M2M : Machine 2 Machine

echnology Senses Air Pollution

Emerging technology is helping organizations monitor the level of air pollution and in the process giving insights into steps that can be taken to improve it.

Cars contribute a great deal of pollution to the environment. The South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), www.aqmd.gov, Diamond Bar, Calif., aims to change this by either repairing the 1,000-2,000 most polluting cars or just getting them off the road all together.

According to statistics from the AQMD, gross-polluting vehicles make up nearly 10% of passenger vehicles, but these are responsible for at least 50% of vehicle air pollution.

AQMD’s solution is a $4 million pilot program beginning in early 2006. It will use remote sensing devices to measure a vehicle’s emission by projecting beams of both infrared and ultraviolet light across a roadway, with the tailpipe emissions absorbing some of the light. A sensor receives the light not absorbed and a computer calculates the emission level. Simultaneously a video camera captures the license plate and the information is stored together.

The contract for the remote sensing has not been awarded yet, but the recipient will be responsible for collecting emissions data from 1 million individual vehicles, roughly 10% of the vehicles in Los Angeles County.

Owners of the most polluting cars will be supplied with funding to either help repair the vehicle or scrap it and purchase a new one.

M2M, Automation, Telemetry, Remote Monitoring, LBS

Success Factors for Smart Services

A presentation designed to help participants identify connected services opportunities and address issues surrounding strategy and implementation, with case examples from industry leaders Axeda and Tendril

For decades, we have been steadily building electronic intelligence into manufactured objects by means of sensors, controllers, and microprocessors. Today, virtually all products that use electricity possess inherent data-processing capability. The term “Pervasive Internet” is used to describe the convergence of pervasive computing and global data networking that enables manufacturers to create products that are “portals” into a whole new world of high-margin “smart services.”

Often described as the ‘next wave of the Internet’, Harbor Research believes that the networking of such products will open up vast new opportunities for growth in added-value “smart services” for product manufacturers and will radically change the dynamics of many industry sectors.

We see more and more noteworthy applications coming on-line as the market matures, and from time to time we like to share successful stories from the field. For those organizations comtemplating smart services, these cases often provide the answers to some key questions along the way.

Recently, we have been briefed on the progress of two supplier companies coming at smart serivces from different angles. Tendril offers a highly functional software toolkit that helps developers cut through the complexity of creating networked devices, thus saving many man hours and maximizing potential productivity. Axeda provides an enterprise software platform that allows product manufacturers to automate high-value remote services into their unique business processes.

The webinar we are broadcasting next week will not only highlight multiple real-world examples of remote device monitoring and management, but we will explore how these two players might collaborate and provide a more valuable set of tools to the vast array of adopters now on the verge of making the move to a brave new world of smart services.

Our objective on this front remains the same. We strive to help companies take advantage of M2M/Pervasive Internet technologies that will lead to decreased service costs, better managed risk, increased revenues and improved customer satisfaction.

Webinar Details
Webinar Title : Success Factors for Smart Services
Webinar Date : Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Webinar Time : 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PST

Snip from Harbor Research Inc >> You can download the entire article at their website www.harborresearch.com

>>The October review of HBR (www.hbr.org) presents a very detailed article on the benefits of M2M. It talks in detail about the various market forces that are shaping this industry and how current industry leaders are adopting this new technology to provide “Smart Service”. This is a must read for anyone following the M2M space.

>>
An M2M and Pervasive Internet conference forum organized by Harbor Research Inc., the world’s leading authority on the networking of manufactured products.

Some of today’s most innovative growth companies, in some very mature businesses, are now developing the skills required to add a whole new kind of value to their products, and to develop new customer intimacy throughout the lifecycle of those products. These companies compete in widely divergent industries, and the specific business strategies they practice vary greatly. But they all have one thing in common: they saw early on that the networking of products and devices would open up whole new realms of opportunity. These companies are now well on the way to leveraging networking and Smart Services to sustain new business models and to accomplish new growth. The availability of new, Wireless M2M technologies – such as Wireless WAN (including GSM/GPRS/CDMA cellular mobile and satellite), Wireless LAN and Wireless PAN (including Bluetooth, ZigBee and RFID) – has dramatically accelerated these opportunities.

OEM Manufacturers of products and machines in particular find it difficult to see how this applies to them. Yet many of these companies are also finding it increasingly difficult to compete in their markets. They are in fact right at the centre of the opportunity. Embedding M2M and Pervasive Internet networking technologies into their products would open up major new profit opportunities that would dramatically change their businesses.

This special one day forum will explore these opportunities in depth. Top experts from leading Industrial companies will join with Harbor’s specialist team to outline what they have achieved within their companies and the enormous benefits already gained.

M2M has enabled recycling and disposal company LondonWaste to kill several birds with one stone.

The firm, which provides services for the North London Waste Authority (NLWA), a consortium of seven London boroughs, is using Orange’s FleetLink system to track the positioning of its recently acquired fleet of 35 lorries.

The FleetLink device in each lorry is connected via GSM to a central location, which means that if a lorry is stolen it can be immobilised remotely.

Each device is also equipped with GPS to map the exact position of each vehicle, and this information enables the central tracking of each vehicle’s location.

‘You can get a list of all the points every time a lorry passes an Orange mast, and you can import that information into mapping software so that you can see where the driver has been in the course of the day,’ says Mark Beattie, head of IT at LondonWaste.

The mapping facility has provided several benefits for the company, in terms of both efficiency and compliance.