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).
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?
