Jan 25, 2016—

Pest-control technicians who work for municipalities, government agencies or private firms spend a great deal of time behind the wheel of a vehicle. In compliance with state and federal animal welfare regulations, the technicians must regularly visit any animal traps they have set—in some cases, as frequently as every 12 hours—in order to check whether the target animal (or perhaps an unintended target) has been caught.

Of course, a good portion of those miles (and corresponding gallons of spent fuel) are wasted, since traps often remain empty for many days. But as it has with so many unlikely niche sectors, as wide-ranging as trash hauling and heating fuel tank management, Internet of Things technology is offering a path to more efficient workflows.

“Traps with monitoring systems started coming on the market about three to four years ago,” explains Greg Smith, who owns the Tomahawk Live Trap Co. Tomahawk is a Wisconsin-based vendor of live traps and accessories, which it sells to animal-control agencies, wildlife services and the U.S. military. Live traps, also known as cage traps, are designed to capture creatures without harming them, so they can be safely released into the wild or returned to their owners. Smith has recently collaborated with OmniM2M, a Seattle-based firm that sells remote monitoring solutions for animal-control services, as well as remote temperature- and tank-monitoring systems for a variety of other applications, to offer Tomahawk traps with integrated wireless monitoring.

The resulting product sports a ZigBee sensor unit that monitors the cage’s trap door and communicates with a gateway from up to 100 yards indoors. The gateway, which can be paired with up to 18 sensors (and, therefore, 18 traps), contains a cellular modem that transmits a message to a cloud-based server to indicate that a trap has been shut, along with the trap’s identifier. From there, the server can send a text or e-mail message to the technician assigned to manage that trap.

“When a trap is triggered, a magnet separates [from the door], and that causes the sensorto send a signal to the gateway,” Smith explains. This sensor unit is small enough to be mounted on most of the traps Tomahawk sells. “There is no limit, really. We can affix thesensor to anything from a 6-foot-long dog trap to 5-by-5 gopher trap—it will work on about 95 percent of our traps.” That remaining five percent includes only the smallest rodent traps he sells, which does not bode well for, in fact, making a better mouse trap. But as sensor manufacturers continue to make ever-smaller devices in the years to come, that is bound to change.

Tomahawk is selling the gateway for $250, while each sensor unit costs $200. In addition to the hardware costs, customers will need to purchase a cellular subscription for each gateway, for which Tomahawk is charging a monthly fee of $30. Other companies that offer remote monitoring for live traps require customers to pay for year-long cellular subscriptions, Smith says, which does not make financial sense for all of his customers. “Especially ones that do not do much business during winter months,” he notes.

Tomahawk previously offered a remote monitoring service through a different technology partner whose sensors did not communicate wirelessly to their gateway, but rather required a wired connection. This meant technicians had a harder time setting up the traps, he r. Plus, the previous partner acted as the main customer-service contact for Tomahawk’s customers, which made Smith feel out of the loop and unable to directly address any issues those customers might have had with remote monitoring system.

Now, Smith and his associates can help customers set up and maintain their remote monitoring system directly. “Within our cloud-based software, Greg can manage his own accounts. He can go in and set up a customer with the cellular service,” says Gary Schmidt, OmniM2M’s managing director. “This way, Tomahawk can go in and sell the service themselves and manage the workflow, and then OmniM2M provides support to Tomahawk if they need it.”

Smith chimes in: “And we like that a lot.”

In addition, a pest-control agency can use the OmniM2M software to send an electronic registration to local regulators that require reporting on each live trap deployed. Once the trap is collected and the live animal is removed from the premises and released, the technician can use the software to issue a final report to the regulator.

Smith says his customers’ customers like the notion that a live trap with a monitoring system can ensure that animals caught in the trap will be attended to as soon as possible. “You can’t imagine how upset [their] customers can get about trapping and [the potential] cruelty to animals,” he adds.

New Frequency, a Georgia-based firm, sells live animal traps with remote monitoring capabilities, under the Trap-Alert brand, using wired sensors. New Jersey-based Trap Smart also sells a wired sensor solution.

The post Building a Better Mouse (or Raccoon, Skunk, You-Name-It) Trap With IoT appeared first on Omni m2m.

The Internet of Things is everywhere, with sensors and communication technologies embedded in all the materials of daily life. Today, the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) is also everywhere: it is has become one of the most widely-discussed concepts of the digital age, driving major changes across industries from marketing to renewable energy. The total number of IoT connections is predicted to increase four-fold by 2020. As the IoT mentality gains momentum, cities are finding innovative ways to take advantage of the increasingly networked physical world.

What is the Internet of Things? IoT brings formerly inert objects into the dynamic world of information technology. It encompasses a range of technologies, from sensors that monitor environmental conditions to RFID tags that can allow users to interact with objects. In the world of IoT, everything produces data that can be gathered and analyzed. Once-passive objects become dynamic, capable of conducting remote updates and on-the-fly improvements. Fundamentally, IoT means a shift from reactive to proactive systems; from delayed problem management to automatic sense-and-respond capabilities.

Driven by the declining cost of sensors and government’s focus on improving efficiency and service, IoT is allowing cities to transition towards real-time data-driven management across urban systems, including water, energy, waste, and transportation. The most basic IoT tools have been around for years, includingconnected streetlights, which switch off when no one is present to conserve energy, or send automatic notifications when a light has gone out. Building on these basic lessons, cities are expanding their IoT programs to enhance complex urban infrastructure.

CITY SYSTEMS

Cities are expected to spend $41 trillion on IoT technologies in the next 20 years. In the pursuit of smarter, more responsive city services, local governments have partnered with startups and major technology companies to begin experimenting with IoT across all dimensions of urban life.

Energy: The smart grid is one of the most well-developed and widely recognized IoT systems. Smart grids rely on smart meters, which relay information about a building’s energy usage back to a central management system, in order to efficiently allocate resources. Smart grids can be used to identify and address outages and promote conservation through demand-based pricing. Moreover, smart grid technology is essential to the integration of sustainable energy sources into the mainstream energy grid.

In addition to benefiting cities, new devices are also bringing the benefits of energy-related IoT to consumers. Citizens can reduce their energy bills with devices like Nest, which can sense when someone is home and adjust temperatures automatically, and the smart-me, which allows users to monitor energy use, turn off unused devices, and manage the temperature in a home or office from a smartphone.

Environmental conditions: Chicago’s Array of Things and Dublin’s CityWatch are models for the deployment of citywide sensor networks. Partnering with research institutions and corporations, these cities are installing sensors on lampposts to monitor environmental conditions including temperature, noise, and air quality. The government and its partners will use the data to manage incidents, identify patterns in microclimates, and make predictions about vehicle and pedestrian congestion. Moreover, these systems feed data into open data portals, where it is available to the public, allowing citizens to take part in tracking and responding to local environmental issues.

Water: Many cities face severe problems with water, whether they experience too much or too little rain. In California, local governments are using IoT to developinnovative ways to plan and manage irrigation, facilitating extensive water conservation and more effectively allocating their scarce resources. Other areas struggle to address flooding and wastewater management during storms. Without proper planning, cities are often forced them to dump raw sewage into local waterways. With the help of IoT, local authorities are learning to prepare for storms more effectively. Using tools developed by Opti, American cities can draw together systems that monitor the weather and those that control rainwater storage to determine when to hold onto water supplies and when to make room for new rainfall. With appropriate planning, cities can reduce overflow in combined sewers and minimize the pollution of waterways.

Citizens are also taking advantage of distributed sensor networks to plan for flooding. The citizen-ledOxford Flood Network has developed a system of sensors to gather data on water level from stream and groundwater sources and anticipate flood incidents. The system relies on sensors that use ultrasonic rangefinders, positioned above local waterways, to measure changes in the water level and indicate flood risks. The network makes use of TV whitespace between channels—made available by the local telecom provider—to transmit data, making information publicly available in real time.

Waste: Although waste management is traditionally a hands-on service, IoT companies are developing two-way communication tools to reduce labor and increase the efficiency of waste management systems. Among several companies that are working on innovative approaches to trash collection and monitoring, Big Belly has emerged as a leader. The company’s sensor-enabled trash receptacles measure waste levels in public bins and compact trash to reduce overflow. The bins share the data with local authorities, allowing them to enhance efficiency by planning collection routes where and when pickup is needed. The same logic is being extended to the home, with Enevo offering home trash monitoring to facilitate efficient collection.

Public transit: The IoT mentality has become an integral part of public transit, where many riders can now follow buses online through GPS or note the minutes until the next train. Some cities are taking the next steps in wiring their transit systems, like London, which has deployed an extensive sensor network throughout the Underground to monitor environmental conditions and detect systems in need of maintenance.

Mass transit IoT is also being adopted by regional train systems. Until recently, railways were unable to take advantage of sophisticated collision avoidance systems, like those used by airplanes and ships, because the nature of railroad tracks inevitably steered trains within inches of one another. The Rail Collision Avoidance System has made this possible by combining GPS and movement data. RCAS monitors trains in the local network and informs conductors if a train is approaching on the same track, helping the railways become even safer.

Parking: One of the most popular IoT applications is the use of sensors to track the availability of parking spaces. The search for parking in busy urban centers is frustrating for the driver, intensifies congestion on the roads, and increases pollution from circling cars. Moreover, cities lack the real-time data that would allow them to implement demand-based pricing. A number of startups, includingStreetline, are trying to enhance the parking process. These companies use sensors to determine when a car is parked in a given spot. This data can be sent directly to drivers, helping to guide them more quickly to an available spot, or to cities, which can use the data to adjust pricing based on demand.

Cars and drivers: Of all the forms of transportation, driving remains the most dangerous.  Government officials are exploring ways to leverage IoT to make the roads safer by connecting the vehicle and the driver with the surrounding environment. The US Department of Transportation is testing the uses of vehicle-to-vehicle communication, enabling cars to sense and respond to possible risks on the road. Cities are also connecting to drivers within their cars: Walnut Creek, CA has implemented a system that connects with drivers’ smartphones, pushing alerts when the light changes from red to green to discourage distraction while driving.

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT FOR IOT

National leaders are beginning to gauge the importance of IoT to economic development, safety, and sustainability. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister David Cameron has promoted the broad implementation of IoT in the public sector by dedicating $122 million to fund research for the development of IoT applications. TheEuropean Union is also hoping to extend the use of IoT, funding research directed at developing new IoT systems for the public good. In the US, the White House supported IoT discoveries through the Smart America Challenge, which brought together government officials, academia, and private industry to explore the potential for smarter and more responsive infrastructure.

CHALLENGES

While IoT offers unparalleled opportunities to enhance efficiency, improve public safety, and support development, it also presents several important challenges that cities will have to negotiate in order to realize these benefits.

Design and analysis together: Cities already have lots of data in their existing systems—the challenge is often that they lack the skills or the technology to use it. In order to make the Internet of Things valuable, cities must ensure that the data-gathering systems are designed together with analytics: the data that is collected should be easily understood and to put to use by the governments that collect it. In addition to enhancing the systems for data collection and analysis, governments must also focus on recruiting tech-savvy leaders who can envision and implement cutting-edge systems.

Privacy and security: Cities must take seriously their role in ensuring the privacy and security of citizen data. Unless citizens trust their governments to ensure privacy, it will become increasingly difficult for cities to get this data at all. Defense from cyberattacks is also a growing concern, particularly with regards to critical infrastructure—hacking smart meters can cost millions, but a more malicious intruder could compromise safety for residents. In order to successfully implement IoT, cities should make privacy and security a top priority.

With smart and forward-looking leadership, IoT has the potential to create a revolution in city planning and management. By embracing the potential of IoT, governments can improve service delivery, increase sustainability, and make their cities safer and more livable places for all residents.

The post The Urban Internet of Things: Surveying Innovations Across City Systems appeared first on Omni m2m.

The buzz surrounding Internet of Things (IoT) connecting virtually unlimited end-point devices is almost entirely centered around the convergence of high-speed processing, intelligent gadgetry, ubiquitous connectivity and massive bandwidth. However, the expansive vision of advanced IoT applications and the promised rewards are increasingly dependent on capabilities of IoT software solutions, platforms and middleware blending high-profile IoT hardware technologies to enhance functionality and deliver the desired results.

A typical enterprise IoT use case involves a myriad of sensors, data loggers and gadgets generating a deluge of IoT data from across large distributed systems. The size of deployment itself is not the only consideration for progressive organizations pursuing long-term growth with IoT initiatives. The ability to increase the capacity of the IoT system to establish IoT applications based on evolving business requirements is just as important in determining the long-term feasibility of IoT initiatives. Flexible, scalable and agile IoT system architecture serve well to address these concerns and present IoT systems as adaptable solutions in the modern data-driven and connected workplace.

Limitations surrounding hardware capabilities, cost and security cause several hurdles with effective generation, transmission and utilization of the vast IoT data deluge. Furthermore, establishing large distributed ‘islands’ of IoT systems opens the door to privacy, security and compliance risks affecting long-term financial viability of IoT applications. IoT architectures must help establish globally interconnected IoT systems among siloed environments lacking integration and interoperability. The IoT industry is addressing these concerns by presenting novel frameworks for network management, programming and content delivery.

The concept of ubiquitous IoT – that refers to multiple individual IoT implementations integrated together to establish a ubiquitous IoT system – is widely adopted to maximize the potential of IoT applications. Connecting and scaling individual unit IoT systems to accommodate unpredictable variable IoT demands as a pool of distributed IoT applications is actually a software-oriented IoT requirement. Dynamic collaboration among these siloed unit IoT units necessitates a strong cloud-based backend system to access information and execute desired operations across the centralized IoT system. As part of the flexible architecture enabling dynamic collaboration among siloed IoT units, the system must form a feedback loop starting from sensing, reaching the centralized computing system, and returning with the desired IoT operation such as control automation that span across multiple IoT devices, sensors and machines.

Devising a flexible, scalable and agile IoT systems architecture is an ongoing and evolving process owing to the rapid pace of technological advancements and the inclination toward expanding IoT applications across all functional areas of the organization. These trends naturally require hardware resources from multiple vendors, varied connectivity capabilities, and scalable third-party cloud services. IoT platforms such as OmniM2M enable this flexibility with the ability to connect to anything using Open APIs, secure M2M connectivity, configurable cloud-based rules engines, built-in feedback loops as well as direct connections. With this approach, OmniM2M customers can invest in IoT hardware of their choice, avoid vendor lock-in and minimize IoT costs while maximizing return on investments.

Organizations cannot afford to go into overload with the overwhelming needs to expand and scale IoT applications as the business grows. The IoT platform itself needs to scale accordingly and help organizations establish a flexible architecture for elastic ubiquitous IoT applications.

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IoT is evolving faster than organizations can adapt using traditional business models. IoT applications are driving customer and employee expectations, values and behavior. The real opportunity with the disruptive technology lies in pursuing and adapting to this digital transformation. Business organizations have competed on grounds of product features as the primary value proposition ever since the industrial revolution 250 years ago. Incremental product feature innovation led to price competition, compromising quality until the time product would become obsolete.

With Internet of Things, the competition is no longer limited to individual product features. Connected technologies enabling business services and product offerings themselves are not one-and-done. Real-time push updates and the ability to learn and respond to customer usage trends, lock-in customers and forces additional investments for enhanced functionality. This capability levels the playing field among small vendors and large enterprises that now compete on grounds of innovation instead of operating budget and scale.

Changing Business Models

This IoT-mindset forces disruptive business model innovation to encourage the customer’s willingness to pay for products and services promising unique customer experience. Business models leveraging IoT applications and cloud technologies for value creation address real-time and emerging customer needs in a predictive manner. All product updates incorporating specific customer usage behavior and pushed across the cloud network have immense synergy value. The connected infrastructure establishes information convergence and delivers high-value tailored services secondary to the initial value offerings considering the extreme customer segmentation. The product initially working as a standalone solution to specific, known problems transforms into smart solutions address issues that emerge in the future.

For instance, smart thermostats can learn usage patterns to program themselves to turn on and off automatically, follow appropriate schedules when no one is at home, or follow instructions from mobile phones on the go. In contrast, traditional thermostats following pre-defined schedules do little to optimize house temperature when needed and turn off energy-hogging cooling or heating systems when no one’s at home.

This example demonstrates how IoT applications and cloud technologies add immense value to a mundane home product. Along with the primary benefit of optimizing house temperature, IoT enables secondary benefits such as shrinking electricity consumption and controlling cooling and heating systems from mobile devices away from home as an even better value proposition in competition with otherwise better thermostat products. The competition is therefore drawn away from price and product quality and shifted toward IoT and smart connectivity to enable recurring revenue streams.

Influencing Business Future

The pervasive trend of leveraging IoT applications for business presents opportunities for ongoing disruptive business model innovation that encompasses a myriad of megatrends branching out from the technology itself. IoT has accelerated the growth of Big Data technologies, cloud computing, mobility, consumerization of IT and a range of intelligent, connected, analytics-driven and consumer-oriented technology use-cases for business. For those who can master it, IoT will become a business of its own. Advancements in digital communication technologies between machines and infrastructure is leading to virtual, automated and information-driven collaboration without physical human intervention. Personalization of technologies has shifted consumer preference and produced new grounds of competition for business organizations that go beyond the initial product offering itself.

Progressive business organizations must combine IoT applications and business models to adapt and capture unprecedented business opportunities resulting from the prevalence of connected products and services.

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