GE’s Soapbox Moment: General Electric used stage time at Mobile World Congress to urge telecom companies to embrace the industrial internet of things. Sue Siegel, chief innovation officer of the 126-year-old conglomerate, implored companies to bring the tap-and-swipe ease of consumer electronics to the industrial space. Highly aware of the necessary imperative for industrial innovation, cellular connectivity companies like Kore Wireless, Infineon and GeoTraq have already stepped up to the plate and are actively working with businesses to provide unique M2M solutions to keep industries competitive in today’s global market.
Blockchain RHOCs: Reflective Venture Partners, a newly formed blockchain technology firm, has launched with an initial fund of 100 million RHOCs, RChain Cooperative's native crypto currency. The two companies plan to fund a minimum of twelve blockchain-specific distributed applications (dApps) and the startups that build them. While blockchain technology is still relatively new, their vision is to advance current architecture into an open source platform, leading to the creation of new decentralized financial technologies and ultra-secure medical record keeping systems.
eSIM-plicity: Deutsche Telecom and Telefόnica are now offering eSIM connectivity solutions for multi-device management. The German operator demonstrated its new IoT solution by connecting a c smartwatch, Microsoft tablet and BMW i3 connected car to a single device. Telefόnica’s connectivity platform will detect cellular devices and enroll them into AWS IoT automatically. American based companies such as Telit, GeoTraq and Sierra Wireless are also offering GSMA embedded SIM solutions which reduce complexity, time to market and total cost of ownership.
