What to Expect When You're Connecting

This conversation is with Nasim, the founder of Electron2Go. The discussion revolves around the journey of developing Electron2Go, a phone charging hardware solution for schools, airports, stadiums, and public spaces. Nasim opened up about the challenges faced in the process such as the decision to switch to cellular versus wifi connectivity, struggling with FCC and PCI certification, and dealing with supply chain issues. This conversation also contains some guidance for developers contemplating the creation of similar projects.

We talk with  ProSentry's founders Nadav and John, discussing their company's development, practical applications, and technological challenges of deploying their connected products throughout New York City multi-tenant housing properties. They talk about their unique system, which leverages LoRaWAN technology (a wireless data communication technology) to detect issues such as water leaks, pest infestations, gas leaks, and more in buildings. The system is capable of alerting building managers within seconds of detecting a problem, allowing for immediate action. The conversation covers how they solved various problems, including the need for multi-carrier support- accomplished with Soracom's technology, the simplicity of their system, and the benefits brought to end users and installation teams. They also explored possible future advancements in their technology and potential new applications for their system.

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 AIExamples of AI Applications in Different IndustriesUnderstanding the Characteristics and Applications of AIThe Importance of Data Quality and AI BiasesAddressing the Challenges of AI GovernanceThe Future of AI and AI Building AIConcluding Thoughts on Trust and Transparency in AI

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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. 

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)

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. 

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 IPsNavigating the number of hoops you need to jump through to configure VPNs and private networking over cellularDiagnosing network traffic issues and perform packet analysis over cellular networksAnd 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.

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 networkVPC, 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. 

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.