Antenna and IoT solution provider Taoglas has had a busy few years filled with acquisitions, partnerships and product releases.
While Co-Founder and CEO Dermot O’Shea confirmed that the vast majority of Taoglas’ business still is focused on RF and antenna design, he also explained that as IoT becomes more complex and challenging for its customers, the company is actively looking for ways to expand and evolve its offerings.
“We’re really solving complex IoT challenges for customers,” O’Shea told RCR Wireless News at Mobile World Congress Los Angeles. “Because we’ve solved complex antenna and RF challenges for our customers, our customers really trust us […] and have been asking us to do more. They are overwhelmed with the complexities and with the pace of change.”
He went on to explain that where there used to be one or two radios, there might now be eight or ten and multiple antennas, and further, new technologies continue to be introduced, only adding to the complexity of IoT solutions.
Now, Taoglas is looking to do more than just antennas. “We started with cables and connectors a few years ago. We added filters last year. And now we’re doing positioning modules and next year, we’ll be launching our vision systems solutions.”
Critical to Taoglas’s new approach to assisting its customers with IoT was strategic acquisitions. In November of last year, the company finalized its acquisition of ThinkWireless, an antenna provider that specializes in the design, development and production of combination antenna systems for the commercial vehicle market.
Initially, Taoglas viewed ThinkWireless as a competitor. “We were very impressed with what they did and the custom solutions they offered,” O’Shea reflected. “We’re expanding their products into our existing customers, but also to target the comm vehicle market outside of North America.”
And this year, Taoglas completed its acquisition of Firmwave, a move that will significantly bolster Taoglas’s goal of addressing complicated IoT problems. According to O’Shea, Firmwave had 30 engineers already excelling in this area. “They were working on very advanced IoT solutions. Now, we have one very strong team of over 100 engineers and we’re calling it next-generation IoT solutions.”
Precision positioning for the IoT
Taoglas has also identified a growing need for precise location modules as applications for IoT advance and increase. The company’s Edge Locate Module, revealed at Mobile World Congress, is very small form factor, high precision accuracy location device that can deliver proven accuracy down to just 1.4cm.
This feat, Dennis Kish, president of Taoglas USA, explained, is accomplished through a technology called Real-Time Kinematic or RTK. RTK is a complex satellite navigation correctional technique that enhances the precision of position data from satellite-based positioning systems. “RTK will allow you to put correction data back into the system and will allow users to be able to correct from base stations that are precisely located that will tell you where your roaming device is,” he said.
“The module will help to determine exactly where, for example, an e-scooter is in a micro mobility solution,” continued Kish. “It can tell you if you’re on a footpath where you shouldn’t be with a scooter or if you’re parked in the right area.”
The technology will also help with “all kinds of smart infrastructure” by making it possible to easily and accurately locate assets anywhere in a large structure, such as a shipyard or warehouse.
According to Kish, the reaction to Edge Locate from customers has been “fantastic.”
For more information on Taoglas, click here.
