What to Expect When You're Connecting

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Learn about asset tracking from an industry insider and building product narratives that drive adoption across a value chain. This conversation is with Tom Dever from Nimbelink, a division of Airgain where we discuss the world of asset tracking and how it’s used across various commercial and industrial industries. For the second half of the episode, I asked Nicole Young to weigh in on the conversation I had with Tom. She’s a technologist new to IoT and together, we discuss asset tracking and explore one of my favorite topics, product buy-in. Great connected products can still fail due to a lack of buy-in or adoption from each major player within the value chain for a product. That value chain includes OEMs, distributors, integrators, field technicians, and end users. Connected products will encounter a lot of resistance depending on the weakest link in that chain. We go into examples of what that successful narrative looks like using remote asset monitoring as our focus.

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Today we're talking about a technology that gets us a few steps closer to the holodeck from star Trek, or the construct from the matrix, which if you remember, was that virtual environment used by Morpheus and Neo to learn kung fu and control and alter simulations “guns, we’ll need more guns”. These were virtual environments that could have a real impact on the people within the physical world.

Before we get futuristic virtual worlds that mirror and simulate the real world, we’re going to need to work out the technology that expands on how we visually represent and interact with a digital twin to effect change in reality. We have tens of thousands of individual products today that have bi-directional relationships with physical devices and a digital representation, including factories, airplanes, and individual condition monitoring solutions. The challenge we face is finding an easier way to integrate the entirety of these disparate ecosystems of devices that don’t natively talk to one another. Initially, businesses are seeking to improve efficiency, monitor safety, or even simulate or recreate events that occurred within these ecosystems of independent systems by interacting with their digital twin. 

Science fiction has been predicting this future state well before the technology existed. It’s told in stories where somebody gets trapped in a virtual simulation while the rest of the crew is outside of the simulation and is in grave peril. 

It requires the hero to find the backdoor in the virtual simulation in order to recreate a version of the starships controls that can affect the physical world. We may not have neural interfaces or fully immersive holographic of environments, but we do have examples of very intricate digital twins and augmented reality. 

I've seen a number of command and control centers at larger manufacturing facilities where it feels a bit more like mission control filled with monitors displaying digital representations of plant status, which is usually it's a 2d image and color-coded status icons and helpful if you’re a bird or very familiar with the facility, but we are now starting to see the use of high fidelity 3d images that allow digital twins to be manipulated from multiple angles and see multiple data points visually superimposed on a different augmented reality layer. The data streams in from the various sensors that don’t talk to one another but still centrally report in, from the PLCs, IoT sensors, equipment status alarms, and granular condition monitoring subsystems. And that is really exciting. As we discussed in Episode one about the digitization of workforce knowledge, sometimes we need to see all of the different contextual data points to really understand why something is happening. 

Generating these large visual 3D representations of a physical space is rapidly evolving. For years we’ve been able to look at photos and have 3D designers create a digital representation — trade show booths, home builders, and architectural firms have been selling their ideas for decades now. That’s not what we’re talking about — the technology we’re going to discuss is how we can digitally recreate a physical space that already exists in 3D In a matter of minutes to hours, depending on the size of the facility.  

 So in this interview, we've got Brittany Shramm from Matterport, a company that specializes in 3d image capture software and technology that created some of the highest fidelity scans of an industrial facility that I had ever seen. 

They showed some demos and I was, uh, blown away.  Digital twins and augmented reality have really gone from novel curiosity into something a bit more mainstream. We’re finding that it is becoming increasingly necessary to combine data from physical assets into applications and it infrastructure in order to improve operations. 

Service and maintenance teams armed with better

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This week we’re diving deep into a niche industry that has started to become reliant on connectivity to keep its content fresh, relevant, up-to-date, and maintain consistency across hundreds of thousands of devices. 

We’re talking with Sheldon Downey from InstoreScreen and an expert on the use of high-tech digital signage for use in advertising and creating unique retail shopping experiences.

Sheldon shares several stories to help paint a picture of where connected systems are going. For example, we cover how the physical and digital worlds are coming together in what’s called an endless aisle experience and what that means for us as consumers. In addition, we spend a fair amount of time discussing the operational challenges that deployment teams face, the hurdles facing IT, and the role that real estate teams play in putting more technology into retail locations. 

I could keep going, but I don’t want to spoil some of my favorite parts of the conversation — you’ll have to keep listening to find out the rest.

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This special episode is the audio from a previously recorded onstage presentation by Soracom CTO, Kenta Yasukawa given at the IoT in Oil and Gas event hosted by the Energy Conference Network in Houston, Texas. Kenta's presentation shares a number of insightful takeaways as a connectivity technology company asked to solve unique challenges for three different companies in the oil and gas industry leveraging cloud-native cellular connectivity.

For the sake of transparency, I feel it's important to disclose that I'm employed by Soracom and Kenta is a founder. He talks a lot about Soracom in this presentation, how he started the company, and he gets into the weeds with the technology. This is not intended to be a sales pitch, but since it breaks with the typical interview format, it feels right to call this out.

What you’re going to hear is a passionate technologist that has built something he’s proud of and has some really amazing results by taking a radically different approach to telephony, cellular, mixed-connectivity networks, and applying modern cloud technologies to address the challenges oil and gas companies face with data security, private networking and supporting remote devices in remote locations.

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From the design level to the system level, connected products represent a new set of technologies and capabilities that can all serve as the weakest link in a product launch.

Our guest is Titu Botos, a PhD in electronics and mobile robotics and the CEO of NeuronicWorks, a product design and manufacturing company in Canada. 

We discuss how connectivity shapes both the challenges and the complexity of the product design process and where the most common gaps in design rear their ugly head. From radio compatibility, carrier compatibility, processor selection, and security we cover a lot of ground. This even includes the multiple factors that design decisions can impact battery life for IoT devices required to operate for long periods of time in the field without a power source.

This conversation makes for a helpful checklist for someone who is considering a product idea that they want to bring to market, how complex some of these decisions can be, and what the value of having an expert guide alongside them might look like.

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Our guest in this episode is Matt Negaard. He’s been involved in sales and business development roles, product development, roles responsible for technical requirements, led entire teams, and he doesn’t hold back in sharing what he’s learned as a product portfolio owner within IoT and IIoT. 

If you like learning from the experience, stories, and thought processes of other IoT professionals, this is your chance to learn what his takeaways have been evangelizing IoT through the years prior to the mass consideration of wireless and cloud-based solutions that we see today. Whether you've been in the IoT space for years or you're looking to get into the space and want to know what it’s like working on connected products and what it takes to get them out into the world, you'll walk away with some great takeaways.

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In this episode, we’re looking at how connectivity decisions are made in the oil & gas industry and the factors that influence investments in new technology.

This conversation is less about what they are building, but why an industry that’s resistant to change and slow to adopt new technology is pushing forward with big investments in tech that’s reliant on connectivity.

To make the most sense of how change happens, we need to address an important question, “Who picks up the phone when the energy companies call looking for answers?” Look no further than today’s guests Jeff and Scott from Logix Sales & Marketing.

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Digitalization is an incredibly dense topic, especially when we’re talking about the digitalization of knowledge within a workforce. Not as a way to replace people, but to preserve the knowledge that allows us to trust the feedback systems (whether it’s analog or digital) and bring confidence back into our decision-making.

Connectivity, data collection, and sensors are only as good as the underlying data models, assumptions, and the data science we apply to a solution … to which our guest said during the panel, “you know, long ago we had another name for data science, it was called math”

So what does this conversation have to do with connectivity? Everything. 

Digitization goes well beyond individual discrete data points and it’s clear that the data we need to make meaningful decisions doesn’t stop at the four walls of a facility — it requires pulling data from “out there”.