German car giants Volkswagen and BMW have confirmed massive Industry 4.0 investments, and firmed up their interests in private industrial 5G as a means to factory automation and slicker production.
Volkswagen has announced “further” investment in digital technologies at its flagship plant in Wolfsburg. The...
The Digital Supply Chain Institute, a US research group focused on the evolution of supply chains in the digital economy, has recommended supply chain companies set up ‘war rooms’ to track and respond to the coronavirus crisis, and seek to implement automation and analytics...
By 2025, 5G connections should cover 40 per cent of Europe’s workforce, 70 per cent of its industrial sites, and 80 per cent of its main logistics routes. This was the message from DigitalEurope, the trade association for the European tech industry, at the...
Industrial IoT’s biggest problem? The fear of failure in a risk adverse industry. So says Ericsson, which recommends a two-pronged approach to spur takeup among overly-cautious manufacturing companies.
The first fix is to drive starter IoT with proven low-level sensor solutions; the second is to...
Note, this article continues from a previous instalment: 'Connectivity is 5% of Industry 4.0 spend – we’d rather talk apps and services'. Go here to read this article.
So, what about those IoT use cases, which Orange Business Services (OBS) reckons are proven (see...
OSIsoft has reworked its PI System for the energy sector to plug-in, process, and manage data streaming from distributed energy resources. It has picked up a couple of new contracts, as well.
The company said the new architecture supports a “community system of data”, enabling...
Orange has brought in a first wave of industrial companies into its new 5G-geared Industry 4.0 campus in Antwerp, in Belgium. Those to join are the Port of Antwerp, chemical company Borealis, and polymer manufacturer Covestro.
The quartet will play (“co-innovate”) with real-life industrial applications...
Brazilian telecoms regulator Anatel has approved local energy distributor Neoenergia to operate a private LTE network in the 3.5 GHz frequency. It will be the first private LTE network in Brazil, and the first for smart electric grids in Latin America.
Finnish vendor Nokia secured...
Waterfront Toronto, in charge of the $1 billion redevelopment of Toronto’s waterfront neighbourhood, has extended the deadline on whether to move forward with Google sister company Sidewalk Labs’ proposal for the smart city enclave.
The board of Waterfront Toronto has extended the consultantion period from...
A consortium of technologists, industrialists, and academics have joined a new European working group to develop and demonstrate a new ‘beyond-5G’ system for private networks, integrating 5G, Wi-Fi, and LiFi technologies, and managed through AI based autonomic networking.
The 30-month project, called 5G-CLARITY, has been...
How does a mobile operator, in the business of airtime subscriptions, go beyond selling straight connectivity? Because this must be the goal, and the measure of ambition. There is no future in SIM cards, as we have argued – especially as technological innovation higher...
The first “neutral aggregating platform” for tracing the provenance of goods in the supply chain has launched, pulling together and making visible data from sundry blockchains.
The World Economic Forum described it as a “self-service track-and-trace” blockchain platform at its general meeting in Davos this...
After leading the early automation revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, manufacturers are once again seeking a technological edge. A whopping 72% of manufacturing companies plan to significantly increase investment into digitization efforts in 2020. These manufacturers’ combined financial commitment is expected...
The World Economic Forum has zeroed-in on skills and training as it seeks to put the world right in Davos this week. It has launched a programmer, Reskilling Revolution, to provide one billion people with better education, skills and jobs in the face of...
Telecoms operators must do more than just sell connectivity. It is a maxim that gets repeated, often, and always – and one that, in the end, becomes more like a stick to beat them with than a code of survival, as they fail over...
Spending on factory data applications will grow from $18 billion in 2019 to just over $27 billion in 2024, a rise of 50 per cent in the period, according to analyst house ABI Research. The industrial and manufacturing sector is seeking to upgrade software...
As the headline suggests, this analysis should be seen in context. It offers only rapid arithmetic around the World Economic Forum’s (expanding) list of ‘lighthouse’ factories, which claim the most success with digital change. It considers the available data (the location and ownership of...
Bosch wants to be an “innovation leader” in AI, it told CES last week. The German industrial giant, one of the manufacturing sector’s most outspoken champions of industrial 5G, is seeking to mainline data in its products and factories, and apply advanced analytics to...
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has opened a new ‘customer experience centre’ in Bangalore (Bengaluru), in India, to offer IoT solutions to customers and partners from across industries.
The facility, on a 20,000 square-foot campus, shared with a global engineering centre for its Pointnext Services division,...
Siemens and Arm have struck a deal around computing and sensor design for connected and autonomous vehicles, to help the automotive industry develop more complex platforms for in-car and between-car connectivity.
The work to redefine vehicles within intelligent and interconnected transport systems starts with on-board...
The World Economic Forum has named 18 new factories, mostly from Asia (and mostly in China), as part of its ‘global lighthouse network’ of advanced manufacturers. They join the existing roster of 26 factories.
All of the sites have been assessed by consultancy McKinsey &...
BMW is pushing in-car 5G connectivity at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2020 in Las Vegas. The German car marque reckons its forthcoming iNEXT electric crossover, scheduled for launch in 2021, equipped with a built-in SIM, will be the first high-end consumer vehicle to...
Walmart has put automated pick-and-pack robots to work at a so-called ‘supercenter’ in Salem, New Hampshire.
The new system, called Alphabot, is live in a 20,000-square-foot warehouse-style extension at its Salem superstore, which has been opened as a grocery pickup point with drive-thru lanes for...
US carrier Verizon and Dutch mapping company HERE are pairing 5G connectivity and multi-access edge computing (MEC) with location data and autonomous vehicle knowhow as part of a co-innovation exercise to hone various consumer and industrial IoT use cases.
The two companies are working, at...
