US-based smart grid infrastructure firm Sensus has invested £5 million in Navetas, a technology spin-off from research first performed at Oxford University, in exchange for a 15 percent stake in the UK business. The funding is the latest in a series of rounds in which Navetas previously secured backing from Oxford, Swarraton Partners, and Naxos Capital. In announcing the deal, Sensus, which is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, said it was eager to deploy Navestas' patented energy management software in the US market. Utilities currently deploying the licensed wireless Sensus FlexNet™ advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system will now be able to leverage the Navetas software as an optional service that provides residential and commercial customers with an online portal or mobile app showing precise electricity consumption data from various appliances. The system will also afford consumers with access to detailed information about daily usage patterns and the cost associated with each device, allowing them to manage consumption and save money. “Many utilities offer online portals that allow customers to see their aggregate electricity consumption,” said Matt Zafuto, Sensus' vice president of corporate strategy and business development. “Our technology allows the customer to see disaggregated data such as the electricity consumed by a water heater in the basement or a toaster oven in the kitchen and know how much each device costs them to operate.” Zafuto went on to describe the partnership as a "game changer" as utilities will be able to offer Navetas' service through the AMI system without their customers having to purchase or install equipment in the premises to gather and present the data. Navetas was founded in 2008 to productize the load disaggregating concept from the University of Oxford that can uniquely monitor, from a single point, how much energy is being used by different appliances in the home. Navetas has successfully launched the technology in the U.K. and across Europe. “The pace of change in the global energy market is rapid and this partnership will allow Navetas to develop internationally, specifically in the U.S., and to deliver new and innovative technologies that will address the emerging market dynamics,” said Navetas Energy Management CEO Chris Saunders. “Participation by a major global player such as Sensus is testament to the value our technology brings to the energy market.” Source: Renewable Energy Magazine
Sensus £5 million investment in Navetas secures exclusive US license to smart grid technology
Kobo Believes eBook Market is a Two-Horse Race
As one Canadian technology company looks to be going the way of the Dodo, another is taking on an internet giant in the fast expanding world of ebooks. Canadian BlackBerry-maker RIM is not having the best of times at the moment, but one bright light for the Canadian technology landscape comes in the form of the Toronto-based Kobo Books, which believes it and Amazon are in a two-horse race in the ebooks and erader market. While Kobo Books is no longer strictly Canadian, having been bought out by Japanese ecommerce firm Rakuten for US$325m (£204m) earlier this year, it retains a strong Canadian identity and its headquarters remain in Toronto. We spoke to Todd Humphreys, executive vice president of business development at Kobo, while he was visiting the London Book Fair this week. The Kobo stand is in the Digital Zone, which has grown exponentially in the last few years as the digital publishing revolution has taken off. While Humphreys doesn't think physical books are going to disappear any time soon, he does see the split between traditional printed books and digital books moving to around 50/50, calling it a "tectonic shift" in the way the publishing world works. "The book market continues to grow and we think that digital adds to the overall book share but the percentage shifts more towards digital being a larger [share]." Asda recently cut the price of the Kobo Wireless e-Reader to under £50 in the latest promotional push for Kobo ereaders but Humphreys says there is more to Kobo's strategy than simply undercutting the competition on cost: "I think there are companies that have come out with low cost readers, low cost tablets in this market place. The reason they don't succeed in this marketplace is you really need to have a couple of different pillars. "Source: Beattie's Book Blog
Effective use of Cloud Technology for data sharing
In the last five years, the growth of data has received overwhelming attention from pretty much every commercial and strategic sector in the world.
“Organisations have finally woken up to a world where data is no longer packets of information being exchanged between individuals. Now, individuals are organisms, swimming in a bottomless ocean of data that they are constantly creating!”
Finance, healthcare, retail, and even government organisations have started capturing large amount of data that, until now, went straight past them. As Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt claims, every 48 hours, we generate the amount of data humanity produced since the dawn of civilisation until 15 years ago. It is, therefore, no wonder that a report by Gartner maintains that Data Analytics is expected to be a $20.81b industry in 2018.
(Source: blog.grow.com/data-important-business)
Accumulating this data can help businesses in many ways. Data can help you track the performance of your business operations, be it your digital marketing strategies, be it your sales, or be it the customer feedback. These pieces of information are immensely valuable as they help you understand the current trends in the market, what your customers are looking for, which are the assets that are generating the highest ROI, and so much more. Having such vital data at hand, you can better allocate your resources and significantly minimize inefficiency costs of your company.
Data and analytics guru Bernard Marr stated:
“I firmly believe that big data and its implications will affect every single business—from Fortune 500 enterprises to mom and pop companies—and change how we do business, inside and out.”
Role of Cloud-based Warehousing Platforms
Cloud-based data warehouse platforms are crucial for the generation and accumulation of Big Data. Companies around the world are rapidly shifting towards the cloud domain to generate and store data. These cloud-based data warehouses are nothing but repositories for storing massive chunks of data to facilitate data mining and complement Business Intelligence (BI), Data Analytics, and research.
(Source: d15shllkswkct0.cloudfront.net)
With the data being fed to these platforms through reliable systems like Online Transactional Processing (OLTP), data warehouses allow for an integrated approach to data management, which in turn makes it easier to access and interpret the vital data. A data warehouse platform can benefit businesses in the following ways:
Improved Decision Making - Since data warehouses store vast amounts of valuable facts and statistics, companies will no longer need to make all their decisions based on constrained data sets. Access to Big Data will allow businesses to look at and analyze the broader spectrums and take their decisions accordingly. Harnessing data will enable companies to expand their customer base, improve customer service and retention strategies, enhance their digital marketing strategies, and better predict sales.
Ease of Access - A great thing about data warehouse platforms is that they can gather data from multiple sources and process them into formats that are easy to understand. All of this is done at a speed that ensures no time is wasted in accessing, interpreting, and analyzing data. And as we all know, time is of the essence in the industry!
Quality Data - The data accumulated and processed by cloud-based platforms is standardized into a single and widely used format. When information is generated in standardized formats, its accuracy increases. The more accurate the data, the easier it becomes for companies to make the right decisions.
According to Harvard Business Review, the key to solving problems is through collaboration and data sharing among companies. For innovation, a narrow outlook of a single company will not suffice in today’s competitive global market. Innovation essentially requires a much broader perspective. When companies collaborate, they can bring several problems to the table and together come up with better solutions.
Another trend that has become irresistible in the internet era is cloud commerce, the O2O model becoming viral in the market. Under this model, a consumer searches for the product or service online but purchases it through an offline channel. This model is being implemented in various fields, especially in the e-commerce sector by new players in the online retail market like Fynd.
Data sharing will allow companies to see that the pain points each face are the problems of the industry as a whole that requires joint efforts to solve. Thus, collaboration among potential partners for data sharing should be encouraged as it holds a huge potential for innovation.
[Harsh Shah is the co-founder of Fynd, a first-of-its-kind, e-commerce fashion platform, with a live inventory of 8K plus stores catering to more than 8 million customers. He is an engineer from IIT Bombay and has 7+ years of experience in the field of Fashion Retail, Hospitality, Management Consulting and Human Resources.] Source: ummid.com
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