by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Opinions, Technology
By Rajendra Shende,
Srinivasan leaves his office in Bengaluru where the lights and air-conditioners are switched off when sensors planted inside notice that he is leaving. He is prompted on his e-watch as to how much time it would take for the elevator to arrive on his floor, based on movement-recognition by sensors at the entry of the corridor.
He utilises that time to check on his smart phone, connected to his refrigerator, the items that he needs to buy on the way. His smart phone has already received a message from the sensor in his electric vehicle (EV) that there is enough charge in the battery to reach home if he takes the club route, as other routes have heavy traffic.
Welcome to the world of Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Networking and Machine Learning.
The numbers are crazy, but as per the presentations given by Ericsson’s former CEO Hans Vestburg in 2010 — and repeated by Cisco — by 2020, 50 billion devices and machines would be talking to each other. That is about six times the human population. By 2030, as per one estimate from IBM, one trillion devices would be connected to each other in the Cloud, networking more than 100 times the human population.
Scary? If yes, then the story is not even complete.
There are more than five billion mobile phone users among the world’s population of 7.5 billion. That heralds 100 percent market penetration for digital dialogue very soon. Half the world already uses Internet and digital social media. Countries are competing with each other for declaring the targets of 100 per cent EVs and banning petrol and diesel cars “earlier than thou” and growth rates of EVs in many countries are more than 60 percent.
After the announcement of aggressive policies in the manufacture of EVs by China, France and the UK, India’s EV story is “on the verge of imploding” as per the Indian press. Today’s global car population of more than one billion would double by 2040. The share of EVs is likely to be 40-60 per cent. Growth rates of home appliances in India and China are more than 10 per cent.
Now take a pause and imagine something else: The horrendous amount of e-waste generated as the new models and latest versions arrive and as the existing appliances and devices retire and become “unwanted”.
The sheer numbers of not only sensors but lithium batteries needed in a sharply growing market of EVs, driverless cars, mobile and smart phones, clean energy storage, along with rare-earth metals needed for sensors and PCBs for internet-based computing and CCTVs point to a nerve-racking and daunting challenge to tackle e-waste.
That waste is the dark side of the bright story of the global future. These devices, when discarded for the new versions or at the end of their life, would pose life-threatening consequences to our world. Improper and unsafe treatment and disposal through open burning or in dumpsites pose significant risks to the environment and human health.
Good news, however, is that the sound management of e-waste — starting with legislation and its enforcement — can create new areas of employment and drive entrepreneurship. The latest report of the International Telecom Union (ITU) and UN University (UNU) states that new era of emerging opportunities has arrived.
E-waste contains precious metals, including lithium, gold, silver, platinum and palladium, but it also contains valuable bulky materials such as iron, copper and aluminium along with plastics that can be reprocessed in plasma reactors and recycled. Overall, UNU estimates that the value of precious metals in e-waste is worth $60 billion.
In 2016, the Indian government, under Prime Minister Modi, issued the E-Waste (Management) Rules that place responsibility on electronic goods manufacturing companies and bulk consumers to collect and channel e-waste from consumers to authorised re-processing units. Firms are now required to set yearly collection targets linked to their production numbers. These are steps in the right direction to enhance the liability of the companies, if the enforcement is effective.
(Rajendra Shende is Chairman, TERRE Policy Centre, and Director, UNEP. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at shende.rajendra@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Business Summit, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Emerging Businesses, Events, Large Enterprise
By Sourabh Kulesh,
Mumbai : Reliance Group’s Unlimit — an Internet of Things (IoT) venture for enterprises — and tech giant IBM on Monday announced a collaboration to co-create IoT solutions for industry verticals, including automotive, insurance, utilities and industrial automation.
The two companies are developing IoT solutions for implementation across Reliance Group companies, addressing key segments such as user-based insurance (Reliance general insurance), asset and vehicle tracking (Reliance commercial finance), tower monitoring (Reliance communications) and transformer maintenance (BSES & Reliance energy).
“With 2.7 billion connected devices and growing, Indian economy, enterprises and consumers are embracing IoT at a rampant pace,” Harriet Green, General Manager, Watson IoT, Customer Engagement and Education, IBM, told reporters here at the first-ever IBM ‘Genius of Things (GoT)’ summit.
“Our collaboration is an example of IBM leading the global IoT movement with a growing ecosystem of clients and partners. This underscores how IBM and ‘Unlimit’ are taking the power of IoT to Indian enterprises and capturing the phenomenon of digital disruption for joint client innovation,” she added.
As part of the collaboration, IBM will provide its Watson IoT Platform to collect and connect data, including sensor data, from devices and provide use-case specific dashboards.
“As India is becoming the hot bed for digital disruption, we are confident that our powerful technology platform, with Watson IoT at its core, will provide enterprises with a flexible, scalable and secure solution,” Juergen Hase, CEO, ‘Unlimit’, told reporters here.
Unlimit will design IoT use cases for various industries in the Indian market and build them on the IBM Watson IoT Platform, which provides device registration, IoT rules, advanced analytics, visualisation, reports and cognitive capabilities for each use case.
As a result, rather than approaching businesses on one-by-one basis, Unlimit will provide customers with access to these capabilities so that they can leverage IoT-driven insights and information for business decisions, create new product offerings and revenue streams.
The Unlimit IoT platform aired at the enterprise users was launched in April this year. Unlimit aims to provide a common platform for vertical industries such as automation, healthcare, agriculture, financial services and asset tracking.
Green said that IBM’s amazing Cloud capabilities enable all communication and infrastructure that is needed to work for the transformation of businesses.
“We have a set of applications that allow us track, record and work together effectively through exceptional software. ‘Watson’, designed especially for IoT, also works as a differentiator for the company,” Green added.
Watson analyses the massive structured and unstructured data to help digital transformation of companies.
IBM also announced key clients and partnerships with Kone, KPIT, Avanijal Agri Automation, Acculi Labs, Tech Mahindra and Arrow Electronics to drive IoT growth in India.
“With an unparalleled, growing global ecosystem of over 6,000 clients, 1,400 partners and 750 IoT patents, IBM is uniquely positioned to lead the IoT revolution across industries and help companies in India plug into critical new revenue streams,” said Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia.
Through a multi-year agreement with IBM, Kone will tap into the IBM IoT Cloud Platform to connect, remotely monitor and optimise the management of millions of elevators, escalators, doors and turnstiles in buildings.
KPIT, a global technology company that specialises in product engineering and IT solutions across several industries, will use IBM’s IoT Continuous Engineering to deliver high-quality designs and connected products efficiently.
Avanijal Agri Automation will use the company’s ‘Irrigation Automation System’ solution to collect and log irrigation data from various sensors on the field for agronomical analysis which helps further enhance the yield on a continuous basis.
Acculi Labs will leverage IBM’s IoT platform to build and scale “Lyfas” — a scalable rural healthcare solution to smooth the flow of data from the edge device to cloud for further analysis and prognostics.
With IBM IoT solutions, Arrow Electronics will offer more than 160 industry-leading cloud services such as artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, advanced data analytics and cyber security to customers.
Tech Mahindra is harnessing IBM technology for designing experiences through orchestration of systems, sensors, devices, platforms, external data, back-end systems, analytics engine and much more.
(Sourabh Kulesh can be contacted at sourabh.kulesh@ians.in)
—IANS
