What to Expect When You're Connecting

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In this episode, our host Ryan Carlson talks with Rajeev Dutt, a theoretical physicist and the founder and CEO of AI Dynamics, to discuss the world of artificial intelligence (AI), its defining characteristics, and the challenges of AI governance. Rajeev shares examples of how AI is solving problems in various industries, such as drug target identification in biotech and visual quality inspection in smart factories. They also explore the importance of data quality, potential biases in AI models, and the need for transparency in AI decision-making. Tune in to gain insights into AI and learn about the future of AI building AI.

• An Introduction and Exploration of the World of AI
• Examples of AI Applications in Different Industries
• Understanding the Characteristics and Applications of AI
• The Importance of Data Quality and AI Biases
• Addressing the Challenges of AI Governance
• The Future of AI and AI Building AI
• Concluding Thoughts on Trust and Transparency in AI

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In today's episode, we're joined by Alan Boone, CEO and founder of Simetric to delve into the intricacies of managing multiple carriers and how technology is revolutionizing cost savings. We'll explore how innovations are streamlining operations, detecting anomalies, supporting IT asset monitoring, and automating workflows. Plus, we'll discuss the challenges and potential wastage associated with large enterprise deployments that typically engage with an average of eight different cellular carriers.

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We're talking about the idea that there are alternative ways of arriving to a solution, especially in product development involving new technologies and creative engineering.

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We are talking with John Hubler of the BHIOT group about the use of blended networks in smart products and building out device ecosystems. What is a blended network? It's when you're trying to make a bunch of internet of things, devices all communicate, and they're not all using the same Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Cellular, Satellite, or LoRAWan connection, but need to be on the same network.

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 What to expect when you're connecting in difficult remote locations where bandwidth and hardware constraints are working against you. We are joined by Andrew Jarman, CTO of Toku systems and Kenta Yasukawa, CTO and co-founder of Soracom. 

Andrew shares his experience deploying leak detection devices in oil and gas fields and along pipelines in some of the most remote regions of the world. He shares both his engineering tactics for optimizing hardware, but also explains why old DOS programmers make some of the best IoT embedded engineers.

The participants talk extensively about minimizing power and bandwidth requirements for IoT devices, optimizing cellular connectivity, improving software and firmware performance, and the use of services like Soracom Beam and Soracom's Global Roaming SIMs for efficient and cost-effective data transmission. They also discuss GDPR and IoT security. The discussion reveals the deep technical complexity of IoT systems and the creative solutions required to ensure they operate effectively.

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Today we’re talking about how cellular IoT projects can reduce their data costs. We’re joined by Steve, a Customer Reliability Engineer at Soracom who spends every day working through support tickets submitted by customers. Most of these requests are from customers deploying and supporting their fleets of IoT devices, and Steve has agreed to share his experience. Whether helping configure an APN or troubleshooting modem commands, the reality is that the best-laid plans rarely survive contact with the real world. 

Stay tuned and we’ll dig into the insight and advice from an engineer that specializes in helping people take ownership of their cellular device fleets, eliminate waste, reduce expenses, and streamline their operations. 

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In this interview, we’re talking about connectivity of a different sort - stepping up your networking game. No, not computer networking - professional networking, the cornerstone behind personal and professional success. The same mindset for intentional networking happens to follow the same motions that you’ll find in companies with a strong culture of innovation. 

Learn about building your network, the power of micro-partnerships, and what happens when we assume technology is the hardest part, when people are in fact, the source of the biggest challenges IoT projects face.

Today our conversation is with Kurt Schmidt, a person who I met at first was a project manager, but now a President and Partner at Foundry, a digital strategy, design and development agency with offices in Minneapolis, and New York City.

Kurt is a long-time podcaster with five years of interviews with business leaders and technology leaders on the Schmidt List. Kurt is now a published author with the release of The Little Book of Networking (Available on Amazon)

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We're talking with Eric Hoersten who started his career as the internet was taking its shape and how connectivity has always been a core aspect of the technology solutions he's been involved with. Eric learned a lot about the complexities of managing large connected fleets as vice president of information technology throughout the early years of Redbox. Today, Eric is the chief product officer at Banyan Hills where they are helping companies leverage software tools and technical expertise to build effective automation around fleets of connected devices and the operations teams that manage them. 

Kick back and let the nostalgia wash over you as we revisit the pre-streaming years when a trip to your local McDonald's was just as likely to rent or return a DVD movie than it was to buy a cheeseburger and fries. The Redbox automated kiosk experience leveraged early cellular data technology to deploy and manage over 45,000 locations across the US.  Eric shares what it was like building out the technology stack from the ground up to remotely manage their own systems and data from a central system.

What I think you'll enjoy about this conversation is the opportunity we had to look in the rearview mirror and examine how the Redbox experience provided unique insights. Insights have been baked into the software platforms that Banyan Hills provides to their customers to manage and monitor their own fleets of connected hardware devices. 

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This is a recording of an internal conversation between Soracom product manager and customer reliability engineer Felix (Shay) Hsieh, and Soracom partnership manager Richard Halliday during one of Felix’s monthly AMA office hours calls in which he invites anybody in the company to ask any questions they have.

In this week's episode, you’ll get some very specific examples of what happens when teams of cellular network engineers partner up with cloud engineers to break new ground in the world of connectivity operations.

Some of the best IoT product experiences come down to anticipating the small things. That means building the tools and networking options that IoT engineers, hardware developers, field support technicians, QA specialists, or IT teams can use to do their jobs faster, gain more control, or streamline non-negotiable things like security. For many deployments, that means addressing old problems in new ways.
This can include:

• Managing the time, expense, and security risks of static IPs
• Navigating the number of hoops you need to jump through to configure VPNs and private networking over cellular
• Diagnosing network traffic issues and perform packet analysis over cellular networks
• And more.

I’ve listened to this conversation half a dozen times and always seem to take away something new about the differences between traditional cellular data networks and examples of what the future looks like for IoT-optimized cellular networks and how engineering teams are modernizing the experience for those responsible for building and maintaining networks of IoT devices.

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This was originally an internal conversation that I had with Felix Hsieh, a product manager and customer reliability engineer at Soracom. The discussion was during a monthly AMA (ask-me-anything) virtual office hours call. I came to the call with the desire to learn more about the ways in which private networking has been made more accessible than ever before for cellular data connections and entire networks of deployed IoT devices. 

In this discussion, Felix shares how private networking over cellular has historically been challenging, with lots of red tape, delays, contracts, and technical hurdles. We discuss the evolution of support for virtual private clouds, the role regulations can play on project requirements, and review scenarios of how different companies across a variety of industries implemented their private networks over cellular connections. 

Please keep in mind that this was an internal conversation, so Felix will often talk about how Soracom engineers addressed some of the traditional barriers that setting up VPNs and VPCs that most cellular carriers actually still struggle with today, so it's not a sales pitch, but I felt that it's worth calling out upfront. 

One other note to call out is three acronyms are used within this episode that are incredibly similar to one another – VPN, VPC, and VPG:

• VPN, which we all should know as a virtual private network
• VPC, which is a virtual private cloud; unique to AWS and its secure web hosting. 
• VPG, which is a virtual private gateway; a feature that Soracom leverages within its connectivity platform to bridge private networks from a customer device in the field to a customer's virtual private cloud instance or corporate VPN network. Seamlessly without touching the public internet.