments.
“Interoperability, reliability and scalability are invisible assets required in any IoT project for industrial environments,” said David Gascón, Libelium’s CTO, in a prepared statement. “In this sense, we are providing solutions to approach the capabilities of our multi-protocol wireless sensor platform to industrial devices.”
Plug & Sense! can be configured to work as a node in the network, inserting sensor data into the industrial bus already present. The platform can obtain information from more than 120 sensors currently integrated in the platform by using specific sensor boards (carbon dioxide, temperature, humidity, acceleration, pH, IR, luminosity, vibration and more). It can also be configured to read the information from the bus and send it to Libelium’s IoT gateway using any of the wireless radio modules available: 802.15.4, 868 MHz, 900 MHz, WiFi, 4G, Sigfox and LoRaWAN. Alternatively, it can be configured to read the information coming from the bus and send it via wireless directly to the cloud, using Wi-Fi or 4G radio interfaces.
Libelium covers hundreds of IoT applications with Plug & Sense!, including 120 sensors for smart water, smart environment, smart cities, smart agriculture, smart parking and more. The Libelium platform is fully certified with CE (Europe), the FCC (US), IC (Canada), ANATEL (Brazil), RCM (Australia), PTCRB (US) and AT&T (US), and is able to operate with the following communication radios: LoRaWAN, Sigfox, Wi-Fi, 4G, 802.15.4/ZigBee, and 868 to 900 MHz RF.
PTC Expands IoT Ecosystem With ThingWorx Partners
PTC has announced the continued expansion of its Internet of Things partner ecosystem with the addition of new ThingWorx partners. Hundreds of industrial IoT partner companies—solution builders, services providers, channel partners, and hardware and software technology companies—have chosen the ThingWorx industrial IoT platform to accelerate their IoT initiatives and deliver value to their customers, the company reports.s
As part of the PTC Partner Network, the ThingWorx Ready Program provides partnering companies with a way to validate product integration with the ThingWorx platform. This enables solution builders to shorten their time to market by leveraging pre-integrated products, extensions and starter kits listed in the ThingWorx Marketplace.
The most recent partners to offer ThingWorx Ready products in the ThingWorx Marketplace include HMS Industrial Networks, a provider of products for industrial communication and industrial IoT; MultiTech, a designer, developer and manufacturer of communications equipment for the industrial IoT; Sierra Monitor Corp., a provider of multi-protocol gateways that connect field devices to the ThingWorx platform for smart-building, -facility and -city applications; and ViziApps, a platform for rapidly developing business apps that use ThingWorx data. BETSOL, a provider of enterprise technology products and services, has also joined the PTC Partner Network as a ThingWorx authorized services provider, and will make its IoT services available on the ThingWorx Marketplace.
The ThingWorx Marketplace is a single source for third-party IoT solutions, technologies and services built on or specifically for the ThingWorx IoT platform. Targeted at both industrial IoT solution builders and buyers, the Marketplace aims to simplify the process of bringing together ThingWorx with third-party tools and services by providing a large inventory of pre-integrated, pre-certified products, extensions and starter kits that, according to the company, are easy to access and use by customers and partners to build their own solutions and accelerate their time to market.
“Collaboration is one of the keys to success in today’s IoT market,” said Kevin O’Brien, PTC’s VP of IoT partner sales, in a prepared statement. “The continued expansion of the ThingWorx partner ecosystem reinforces the value of the platform approach to building new IoT solutions. Combining the world-class components of ThingWorx with the complementary technologies and market and solution knowledge of these partners will further enable IoT innovation and adoption.”
“Using an IoT platform is quickly becoming the go-to approach for developing IoT solutions. Partnering with PTC not only allows us to leverage the standout capabilities of the ThingWorx platform, but also enables us to offer our solution through the ThingWorx Marketplace,” said Michael Finegan, MultiTech’s director of business development, in the prepared statement. “This combination enables us to simplify our customers’ experience and to gain greater exposure to the broader market.”
The ThingWorx IoT platform comprises rapid application development functionality, connectivity, machine learning, augmented reality and integration with leading device clouds. According to the company, this provides an IoT technology stack that enables businesses to securely connect assets, create applications, and innovate new ways to capture and deliver value.
B2X Adds to IoT Offerings, Announces Partnership With Drone Maker Zerotech
B2X, a global provider of customer-care services for mobile devices, has announced that it will expand its range of solutions to the Internet of Things market. B2X’s Smartcare solutions are already in use by such smartphone brands as Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi and Lenovo to ensure that customers have a delightful service experience.
According to a recent Ericsson Mobility Report, 6.1 billion smartphones will be in use worldwide by 2020. In addition, Gartner expects nearly 21 billion connected loT devices within the same time period, while IDC estimates that global IoT spending will reach $1.29 trillion by that year. B2X’s customer-care offering, the company reports, will allow it to address a significant portion of this potential market.
In addition, B2X has announced a collaboration with drone company Zerotech, one of its first customers in the IoT space. Zerotech this year launched a pocket-sized smart drone called DOBBY, then expanded business rapidly in the United States. It utilizes B2X’s Smartcare technology platform in order to make its service processes transparent and efficient. Zerotech and B2X will begin their collaboration in the North American market.
“DOBBY is a compact yet powerful drone that’s made for everyone. We are experiencing rapid growth and the most exciting time in our company’s history,” said Yu Lin, Zerotech’s director of customer service, in a prepared statement. “The worldwide demand for drones is growing very fast and our global expansion is progressing at a very high speed. We are pleased that with B2X we have found a partner to help us exceed the high service expectations of our customers.”
On behalf of Zerotech, B2X will assume responsibility for service and repair, and will provide rapid assistance to customers in the case of hardware damage. Customers needing support inside or outside of their warranty can send their device to the B2X managed service center and receive a repaired or replacement device.
The DOBBY Pocket Drone comes with an integrated 4K camera with a resolution of 13 megapixels. It can be controlled by the Do.fun app and provides build-in smart functions such as auto-track short videos and target following. DOBBY can be used both indoors and outdoors, the company reportss.
“With our disruptive business model, B2X is well established in the global smartphone market as a customer care innovator,” said Rainer Koppitz, B2X’s chief executive officer, in a prepared statement. “We would now like to use our expertise and solutions to further accelerate our expansion. The loT market is an extremely attractive segment for us and we have all the capabilities at our disposal to support new product segments in implementing excellent customer experience.”
Tantiv4 Intros IoT Device to Simplify Household Tasks
Tantiv4, the manufacturer of a prototype for a device that can be customized to work with a range of Internet of Things applications, plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign this month. The company’s FetchitGO offering is an IoT remote that works alongside other smart devices and mobile applications to provide full control of an array of tasks. The device offers connections to IoT products from brands like Nest, Google, Logitech, Spotify, LIFX, Hue and IFTTT. The firm’s Kickstarter campaign to introduce FetchitGO aims to raise $50,000, starting Feb. 23.
FetchitGO is designed to allow families on the go to collaborate on shopping lists for groceries, synch up with apps, turn on music or lights, or call for an Uber. The device can be written on and customized to meet a user’s needs.
Through a partnership with IFTTT, FetchitGO can control most IoT devices by using what the company calls “recipes” to allow the devices to work together. With FetchitGO, a user can toggle hue lights on or off, find a lost phone, create a note in Evernote, send emails, create shopping lists, add events to Google Calendar and more. Each button is an action that requires a single click to activate.
“In a home and in a family situation, you need things which are done at a shared family level, a combined functionality that the whole family shares,” said Lokesh Johri, FetchitGO’s CEO and co-founder, in a prepared statement. “We are convinced FetchitGO is the right product to bring to the market for accessing shared resources in the house.”
More information about FetchitGO, including an explainer video about how the device works, is available here.
Hazelcast Releases Distributed Data-Processing Engine
Hazelcast, an open-source in-memory data grid (IMDG) with hundreds of thousands of installed clusters and more than 17 million server starts per month, has launched Hazelcast Jet, a distributed processing engine for big-data streams. With Hazelcast’s IMDG providing storage functionality, Hazelcast Jet is a new Apache 2-licensed open-source project that performs parallel execution to enable data-intensive applications to operate in near-real time.
Using directed acyclic graphs (DAG) to model relationships between individual steps in the data-processing pipeline, the company reports, Hazelcast Jet can execute both batch and stream-based data-processing applications. Hazelcast Jet is suitable for applications requiring a near-real-time experience, such as sensor updates in IoT architectures (house thermostats and lighting systems), in-store e-commerce systems and social-media platforms.
IoT devices churn out data that flows to computers for analysis, including log analysis, monitoring, fraud detection, dashboard data extraction and placement. However, there are challenges to handling large amounts of information: ingesting high volumes of data, while keeping up to date with what’s coming in; anomaly detection—recognizing and validating the correctness of data entering the system; analyzing, aggregating, extrapolating and reacting to a situation in near-real time; working with low-latency access to data; and reporting, whether running on-demand or via scheduled batch processing.
Hazelcast Jet is built on top of a one-record-per-time architecture (sometimes known as continuous operators). This means that it processes incoming records as soon as possible, as opposed to accumulating records into micro-batches, consequently lowering latency for applications. Jet ingests data at high velocity (via socket, file, HDFS or Kafka interfaces), and processes the business logic or complex computation on incoming data. It can be fully embedded for OEMs and for microservices.
“We believe that the Hadoop and Spark ecosystems are too complex to program and to deploy and have set out to bring Hazelcast’s legendary simplicity to big data,” said Greg Luck, Hazelcast’s CEO, in a prepared statement. “We have designed it as a general-purpose engine for the intersect of big-data programmers and Java programmers. But if you are already a Hazelcast user or have data in Hazelcast, it will be the easiest way to solve your big-data problems.”