With connected devices on the rise, the Internet of Things (IoT) is here to stay. And according to speakers at Computex Taipei, companies that leverage the power of connectivity enabled by IoT will ultimately win out.
With connected devices on the rise, the Internet of Things (IoT) is here to stay. And according to speakers at Computex Taipei, solutions providers that leverage the power of connectivity enabled by IoT will ultimately win out.
The speakers – representatives of Taiwan and Swedish companies – made those comments during the 2017 Sweden-Taiwan Tech Innovation Forum held alongside Computex.
According to the speakers, IoT has taken hold in various parts of the everyday life. “Needless to say everything will be connected, whether you like it nor not,” said Jonny Wetterborn, CEO of Sweden-based Tilgin. “We have fridges, washing machines, and air-conditioners. We have everything connected basically.”
“By 2022, there will be some 24.4 million smart home households in North America, and on average each household will contain more than 500 connected devices,” said Samson Chen, Co-Founder of Taiwan-based Qblinks.
Not only homes, but buildings and offices will also be subject to the force of IoT as well, whereby environmental sensors are put inside buildings to help owners save on energy. “Building automation has become very important,” said Mikael Lindholm, VP of IoT at Telenor Group. “It’s important because it’s about utilizing natural resources in an efficient way.”
With the prevalence of IoT, companies that provide solutions which offer greater user experience, help reduce cost and leverage the massive amounts of data generated by sensors can win out amid the IoT trend, they said.
Qblinks, for example, launched its Qmote single button that appeals the user’s needs for greater convenience. According to Chen, using the smartphone to turn on or off lights has been done for some time, but the user needs to unlock the phone and find the app first. Qmote intends to eliminate these hassles, a single button that interacts with the user’s phone to control a variety of devices from lights to locks to projectors.
Also according to Chen, Qblinks differentiates by providing a server-less platform that carries various benefits. “The service becomes reliable and scalable. For a single request or 1 million requests it doesn’t matter to us, as we can control total latency down to 100 milliseconds,” he said. “Another benefit is security; as everything is server-less, there’s nothing you can break into unless it’s at the application level.”
Tilgin, meanwhile, introduced its Open HGA software for smart home gateways. The software includes a set of predefined functions which can be remade and adapted to specific requirements via the open interfaces. According to Wetterborn, this can benefit operators and end users alike. “For operators, the idea is to make it possible to provide new service on existing platform,” he said. “From the end user’s perspective one of the advantages is instead of having multiple devices you can have a single hub that runs different services.”
Finally, the data generated by sensors can be quite huge, and leveraging and analyzing that data to the user’s advantage has become key. Nowhere is data more overwhelming than in video, and Skywatch, also a participant in the forum, has the analytics to make sense of the images taken. “We use sophisticated, accurate algorithms to count the number of people passing through an overhead surveillance camera. Another camera is used to observe the facial attributes of these visitors,” said Wei-Chao Chen, Co-Founder of Skywatch. “You may start observing important trends in your retail shops, discover new opportunities and revenue streams, all with simple pay-as-you-go service plans.”