Presented here are news announcements made during the past week by the following organizations:
Point Mobile;
Seldat Technology Services;
PREMO;
HEED;
Particle;
Mitek, JanusID; and
FogHorn.
Point Mobile Intros New NFC/UHF RFID Handheld Reader
Point Mobile, a manufacturer of mobile handheld RFID readers, offers a number of Android-based handhelds with NFC or HF modules, and is now launching a new UHF reader known as the RF800. A growing number of companies use RFID tags and dedicated reading devices, the company reports, since the technology helps them to reduce failure rates while boosting productivity.
The RF800 reader module can interrogate tags from distances of up to 7 meters, making it suitable for inventory management, retail, production, logistics and warehouse management. The unit displays collected data in real time, and users can process that data immediately while connected to LTE or Wi-Fi.
The device weighs less than 300 grams and has an ergonomic design, the company reports, while a status LED keeps users informed about charging status, data synching and more. Point Mobile has placed the balance point in the reader’s pistol grip, enabling the weight to be distributed evenly. A software developer’s kit includes a variety of program samples and libraries supporting the integration of the RFID module in customer applications.
Seldat Technology Services Unveils RFID-enabled Warehouse-Management System
Seldat Technology Services, a provider of technology-based supply chain solutions, has announced that its WMS360 warehouse-management system is available for deployment in the Asia-Pacific region. The modular system is designed to provide increased visibility, integration and control of warehouse operations of any scale across multiple industries, according to the company.
The WMS360 system has been deployed in third-party logistics, e-commerce, consumer goods, and food and beverage warehouse environments. The solution provides insight to position warehouse operations for business success and includes such features as inbound and outbound planning, inventory management, an EDI gateway platform, RFID tracking and integration with automation hardware, omnichannel integration, task monitoring, real-time alerts, a customer portal, business intelligence dashboards and role-based access.
“Driven by Seldat’s vision to be the global leader in technology-driven supply chain solutions, we are proud to bring the power of WMS360 to warehouses in the Asia-Pacific market,” said Chacko Verghese, Seldat Technology Services’ global CTO, in a prepared statement. “Our team of supply chain experts developed WMS360 in the field—observing, responding to, and anticipating future warehouse needs of the modern supply chain. Proven against real-world scenarios, WMS360 helps companies overcome the challenges of outdated warehouse management strategies by delivering an affordable, easy to use, and highly configurable solution.”
“In Vietnam, the cost for logistics accounts for 21% of GDP, with road transportation and inefficient warehousing management as the main factors,” said Tuan Nguyen, the company’s Vietnam country manager, in the prepared statement. “This leads to higher priced goods and weak competition in global trade. Our team has come up with solutions for an easy-to-use platform to help reduce 20% to 30% of warehouse and transportation inefficiencies allowing for Vietnamese products to better compete in the global market.”
PREMO Launches Magnetic Emitter Antennas for Automotive Apps
PREMO, a manufacturer of inductive components, has announced its LFAD-Series (Diabolo-shape) antennas.
According to the company, most LF antennas on the market have a length of 70 to 80 millimeters for standard range, 150 to 170 millimeters for mid-range and 250 to 350 millimeters for long-range. Mid-range antennas offer a sensitivity around three times that of the standard models, the firm reports. Antenna performance have been a headache for designers, PREMO says, in terms of mechanical robustness, resonance frequency variation versus temperature, and waterproof status.

The company says it has designed and patented the new emitter antennas to boost reliability without brittleness; costly materials, processes and investments; or a decrease in temperature and mechanical performance.
The antennas meet the AEC-Q200 standard for automotive quality, as well as the IP54 to IP69K waterproof specifications, due to their packaging—a rugged plastic box filled with polyurethane resin, PA-LPM protection, a combination of both materials and high-pressure molding (HPM). What’s more, the company reports, they are built to provide higher drop, bending and torsion test limits.
HEED Raises $35 Million to Build AI IoT Platform Connecting Mobile Fans to Sports Moments
HEED, which offers an artificial-intelligence (AI) platform, has announced a $35 million funding round led by SoftBank Group International. The investment will bolster HEED’s expansion as it partners with sports clubs and leagues around the world to deepen connections with mobile fans.
HEED, co-founded by AGT International and Endeavor, uses AI to identify a game’s most exciting moments, as well as Internet of Things (IoT)-based data analytics to generate insights and automatically deliver them to fans’ mobile devices in near-real-time. This investment extends the platform’s development to create new experiences connecting fans to moments in soccer, mixed martial arts, basketball and other sports categories.
“Technology has evolved tremendously in interpreting the physical world. HEED is harnessing this to create a new sports fan experience. This was the driving force behind our vision—to create a platform that uses AI and IoT to deliver the best and exclusive sports moments in near real time,” said Mati Kochavi, HEED’s co-founder and the owner of AGT International, in a prepared statement. “HEED is leading this transformation, and we’re excited to bring on Softbank as a strategic partner.”
“At HEED, we see a world in which live events become global digital experiences, spectators become participants, and stats become stories,” said Danna Rabin, HEED’s CEO, in the prepared statement. “The platform we’ve built provides league and team partners with an innovative way to grow their fanbases across different geographies, demographics and sports categories and engage with them in a different way. This investment is an exciting step forward for us as we transform the future of sports for our partners and their global fans.”
“By leveraging AI and IoT, HEED has developed a unique platform that is changing the way fans watch and interact with sports,” said Alok Sama, SoftBank Group’s president and CFO, in the prepared statement. “HEED is taking a traditionally static experience and providing fans with deeper insights into the physical and emotional aspects of the sporting event by gathering and analyzing large, complex data in real time. We are excited to partner with Mati and the team as they continue developing and enhancing this revolutionary technology.”
Particle Updates IoT Platform to Help Developers Build Connected Products
Particle, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, has announced several developments intended to enable developers to build connected products and bring solutions to market faster.
At Spectra, the company’s annual customer conference, Particle showcased its IoT Rules Engine, a new drag-and-drop editor built on Node-RED; announced the shipping of more than 35,000 Particle Mesh IoT developer kits; and revealed new mesh-enabled, enterprise-scale hardware systems-on-a-module (SOMs). Particle also announced the launch of Particle Workbench, its professional desktop developer environment powered by the Microsoft Visual Studio Code editor for developers.
“We want to ensure IoT product builders have the tools they need to build the connected solutions that are changing how we interact with the world around us,” said Zach Supalla, Particle’s founder and CEO, in a prepared statement. “We’re excited to roll out these new products that not only make bringing IoT products to market achievable, but are also open source and built on open standards—moving the entire industry forward.”
Particle unveiled a beta version of the Particle IoT Rules Engine, a drag-and-drop application builder created on IBM’s Node-RED open-source platform that makes it easier for IoT product developers to create app logic. More than 35,000 pre-ordered units of Particle Mesh are expected to be shipped this month. The enterprise-grade, production-scale versions of Particle Mesh—which, according to the company, enable product builders to iterate and transition to scale faster and easier—are being developed for release in 2019.
Powered by Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Particle Workbench enables users to build and debug professional-grade apps optimized for Particle developers. The IoT Rules Engine provides a visual interface to access the Particle platform using if-this-then-that style logic, enabling customers to create business rules in the cloud that react to events in the physical world.
The IoT Rules Engine offers building blocks to create the rules needed for any IoT use case, the company explains. These include real-time alerting, IoT data management, over-the-air (OTA) firmware automation and third-party integrations. Because it is built on Node-RED, builders can benefit from thousands of community-contributed logic snippets (nodes) to supercharge their workflows.
“The Rules Engine has saved us time in building logical systems of our own for processing of IoT data,” said Sunny Pack, Symbiot’s co-founder and lead engineer, in the prepared statement. “It’s been crucial in flagging down potential issues in production, helping us build supplementary support for our devices in conjunction with our existing infrastructure.”
Mitek, JanusID Partner on Real-time Identity-Verification Solution
Mitek, a provider of mobile-capture and digital-identity verification solutions, and JanusID, an identity organization providing one-click secure website access, have announced a partnership to deliver a real-time identity-verification online app known as CheckedID. The app is powered by Mitek’s Mobile Verify, AI-based identity proofing, which enables small- and medium-sized businesses to onboard customers and employees quickly and in compliance with European Union regulations.
Mobile Verify assesses the authenticity of an identity document in real time, using AI and machine-learning algorithms to check for signs of forgery and tampering. Passports, ID cards, residence permits and driving licenses can be processed quickly and reliably, the company reports.
In addition, the app uses Mitek MiSnap for fast image capture, and also performs a liveness check with facial comparison of a user’s “selfie” to the document’s portrait photo. For Android devices, the app employs Mitek’s NFC capability to verify the authenticity of electronic machine-readable travel documents by scanning and reading a document’s embedded RFID chip using the device’s NFC reader.
CheckedID is customizable to suit a customer’s brand and business requirements. Its pay-as-you-go license arrangement offers businesses an option to pay only for what they need to operate safely, and in compliance with regulations. The outcome of the verification workflow is delivered to customers in a secure, GDPR-compliant report, which can act as proof that the verification process has been executed and meets regulatory requirements. All access to the service and data processing is safeguarded by banking-grade security, the company reports, keeping consumer details safe.
“With Mobile Verify powering CheckedID, businesses now have a simple way to identify their customers without demanding that they photocopy and send passports through the mail, or go to a physical location,” said René Hendrikse, Mitek’s VP and managing director for the EMEA, in a prepared statement.
“Enabling customers to safely provide verified personal data increases the level of trust for each party in online customer and employee onboarding. Trust, plus a high regard for privacy, is what businesses increasingly demand,” said Irwin Oedayrajsingh Varma, JanusID’s initiator and CEO, in the prepared statement. “We are very happy to be partnering with Mitek, to ensure these benefits can be realised for all types of transactions, anywhere in the world.”
FogHorn Adds New Internet of Things Software to Its Portfolio
FogHorn, a developer of edge-intelligence software for industrial and commercial Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, has announced the availability of its Lightning 2.0 software. According to the company, the additions to the Lightning portfolio establish new industry benchmarks for edge-based machine learning (EdgeML), scalable edge deployment support, zero-touch sensor configuration, multi-cloud integration and operational technology tools.
The Lightning product portfolio supports the Industrial IoT (IIoT), according to the company, by embedding edge intelligence locally, as close to the source of streaming sensor data as possible. The FogHorn platform is a compact edge-intelligence solution that offers low latency for onsite data processing and real-time analytics, in addition to its ML and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
“In 2018, we have seen a large volume of initial edge intelligence deployments experience great success across a range of industries and use cases,” said Pierce Owen, a principal analyst at ABI Research, in a prepared statement. “Now, the task at hand is to efficiently deploy these projects at large scale. This latest release from FogHorn focused on going from pilot to broad commercial roll out is well timed with the state of the market’s needs.”
FogHorn enables sensor fusion with its ability to simultaneously process and infer on multiple data streams of different types. This release adds critical capabilities to improve sensor deployment automation and scalability, including auto sensor-discovery, sensor fusion, edge device auto-registration and single-click deployment to thousands of devices at once. Data publishing integration with cloud providers, along with integration with Google Cloud IoT Core, can help users to streamline production deployment rollouts.
The Lightning platform features a user interface designed specifically for OT team members. The 2.0 release introduces VEL Studio (beta), a streamlined approach to creating and debugging flow-reactive analytic expressions, delivering programming efficiency for the edge, while reducing the barrier to entry.
“It’s very exciting to see a number of our customers aggressively rolling out the Lightning platform and experiencing significant improvements in performance, automation, yield, quality and cost savings,” said Sastry Malladi, FogHorn’s CTO, in the prepared statement. “The 2.0 release was designed to help our customers scale quickly and accelerate time-to-value in the most innovative, automated, and user-friendly way. This release further extends our technology and solution leadership in real-time edge intelligence, and we are fortunate to have such passionate customers and ecosystem partners continuing to help us push the envelope of innovation in industrial edge intelligence.”