IoT Asia 2017 in pictures

The entrance to IoT Asia 2017.

IoT Asia 2017 was officially opened by Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister-in-Charge of the country’s Smart Nation initiative.

IoT Asia 2017 was officially opened by Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister-in-Charge of the country’s Smart Nation initiative. During the opening keynote, Dr Balakrishnan discussed the government’s plans to turn Singapore into a Smart Nation, including the announcement of a GovTech-NUS tieup that will see over 10,000 public servants receiving data science training over the next five years.

Source: Lionel Lin for SingEx. Dr Balakrishnan (right) presents the Trailblazer Award to Ambi Labs.

He also presented IoT Asia 2017’s inaugural Trailblazer Award to Ambi Labs, the company behind the Ambi Climate device for controlling room temperatures, and G Element, a 3D software company focusing on smart buildings and cities. The award recognises outstanding companies who have made significant contributions to the region’s IoT ecosystem and community. Tanand Technology, which provides building and industrial management solutions which can be accessed through smart devices, received an honorary mention. 

More use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT) were on the showfloor at IoT Asia 2017. Some of the highlights included:

The AAEON booth featured smart city street lighting among other solutions. Lighting can be scheduled, light levels altered, maximising energy conservation. Power consumption data can also be recorded for later analysis. The cylindrical sensor at the top of the light controls both power and light output of an LED lamp and has an embedded antenna for Sub-GHz wireless communication.

The ESCO Wireless Huddle Room is an all in one meeting room in a box. Packages start at S$2,500. ESCO also showcased Microsoft Surface Hub at its booth. Commercial bundles for Singapore begin at S$12,900. There are two Hub models, the 55" which is described as a two-person shoulder-to-shoulder experience, and the 84" for medium to large conference rooms.

Thinkcrate from Nullspace Robotics is a series of Arduino projects for adults and children that can be ordered by subscription with all projects to arrive together, or spaced out at one delivery every two weeks. 

The first three Thinkcrates have step by step instructions on how to build a lamp (background), a piano (foreground left) and a wire game (foreground right) respectively. Twelve more projects are in the pipeline.

TCAM Technology, which produces wireless telemetry products, had a display for smart farming, which is already in use in Brunei. Sensors to check if the leaves are wet, soil conditions and air temperature are all sent back to a data logger and from there, to the farmer's dashboard.

All the sensors are connected to the waterproof and dust-proof TMN-52 data logger, which has a configurable sampling rate and battery life which lasts years.

The farmer's dashboard monitors various conditions affecting plants, allowing a farmer to tweak conditions for optimal growth.

Auggd transforms digital content into virtual and augmented experiences, which can be delivered through a customised branded mobile app. The experience can be created in seven days or fewer.

Dell EMC showcased smart building solutions.

Singapore startup FreshTurf listed the industry challenges with delivery, including settling on a place and time agreeable to both delivery company and recipient. With a system of secure, distributed lockers, the delivery can be placed in a locker and collected by the recipient at his or her convenience.  

Freshturf showed how its storage locker network can be used as collection points for items as varied as parcels, hot foods, cold foods, and laundry. Users are authenticated via the IBM Cloud and Blockchain technologies.

Nanyang Polytechnic's (NYP's) Centre of Innovation for Electronics & IoT showed how NVIDIA GPUs can be used to count people on the showfloor in realtime. The NYP Centre of Innovation for Electronics & IoT was jointly established by Spring Singapore and Nanyang Polytechnic. The centre partners enterprises, mainly small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), to create through strategic innovation and capabilities development. IoT solutions and video analytics are not the only capabilities that the centre supports. The centre also works on embedded and wireless systems, wearable electronics and IC design among others.

The Xilinx reVision reconfigurable vision platform has been used by an Avnet customer to create the GeniHOG Motorcycle Detector, which uses a camera sensor to detect motorcycles at the edge as an example of how edge computing would work. The camera in this setup is not connected to the cloud, and can analyse video in real-time. Edge computing for IoT saves on data transmission costs and bandwidth problems with large volumes of data, only identifying and sending back what's important. Avnet is the distributor for various Xilinx kits in Southeast Asia.

Idea Ink illustrated concepts discussed during the conference, including this panel examining IoT's impact.

On the sidelines of IoT Asia

Dell EMC had a Facebook contest with the Puzzlebox Orbit, a brain-controlled helicopter, as the prize.

Fujitsu offered a chance to win a caricature keychain in return for a completed survey form.

FOMO Digital sponsored digital photography booths which allowed users to choose a picture which had been hashtagged with the official #iotasia hashtag on Instagram for instant printing.

Interested?

Read the TechTrade Asia blog posts about Minister Balakrishnan's keynote speech, and the GovTech's partnership with NUS

Hashtag: #iotasia