Digital Innovation Magazine - August 2020

CCO Dirk Lindemeier on the advantages of going digital

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e are excited to bring you our August edition of Digital Innovation. Summer holidays may be on standstill; however, the airline industry is taking this time to adapt in order to meet the changing needs of its customer base. We talked to Dirk Lindemeier, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at SkyFive, all about the merits of airline digitalisation (p6). It was fascinating to learn how airlines can improve their operational efficiency, generate ancillary revenue and enhance the travel experience, by providing real broadband connectivity in the skies.

Speaking of ‘going digital’, we have a report on the digital transformation journey of 100 global retailers on page 64. According to the survey, many of the respondents are still in the early stages. Meanwhile, David Ferrucci, creator of Watson the robot, is working on an exciting project, building an AI system that’s capable of having common sense (p30). Is the world really ready for the first bona fide humanoid robot?

As we wait with anticipation for the results of Covid-19 clinical trials, it was intriguing to learn that scientists are using AI in an attempt to find existing drugs that could help patients with symptoms. Turn to page 20 to find out more.

Plus, that’s not forgetting our must-read features on the world’s first IoT open platform (p44), the most innovative companies in Europe (p56), as well as August’s start-up of the month (p70).

Have a great summer everyone!

Editor Anna McMahon

Director Danielle Harris

editorial@digitalinnovationeu.com

d.harris@ithink.media

Senior Digital Designer Daniel May

Director Tom Barnes

design@digitalinnovationeu.com

t.barnes@ithink.media

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Could David Ferrucc capable of com

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Dirk Lindemeier, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at SkyFive

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Leveraging AI in finding a drug to treat Covid-19

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Our current top 10 most innovative European companies 4

70

The star multinational

ci’s latest robot be mmon sense?

A global survey of the digital readiness of 100 retailers

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44

rt-up of the month is ride-hailing company, Bolt

Deutsche Telekom’s first open platform for the IoT 5

B U S I N E S S I N T E RV I E W

Dirk Lindemeier, Co-Founder a (CCO) at SkyFive, believes th industry could be accelerated connectivity in the skies, allo connect their entire fleets efficiency, ancillary revenue g travel exp

Written by Anna McMahon 6

and Chief Commercial Officer he digitalisation of the airline d by providing real broadband owing airlines to affordably for improved operational generation and an enhanced perience.

Produced by Danielle Harris 7

Dirk Lindemeier has a wealth of experience in both aviation and telecommunications, having spent 19 years at Nokia and 10 years in military aviation prior to launching SkyFive, a specialist provider of broadband services in the sky, based on Air-toGround (A2G) technology. e is passionate about digitalisation of the airline industry and believes that, in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, it is now more important than ever before.

According to Dirk, Covid-19 not only causes economic damage, but it can also serve as a catalyst for change and transformation. He says, “The vast penetration of broadband connectivity has become a commodity that everyone now takes for

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granted on the ground, and Covid-19 has the potential to accelerate a similar adoption in the sky.�

To make connectivity a true enabler of digitisation, Dirk believes it must be ubiquitous (in the air and on the ground),

A2G is the only technology that can meet the ever-increasing demand for broadband connectivity in the sky

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“By once more extending proven bus principles and technologies of mob communications into the cabin, we c remove the barriers to adoption and usage of cabin Internet services Dirk Lindemeier, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)

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siness bile could d boost s�

available on every aircraft (including regional jets and turboprops), and so self-evident to passengers using it that it becomes the norm, not the exception.

Smartly fighting Covid-19 Ubiquitous broadband connectivity can help with challenges in air travel in the phase following Covid-19. Dirk highlights four key examples:

Social distancing Enforcing 1.5 metres of distance between two persons to reduce infection risk constitutes a real challenge for airports. With one person now occupying a square of 3 by 3 metres, the packing density is reduced by a factor of 18 (with two persons per square metre being a typical value for moving queues).

Bringing all passengers online would enable walk-through airport transits and avoid queues building up. Departing passengers could be steered to arrive at the airport just in time, and airports could dynamically adapt their bottlenecks in arrival direction based on real-time data shared by inbound passengers – and all of this could be done perfectly anonymously.

Disruption management It will take time for flight schedules to stabilise after the crisis, inevitably leading to disruptions. Passengers 11

Drinks or data

that are always on can be contacted by airline service desks during the flight, and disruptions can be resolved in real time rather than queueing up people at transfer desks after landing.

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Several airlines have already suspended trolley services in order to protect cabin staff.

How about passengers ordering online from their seats? When presenting them a ‘drink or data’ option, many would go for data (Wi-Fi) instead of a coffee served in a paper cup, at least on a short flight. As a side effect, trolleys get lighter or disappear completely, which saves weight and is better for everyone’s elbows and knees altogether.

“when we look back in a year from now, could it be possible that we might see Covid-19 as an inflection point – towards real broadband services in the sky?”

Paradigm shift required Dirk says, “To bring these scenarios to realisation, connectivity must become true broadband to airlines and passengers. And for that to happen, a change in the current business model and an advance in technology are required, to boost performance and cut airline total cost of ownership. This is where Air-to-Ground (A2G) technology comes into play: instead of connecting aircraft via satellites that are 36.000 km away, a grid

of cellular base stations with skypointing antennas is deployed, which connect aircraft at much higher data speeds, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional satellite service.”

According to Dirk, airlines have so far largely failed to make Internet access in the cabin a profitable service for the following reasons:

• Most passengers reject the combination of high session prices and poor performance; thus, passenger take-up as 13

well as airline revenue from Wi-Fi sessions stay far below the cost of providing this service.

• Some airlines decided to make Wi-Fi free, whichincreases passenger adoption (although the performance remains poor). In the absence of revenues, however, the airline business case turns dark red, unless the cost can be offset by other operational benefits of the connectivity service.

• For those passengers who connect, airlines often throttle the throughput or cap the volume to reduce cost from excessive data charges of their satellite communications service provider.

As a result, passengers are frustrated, and aircraft are carrying along satellite communications systems with mediocre value creation at best.

New digital value creation Dirks says, “By relying on A2G for connecting aircraft, this vicious circle can be turned into a virtuous one. And once everyone in the cabin connects, marketeers can turn the aircraft into a value creation engine and apply an array of digital engagement means.”

As such, Dirk outlines the following examples: 14

“To brin scenarios to connectivity true broa airlines and

Dirk Lin Co-Founder and Chief C

ng these o realisation, y must become adband to passengers�

ndemeier, Commercial Officer (CCO)

White-label Wi-Fi With Hotspot 2.0, passengers can automatically connect to Wi-Fi services through their standard mobile service providers, who compensate the airline in the form of roaming fees, without the airline having to invest into marketing the service.

Bits & Pretzels Not only the name of a famous festival in Germany, but also a new way of selling inflight Wi-Fi alongside refreshments, ordered and paid online before the flight, or straight from the seat after boarding.

Advertisements With a high take-up rate and the ability for everyone to browse the Internet as well as media-rich content, the number of ads that can be presented to passengers during a flight increases significantly. By adding the unique travel context, the value of an impression is further amplified.

Partner offers and vouchers Airline partners (for example, touristic attractions and ground transportation companies at the destination) can sell special packages and vouchers with exclusive discounts or other benefits in the cabin.

E-commerce The inflight shop can be converted into a digital mall, which not only 15

includes airline products, but also the offering of shops at the arrival airport. Purchases can be collected at the arrival gate, or inside the airport shops.

Substantial cost saving potential Real broadband connectivity can also unlock operational efficiency savings. With A2G, such savings become inherently easier for airlines to realise, and the use case theatre for operational connectivity is ample. Dirk shares the following prominent examples:

• Data offload: as a quick win, an A2G system can offload most of the data traffic from legacy narrowband communication systems, to not only transfer it cheaper but also much more of it.

• Predictive maintenance: continuous aircraft health monitoring can reduce disruptions and save maintenance cost due to improved dispatch reliability, no-fault-found reduction, inventory reduction, and higher labour productivity.

• Reduced fuel consumption: flight paths can be optimised

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“A2G is the technology that features the performance required by connected aircraft, supports flat data tariffs for airlines, and is built upon 4G and 5G standards for economies of scale and an open ecosystem” Dirk Lindemeier, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)

with real-time weather and traffic information. On the ground, idling can be avoided through integrated operations with airports.

• Weight reduction: heavy onboard systems can be replaced with weightless cloud services, for example, streaming services instead of inflight entertainment systems, online shopping instead of trolley duty-free sales, and cloud storage instead of data recorders.

• End-to-end process optimisation: internal and external processes,

such as turnarounds, can be optimised significantly once being data-driven and partly or fully automated.

The Gigabit age in aviation The target must therefore be nothing less than to provide an affordable broadband connection for every aircraft and every passenger. To do so, Dirk believes that three things matter most:

• Airlines require real broadband data pipes between their aircraft and the ground.. Moreover, the full capacity needs to be 17

available for every aircraft, also in busy airspaces, thus network density directly drives performance as well.

• Airlines need data tariffs from their inflight connectivity providers that do not penalise usage by charging by data volume. Instead, tariffs should be based on throughput. Only when following this fundamental rule, mass adoption will happen and drive down the cost.

• Instead of today’s vertically integrated solutions, the aircraft and the inflight connectivity service need to be fully unbundled, just like a smartphone can connect to any network.. One of the key achievements of mobile communications is a high degree of standardisation, which not only fuels technology evolution, but also assures affordable prices for end users.

Dirk concludes, “A2G is the technology that features the performance required by connected aircraft, supports flat data tariffs for airlines, and is built upon 4G and 5G standards for economies of scale and an open ecosystem. What’s more, together with mobile network operators, we can also establish a business model that meets the 18

specific financial requirements of airlines post Covid-19.

For mobile network operators, unlike airlines, connecting people is the core business, and their capabilities to market, sell and take care of subscriptions are undisputed.

By once more extending proven business principles and technologies of mobile communications into the cabin, we could remove the barriers to adoption and boost usage of cabin Internet services.

The ingredients for making all of this happen are available today. I think that ubiquitous connectivity as a driver of cost reduction as well as for ancillary profit have never been more significant for airlines.�

And when we look back in a year from now, could it be possible that we might see Covid-19 as an inflection point – towards real broadband services in the sky?

For further information on SkyFive, visit www.skyfive.world 19

A RT I F I C I A L I N T E L L I G E N C E

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Scientists are leveraging AI to find existing drugs to repurpose for Covid-19 clinical trials.

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n a pilot study at the end of March, 12 adults with moderate Covid-19 admitted to the hospital in either Alessandria or Prato, Italy, received a daily dose of the rheumatoid arthritis drug, baricitinib, along with an anti-HIV drug combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, for two weeks. Another study group of 12 received just lopinavir and ritonavir.

After their two-week treatment, the patients who received baricitinib had mostly recovered. Their coughs and fevers were gone; they were no longer short of breath. Seven of the 12 had been discharged from the hospital. In contrast, the group who didn’t get baracitinib still had elevated temperatures; nine were coughing, and eight remained short of breath. Just one patient from the

lopinavir-ritonavir-only group had been discharged.

The study comes with serious caveats: the lack of a formal control group, the small number of subjects, and the open-label design, meaning both physicians and patients knew which course of treatment they received. But it wouldn’t have been conducted at all if not for the work of BenevolentAI, an AI company based in the UK. Researchers there, along with collaborator, Justin Stebbing, an oncologist at Imperial College London, published a letter to The Lancet, describing how they used AI to identify baricitinib’s potential to treat Covid-19.

According to Stebbing, “AI makes higher-order correlations that a human wouldn’t be capable of making, even with all the time in the

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world. It links datasets that a human wouldn’t be able to link.”

Evaluating one billion small molecules for their ability to bind SARS-CoV-2 proteins would take a decade on even the largest of supercomputers.

The work also moved fast, which is crucial in a pandemic. Peter Richardson, BenevolentAI’s Vice President of Pharmacology, says that it took him only an afternoon of work to use the company’s knowledge graph – an enormous, digital storehouse of biomedical information and connections inferred and enhanced by machine learning – to identify two human protein targets to focus on, AP2-associated protein kinase 1 (AAK1) and cyclin g-associated kinase (GAK). These kinases mediate endocytosis, a process by which cells engulf things, including viruses, and, if disrupted, might make it harder for SARSCoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, to get into human cells. Once the researchers had those targets, they used another algorithm to find existing drugs that could hit the protein targets. The team completed the work in only a few days.

By eliminating all the drugs that are not approved by regulators, the researchers cut the list down to about 30, and sorted out the handful 24

of those that showed the highest affinity for binding their targets. Two were toxic chemotherapy drugs, and of the remaining three, baricitinib was the clear winner. In clinical trials as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, the side effects were mostly benign and showed up after a longer period of treatment than Covid-19 patients are likely to need.

Plus, it’s not metabolised by the liver and is instead excreted through the kidneys, meaning that it might be safe to combine it with a traditional antiviral (such as lopinavir).

In addition to baricitinib’s predicted interactions with AAK1 and GAK, it’s a known Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitor. Because JAK mediates cytokine signalling that leads to inflammation, inhibiting JAK suppresses inflammation, which, at first blush, might have been a problem.

Richardson said, “We were in this anomalous position of having a drug that was anti-inflammatory and saying we should give this to someone who is infected by the

“IT’S ALL ABOUT PERSONALISED MEDICINE, WHICH MEANS TREATING THE RIGHT PERSON AT THE RIGHT TIME WITH THE RIGHT DISEASE WITH THE RIGHT DRUGS” Justin Stebbing, Oncologist at Imperial College London

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virus, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

effectiveness in Covid-19 patients in the US.

The idea is that baricitinib not only prevents the virus from getting into cells, but also reduces the intense immune reaction that causes so many problems, even as viral titres start to fall.

Stebbing said, “Even if the trial doesn’t work, we’re going to find out a huge amount of who it might work in and when it might work. It’s all about personalised medicine, which means treating the right person at the right time with the right disease with the right drugs. Hopefully, this will be a powerful part of the jigsaw.”

It was a good enough idea that Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company that makes baricitinib, has entered into an agreement with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study the drug’s

The Benevolent AI team is one of several groups leveraging AI to find drugs that have already been

THE BARABÁSI GROUP SHARED A LIST OF 81 APPROVED DRUGS THAT THE TEAM AND ITS COLLABORATORS ARE NOW TESTING IN THE LAB TO SEE WHETHER OR NOT THE DRUGS INTERRUPT A CORONAVIRUS INFECTION AND HOW THEY MIGHT DO SO

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approved by regulators and could therefore be repurposed to fight SARS-CoV-2.

Shantenu Jha, a computational scientist at Rutgers University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, is coupling AI techniques and algorithms with high-performance computing simulations to speed up the ability to screen billions of existing drugs for their interactions with and ability to disrupt SARSCoV-2 proteins.

Evaluating one billion small molecules for their ability to bind SARS-CoV-2 proteins would take a decade on even the largest of supercomputers, Jha says.

But he and his colleagues have integrated machine learning into the simulations they run on the supercomputers, which allows the programs to adapt to new information that gets uncovered as they run, thereby producing results (in this case, lists of candidate small molecules) much faster than traditional supercomputing methods.

Another group, led by AlbertLászló Barabási, a researcher at Northeastern University, is combining AI with another strategy, network medicine. The idea is that by understanding the genetic and protein interactions in the body, researchers can gain a better 27

“THE HOPE IS THAT IF YOU FIND SUCH A DRUG, THE DRUG WOULD EITHER BLOCK THE VIRUS’ ABILITY TO DO WHAT IT NORMALLY DOES OR BALANCE ITS CONSEQUENCES” Albert-László Barabási Researcher at Northeastern University

understanding of how things might go wrong during disease.

The team has a suite of tools that connect what’s known about these interactions and how existing drugs fit into the network. Then, the researchers pinpoint the aspects of the network (or neighbourhoods) that are perturbed during disease and use AI and network associations to find existing drugs that could be repurposed to offset those disruptions.

Sometimes, drugs target the proteins directly involved in a disease, Barabási explains, but

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more often they hit somewhere else in the neighbourhood. Over the course of three weeks, he and his colleagues searched for interactions between approved drugs that could be repurposed and the network neighbourhoods of the human proteins shown to bind to SARSCoV-2 proteins.

Barabási explained, “The network medicine and AI tools have learned from what we know about the existing drugs and their networkbased relationship, and now find similar patterns in the case of the drug and the Covid targets. The

hope is that if you find such a drug, the drug would either block the virus’ ability to do what it normally does or balance its consequences.”

Perhaps the drug would interfere with a protein the virus needs to bind to as a means of infecting the cell or stop the coronavirus from using the host cell’s machinery to create its own proteins. The Barabási group shared a list of 81 approved drugs that the team and its collaborators are now testing in the lab to see whether or not the drugs interrupt a coronavirus infection and how they might do so. Some of the drugs

(such as ritonavir, lopinavir and chloroquine) are already being tested in Covid-19 clinical trials, while others, such as the antihistamine azelastine, are not.

Barabási added, “One of the things that our methods don’t tell us is whether (these drugs) would be making the situation better or worse.

That’s why we prefer to start with the lab-based experiments before clinical trials because, in the lab, we will be able to see if the impact goes in the right direction.”

Source: www.the-scientist.com 29

ROBOTICS

David Ferrucci, the creator of Watson, wants to build an AI system capable of having common sense.

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David Ferrucci was the principal investigator who led a team at IBM on the development of Watson, a question-answering computer system proficient at answering questions posed in natural language. ince then, he’s been attacking a more challenging task – developing an AI system that has common sense.

Ferrucci’s latest creation can listen to a children’s story and ask questions. In one tale, Fernando and Zoey buy some plants.

Fernando places his plant on a windowsill, while Zoey tucks hers away in a darkened room. After a few days, Fernando’s plant is green and healthy, but the leaves of Zoey’s have browned. She moves her plant to the windowsill and it flourishes.

A question appears on the screen: “Does it make sense that Fernando put his plant in the window 32

because he wants it to be healthy?

The sunny window has light and the plant needs to be healthy.”

The question is part of an effort

by Ferrucci’s AI system to learn how the world works. It might be obvious why Fernando puts his plant in the window, but it is surprisingly difficult for an AI system to grasp.

Ferrucci and his company, Elemental Cognition, hope to fix a huge blind spot in modern AI by teaching machines to acquire and apply everyday knowledge that lets humans communicate, reason and navigate their surroundings.

We use common-sense reasoning so often, and so easily, that we barely notice it.

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C L A R A On a server somewhere, an AI program known as CLARA adds that information to a library of facts and notions – a kind of artificial common-sense knowledge Ernest Davis, a professor at NYU, who has been studying the problem for decades, says common sense is essential for advancing everything from language understanding to robotics. He says, “It is central to most of what we want to do with AI.” According to Davis, machines need to master fundamental concepts like time, causality and social interaction in order to demonstrate real intelligence. He adds, “This is the large obstacle that the current approaches are having serious trouble with.”

The latest wave of AI advances, built on a mix of machine learning and big data, has given us 34

gadgets that respond to spoken commands and self-driving cars that recognise objects on the road ahead. They are amazing, but they have zero common sense.

Alexa and Siri can tell you about a species of plant by reciting from Wikipedia, but neither seems to know what happens if you leave one in the dark. A program that’s learned to recognise obstacles on the road ahead doesn’t typically understand why it’s more important to avoid people than traffic cones.

With Ferrucci’s computer, the researcher clicks an on-screen ‘yes’ button in response to the question about Fernando’s plant. On a server somewhere, an AI program known as CLARA adds that

information to a library of facts and notions – a kind of artificial common-sense knowledge. Like an endlessly inquisitive child, CLARA, which stands for Collaborative Learning and Reading Agent, asks Ferrucci another question about the plant story, then another, and another, attempting to ‘understand’ why things unfold the way they do.

Ferrucci has been working on the problem for some time. A decade ago, when he led the development of IBM’s Watson, having a computer answer questions from game show, Jeopardy!, seemed near impossible. Yet in 2011, Watson crushed several human champions in a widely publicised version of the

programme. Watson parsed reams of text to find nuggets of trivia, suggesting answers to Jeopardy! questions. It was a crowning achievement for AI, but the absence of any real understanding was all too apparent.

Ferrucci says Watson’s limitations, and the hype around the project, propelled him to try building machines that better understand the world. IBM has since turned Watson into a brand that refers to a bewildering range of technologies, many unrelated to the original machine.

Not long after Watson’s triumph, AI was transformed. Deep learning, a means of teaching computers to

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Ferrucci and his company, Elemental Cognition, hope to fix a huge blind spot in modern AI by teaching machines to acquire and apply everyday knowledge that lets humans communicate, reason and navigate their surroundings

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recognise faces, transcribe speech and do other things by feeding them large amounts of data, emerged as a powerful tool, and it has been applied in ever more ways.

Over the past couple of years, deep learning has produced striking progress in language understanding. Feeding a particular kind of artificial neural network large amounts of text can produce a model capable of answering questions or generating text with surprising coherence.

Teams at Google, Baidu, Microsoft, and OpenAI have built ever larger and more complex models that are progressively better at handling language. And yet, these models are still bedevilled by a lack of common sense.

CLARA aims to go further by combining deep-learning techniques with more oldfashioned ways of building knowledge into machines, through explicit logical rules, like the fact that plants have leaves and need light. It uses a statistical method to recognise concepts like nouns and verbs in sentences. It also has a few pieces of what’s known as core knowledge, like the fact that events happen in time and cause other things to happen.

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CLARA also gat sense by inte users. And if it c contradiction, it statement is m

thers common eracting with comes across a t can ask which most often true

Knowledge about specific subjects is crowdsourced from Mechanical Turkers and then built into CLARA. This might include, for example, that light causes plants to thrive, and windows allow light in. In contrast, a deep-learning model fed the right data might be able to answer questions about botany correctly, but it might not.

It would take a long time to handcraft every possible piece of common-sense knowledge into the system, as previous efforts to build knowledge engines by hand have sadly demonstrated. So, CLARA combines the facts it’s given with deep-learning language models to generate its own common sense.

In the plant story, for example, this might allow CLARA to conclude for itself that being in a window helps make plants green.

CLARA also gathers common sense by interacting with users. And if it comes across a contradiction, it can ask which statement is most often true.

Roger Levy, a professor at MIT who works at the intersection of AI, language, and cognitive science, said, “It's a very challenging enterprise, but I think it's an important vision and goal. Language is not just a set of statistical associations and 39

patterns – it also connects with meaning and reasoning, and our common sense understanding of the world.”

It’s hard to say how much progress Ferrucci has made towards giving AI common sense, in part because Elemental Cognition is unusually secretive. It recently published a paper arguing that most efforts at machine understanding fall short, and should be replaced by ones that ask deeper questions about the meaning of text. But it hasn’t published details of its system or released any code.

Scaling such a complex system beyond simple stories and basic examples will likely prove tricky.

Ferrucci seems to be looking for a company with deep pockets and a large number of users to help.

If people could be persuaded to help a search engine or a personal assistant build common-sense knowledge, that could accelerate the process. Another possibility Ferrucci suggests is a program that asks students questions about a piece of text they have read, to both check they understand it and build its own knowledge base.

But, CLARA isn’t the only commonsense AI in town. Yejin Choi, a

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“It's a very challenging enterprise, but I think it's an important vision and goal. Language is not just a set of statistical associations and patterns – it also connects with meaning and reasoning, and our common sense understanding of the world” Roger Levy, Professor at MIT

professor at the University of Washington and a researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, recently led the development of another method for combining deep learning and symbolic logic, known as COMET. This program gets confused less frequently than pure deep-learning language models when conversing or answering questions, but it still gets tripped up sometimes.

Choi says she’d like to see the inner workings of CLARA before passing judgment, adding, “At a high level, it makes sense. I think they can make some toy examples, but I find it hard to believe one can really

make it work for general-purpose common sense.”

However, Davis at NYU isn’t sure that common-sense AI is ready for its Watson moment. He suspects that fundamental breakthroughs may be needed for machines to learn common sense as effortlessly as humans. For example, he says, it’s unclear how machines could grasp uncertain meanings. He concludes, “There seems to be something serious we’re missing.

There are aspects of it that we haven’t gotten anywhere near.”

Source: Wired 41

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INTERNET OF THINGS

Deutsche Telekom is launching the world’s first open platform for the IoT.

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DEUTSCHE TELEKOM HAS UNVEILED PLANS TO RADICALLY SIMPLIFY THE COMPLEX INTERNET OF THINGS (IOT).

WITH A UNIQUE PLATFORM, IT BRINGS ALL PLAYERS TOGETHER, INCLUDING DEVELOPERS, OPERATORS, PARTNERS AND SUPPLIERS. 46

his ‘hub’ will be the new industry meeting place for the IoT. The most important goal is to make access and operation of an increasingly heterogeneous IoT ecosystem as simple and manageable as possible. Transparency instead of complexity, with standards and open interfaces, this is Deutsche Telekom’s response to the most urgent demand in the world of IoT.

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“THE AMALGAMATION OF ALL IOT SOLUTIONS INTO ONE FRAMEWORK PROVIDES A BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT THAT IS UNIQUE TO DATE” Rami Avidan, CEO of Deutsche Telekom IoT GmbH

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The new industry environment brings together the complete range of the most important elements that are essential for IoT solutions – connectivity, devices, cloud services and solutions for data analysis. Deutsche Telekom is not only relying on its own IoT offerings. The marketplace, with its diverse partner portfolio, offers customers the greatest possible flexibility.

This considerably simplifies the setup and operation of individual IoT solutions. It also drastically reduces the development

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time from individual customer solutions to market readiness.

Rami Avidan, CEO of Deutsche Telekom IoT GmbH, who is responsible for Deutsche Telekom’s IoT business, said, “With the new hub for IoT, we are exploiting the full potential of the Internet of Things.

“The amalgamation of all IoT solutions into one framework provides a business environment that is unique to date. With this, Deutsche Telekom is establishing the world’s first open IoT network and expanding its role from IoT player to IoT orchestrator.”

The launch is planned for the second half of 2020, and the IoT hub will be continuously expanded. Deutsche Telekom invites partners and customers to test the new IoT environment.

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“AS AN INDEPENDENT COMPANY, WE ARE MORE AGILE AND CAN BETTER ADDRESS THE FAST-MOVING IOT MARKET” Rami Avidan, CEO of Deutsche Telekom IoT GmbH

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During operation, standardised interfaces ensure uncomplicated communication with all important clouds, protocols and technologies. In other words, different IoT ecosystems now play together seamlessly. With this revolutionary approach, data and applications from the devices are easily delivered to where they are needed – on an integrated

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dashboard or directly into the systems and user interfaces.

Logging on to different systems is no longer necessary.

With the spin-off of the IoT business into an independent GmbH (company with limited liability) as of July 1st, 2020, Deutsche Telekom aims to accelerate its market

entry. Competitors in the IoT environment are particularly agile and have lean decision-making structures. The independent Deutsche Telekom IoT GmbH (DT IoT) is intended to strengthen Deutsche Telekom’s position in this growth market. The newly founded DT IoT will have end-toend responsibility for the entire IoT business at Deutsche Telekom.

Avidan added, “As an independent company, we are more agile and can better address the fast-moving IoT market.”

You can find out more information about Telekom’s IoT services by visiting www.iot.telekom.com

Source: IoT Business News

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TOP 10

A rundown of 10 of t companies in Eu

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the most innovative urope right now.

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1

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SIEMENS

Siemens, the long-established global giant based in Germany, raised the game this year in the sustainable transportations space by opening the first ‘e-highway’ that allows electric trucks to be charged as they drive. This technology, if widely adopted, could simultaneously help solve some of the pain points associated with electric vehicles – and have a huge positive effect on climate change.

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SPROUT WORLD

Sprout packs a lot of innovation into a small, everyday object, demonstrating that everyone can make a positive difference. Who would think of planting a pencil in the ground so a tree can grow from its used body?

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3

ELVIE

This UK-based company’s smart, wearable breast pump allows new mothers to pump through the day, discreetly, silently and hands-free. It’s a great example of how ‘femtech’ is being created to address women’s specific needs.

4

WAYRAY

WayRay has created holographic AR displays that can be built into any glass surface, from car windows to cockpits, allowing viewers to see AR information overlaid right on the window in front of them, no special glasses required.

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5

MICRO MOBILITY SYSTEMS

This Switzerland-based company specialises in creating mobility vehicles for short-distance trips, which they say account for 95 per cent of the journeys people make in large cities. The Microlino is inspired by bubble cars from the 1950s. This little car has a small carbon footprint and it is all most city-dwellers need for the majority of their outings.

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6

LILIUM

This Munich-based company has launched the world’s first five-seater vertical take-off and landing electric jet. It’s rather ground-breaking for the future of sustainable transportation.

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WITHINGS

Withings have introduced a number of seriously innovative products over the years. Most recently, the company debuted a watch called the Move ECG, which has an electrocardiogram built in. This means people who like traditional time pieces now have the option of having life-saving tech on their wrists. The Move ECG can direct AFib at any time, and best of all, the watch has a 12-month battery life, meaning that at-risk users don’t need to remember to charge it every night.

8

AMUSE

This record label, based in Stockholm, allows musicians to receive royalty payments six months in advance, so that they have enough funds to continue creating their work. Amuse’s tech uses AI to predict how much the artist will earn in the future so as to calculate their royalties. It’s a cool tool to help struggling musicians get a financial leg-up as they try to get their work out there.

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9

STHALER

With Sthaler’s Fingopay, you still use your finger to authenticate yourself, but Fingopay doesn’t use your fingerprint – it employs vein ID technology that uses light to detect your unique pattern of blood vessels inside your finger.

It’s much more secure because, unlike fingerprints, blood vessel patterns cannot be altered.

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APISPROTECT

This start-up is tackling a field that hasn’t seen much innovation: beehives. Machinelearning-enhanced sensors capture a massive amount of data about beehive activity that allows beekeepers to have vastly increased insight into how their hives are performing. Giving beekeepers more data helps them to detect challenges or dangers to their hives quickly, and respond.

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S U P P LY C H A I N

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A global survey of 100 retailers has found they are still at the early stages of digital maturity, but are ambitious to accelerate their journey.

MG at The University of Warwick and Blue Yonder have partnered to assess the digital readiness of retail supply chains.

Benchmarked on a four-level scale, more than 100 respondents globally contributed to the final results.

The study found that the majority of retailers are at an early stage of their digital supply chain journey.

Achieving an average score of 2.1, there is clearly still progress to be made, especially when also considering that only 15 per cent of respondents have reached Level 3 or above. However, there is a sense of urgency among retailers to

accelerate their business models, with over half ambitious to achieve a prescriptive or autonomous supply chain in the medium term.

The survey was conducted in March and April 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 emergency in many countries. The questionnaire was extended to assess the impact of the pandemic on global supply chains.

Unsurprisingly, 75-80 per cent of products saw demand fluctuations during the emergency, with nearly one third (32 per cent) experiencing extreme variations of 200 per cent or more a month post lock-down.

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Retailers made big efforts to adapt to the conditions.

In general, they felt their planning systems were effective, but, significantly, they required a high degree of manual intervention. Notably, their processes were more effective in responding to decreases in demand, rather than increases.

The top lesson from Covid-19 was the imperative to improve agility. Retailers saw the need to focus on flexibility and to prioritise investment in demand forecasting, visibility and automation.

Most retailers have a monthly cadence for financial and strategic planning. Their desire is to ensure that

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The top lesson fro imperative to impr saw the need to fo and to prioritise in forecasting, visibi

75-80% of products saw demand fluctuations

om Covid-19 was the rove agility. Retailers ocus on flexibility nvestment in demand ility and automation

38%

orient promotional pricing to increase sales

planning becomes crossfunctional and integrated across the business. Today, more than half of the respondents plan their assortment on a phase-based timetable. There is a strong aspiration to move towards continual, machinelearning-driven optimisations, in order to encompass the dynamic nature of supply and demand.

Functionally, most retailers manage pricing through a promotional calendar, with only 13 per cent continually optimising prices.

Commercially, 38 per cent orient promotional pricing to increase sales, while 33 per cent aim to increase margin.

Only 11 per cent are able to manage across multiple factors such as margin and inventory clearance. Today, there is little investment in AI and ML, but over 42 per cent are aiming to incorporate this capability.

The report shows retailers are not able to react to changes in demand in real time, with only 8 per cent refreshing demand planning processes on a real-time basis. More than one fifth (22 per cent) of retailers currently use 67

spreadsheets for this process, but almost three quarters (74 per cent) want to switch to prescriptive or autonomous technology incorporating machine learning in the next five years.

Nearly half (49 per cent) of respondents have basic demand processes, with only 11 per cent able to accurately sense and shape demand. The approach extends into replenishment, so perhaps in recognition of

the pandemic are likely to have highlighted this issue.

There is also recognition that transport planning is currently too manual and simplistic, with cost savings and efficiency improvements to be made. Overall, there is a lack of integration between logistics and planning.

Incumbent processes have often evolved to fit the available technology, departmental or

only 10 per cent of respondents operate fully automated warehouses, with 40 per cent noting an aspiration to do so over the next five years. these issues, some 44 per cent are looking to develop a digital twin to manage inventory, with optimisations based on demand, cost and business strategy.

Channels are planned separately by the majority of retailers, with 24 per cent maintaining discrete inventories. Again, it is seen as a key area for investment and optimisation.

What’s more, only 10 per cent of respondents operate fully automated warehouses, with 40 per cent noting an aspiration to do so over the next five years.

Significant labour issues during 68

functional needs and required reporting cadence. These are level 1 and 2 processes. The true nature of demand, however, is determined in real time by an interrelated set of factors. When capitalising on the digital opportunity, it is important to remember that machine learning can recognise digital signatures in big data to enable a paradigm shift in demand sensing, prediction and planning. Cloud models enable automation and on-demand scaling to help reveal demand with greater precision, thus maximising profit and reducing waste.

To read the full report, visit www.blueyonder.com

44%

49% have basic demand processes

looking to develop a digital twin

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IN THE SP OTLIGHT

START-UP OF THE MONTH

Multinational ride-hailing company, Bolt, is working hard to save the planet whilst providing its customers an efficient and cost-effective way to travel. ormerly known as Taxify, the Tallinn-based start-up, Bolt, offers multiple transportation options including taxis, private drivers and electric scooters to its users worldwide. The European competitor to Uber, it has around 25 million users in over 30 countries across Europe and Africa’s ridehailing space and is backed by German automaker, Daimler, and Chinese ride-hailing giant, Didi.

A fast and affordable way to ride, all you need to do is download the Bolt app to your smartphone to summon a lift at the touch of a button.

It is quick and easy 70

to use, with the aim of offering the best ride prices in every city it is available. Drivers are their own boss and can earn as much or as little as they see fit by setting their own daily schedule.

Bolt’s Green Plan means all rides in Europe are now carbonneutral. The company’s longterm commitment to reducing its ecological footprint aims to offset carbon dioxide emissions by at least five million tonnes by 2025,

One of its biggest achievements is that every time a customer takes a Bolt ride, a donation is made to carbon offsetting projects across the globes. create greener cities by bringing more electric vehicles and scooters to its platform, and reduce its eco footprint by starting to use more renewable forms of energy.

One of its biggest achievements is that every time a customer takes a Bolt ride, a donation is made to carbon offsetting projects across the globes. Consequently, Bolt is doing its bit to keep its green credentials intact, and customers need not feel guilty about opting to take a ride.

The company achieved unicorn status in May 2018 after it closed $175 million in a funding round, and since then, it has gone from strength to strength.

For further information about Bolt, visit www.bolt.eu/en/ 71

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