Whether it’s a trade fair, conference, exhibition, or maker event, here you can find out everything you need to know about events related to the Internet of Things (IoT).
With new ideas, new technologies and new smart products emerging every year, one big challenge for devices in the Internet of Things remains: How can we make them understand each other? A huge number of manufacturers and products using different protocols plus a wide range of platforms with non-interoperable networking technologies are making the IoT too complicated to handle.
Berlin’s annual conference “re:publica” has finally grown out of its infancy. What started as a blogger-event with a high nerd factor has finally become a serious annual gathering of, let’s say, a variegated tech society. Founders, inventors, politicians, activists and journalists met to present, network and discuss. While this year’s motto “Love out Loud” focused on the rise of internet hate speech, the spreading of fake news and how to deal with it, other tracks like “business & work” and the “global innovation gathering” brought together makers, hub managers and entrepreneurs from around the world.
Following on from E-World, and a great deal of work going on in the background, Phoenix Contact and ourselves were back on the road this week with an appearance at the DIAL Openlab at DIAL’s offices in Lüdenscheid, in the […]
The focus of this year’s Hannover Messe was on Industrial Internet of Things services and products. With over 6,500 exhibitors and more than 225,000 visitors it is the world’s largest industry fair. And with IoT being a main topic, our appearance was obligatory. Lemonbeat’s technology offers a flexible framework to quickly enable the “IoT-zation” of all kind of things: from sensors and actuators to products and machines for consumer and professional needs. Already in use in the field of Smart Home, Smart Building, Smart Energy and Smart Garden systems, Lemonbeat’s range of use is vast.
Let’s face it: Explaining the Internet of Things and the advantages of direct communication between devices can be a dry and theoretical topic. So we decided to literally spice the whole story up and add a little bit of gamification to the issue: In future events we’re going to demonstrate our technology with a smart game of dice that communicates its result to a vending machine, releasing a pack of Lemonbeat branded snack chips in case players sucessfully rolled the dice.
I was honored and pleased to be invited as a speaker to 48forward’s first “Masterclass” session in Munich, a new format designed to give answers in an intimate setting, and to create an interactive atmosphere where the audience is actively encouraged to ask questions. 48forward have been organizing events for a variety of themes (marketing, influencers, digital transformation) for a while now; notably the 48forward Conference. They have established themselves as a welcome addition to the Munich ecosystem, where many topics are additionally discussed with a more in-depth view. As such, speaking at the event was definitely on my to-do list.
Phoenix Contact, a leading manufacturer of electrotechnology, and Lemonbeat bundle their strength to lift building automation to the next level. During the “E-world energy & water 2017”, Europe’s most successful specialist energy trade fair, both companies announced their cooperation. It’s goal: making building automation more intelligent and less complex. A first real life project is already underway.
One big challenge in the world of IoT will be to ensure devices from a range of different vendors to collaborate smoothly. One solution, and one that has proven the most popular up until now, is to connect each single device with a cloud service, collect the data and let a remote computer decide what to do next. But this is not always a very elegant way of doing things. First of all, you may need to tie in a number of gateways to collect data from the different devices which may all use different protocols. Secondly, by sending everything into the cloud first, you run the risk of higher latency. Thirdly, if the cloud server stops working or a glitch with the internet connection, the whole system may grind to a halt.
Whenever you attend IoT events these days, there’s one question that is always debated intensively. Do we really need a common standard for the Internet of Things, or are we fine with what we have? While some say we have already got what we need and the rest can be done with gateways, others passionately advocate for horizontal standardization. At the annual M2M Summit of the German based M2M Alliance in Düsseldorf, the discussion continued.
The Internet of Things, with all its players in the market, faces the same problem that the Internet faced before the days of the World Wide Web: A wide range of platforms with non-interoperable networking technologies, data silos and therefore limited interoperability, and thus, market potential. Perhaps if parallels can be drawn, maybe learnings can be too?
