The Mr. Beacon Ambient IoT Podcast

This week on Mr. Beacon we speak with Ed Treacy, Vice President of Supply Chain and Sustainability at International Fresh Produce Association (IFPA), about the current state of food safety in the world. Ed explains to us all the information you need regarding the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), as well as the opportunities for investment. Are we ever going to get to the point where we can li...

Cesar Johnston has a lot to say about the future of the IoT. Capturing wireless energy to power devices has leapt beyond the theoretical. Energous is currently powering Wiliot's IoT Pixels and Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL) - an item-level communications revolution using ubiquitous frequencies. We also get a chance to learn about his career starting off at Bell Labs and some of the leading companie...

Bluetooth tags have been revolutionary in connecting our digital and physical worlds, but have yet to achieve their full potential. What if the technology, marketing power, and infrastructure reach of the telecommunications industry were to get behind the Ambient IoT use cases which Bluetooth is starting to enable? It’s happening now. The standards bodies developing 5G & 6G have recently set t...

Sustainability and ESG are becoming major drivers of IoT projects. As entrepreneurs and solutions designers, we need to understand what ESG is and the people responsible for it, why they do what they do, and how they do it.  On this week’s show we talk with Iñigo Canalejo, IFCO’s VP of ESG, and a veteran of sustainability. We also hear about IFCO’s market leadership and expansion of the use o...

It's inspiring that SAP has bestowed the title of "VP - Futurism" on someone.  And there is no better someone than Tom Raftery, who is a Global IoT Evangelist and thinker of deep thoughts across many domains.   We start off exploring why there is such a tsunami of funding going into making supply chains resilient and sustainable.  And then we drill down (no fracking!) into Tom's rol...

There are huge opportunities to make our food supply chains more efficient (that’s a polite way of saying we waste obscene amounts of food). New technology from a Google backed startup called Strella can help.  This week we talk to Strella’s CEO and Founder, Katherine Sizov, and learn more about the food ecosystem, cutting edge technology that is making a difference, and some real world entre...

The new GS1 EPCIS 2.0 standard is set to have a dramatic impact on the way we manage supply chains. Its functionality can drastically improve sustainability, trust, and efficiency. We talk to one of the key contributors to the standard, author, CTO, and entrepreneur Dominique Guinard about the “Why, What and How” of a standard that supports visibility of “What, When, Where, Why and How” for produc...

Can profit and planet ever agree? This week's episode proves they can - thanks to World Friendly IoT - and our guest Ollie Smeenk explains how. Ollie is Co-CEO at SODAQ, and he shares fascinating insights about his company’s approach to developing energy harvesting edge devices for construction and shipping. The opportunities to reduce carbon footprints, measure change, and drive profits and savin...

Interested in RTLS, asset tracking or Industrial IoT? You need to know about the new standard, Omlox, which is shaping the market with over 1,700 company members. Born out of the needs of European manufacturing giants, and the pioneering by Trumpf, the German industrial engineering pioneer.      Omlox promises interoperability for RTLS systems, a catalyst for growth for RTLS ve...

We’re joined this week by Simon Molnar, who is the founder of Flagship, which is a company that is working to bring to physical retail the science of merchandising and inventory management which they perfected from running Australia’s largest online jewelry store.   How will apparel retailers survive in the face of online competition and challenging headwinds? We talk in depth with Simon abou...

In their role as a “converter”, Tadbik have been at the forefront of creating tags and connected packaging with RFID, NFC & BLE. Industry veteran David Beit-on, who heads up Tadbik’s business operations in Germany, explains the role of the converter in the world of IoT.   He shines a light on what solution designers need to consider when adding auto-ID tags to “things.” We discuss Ta...

Companies are being hacked and ransomed all the time these days, and given the fact that billions of IoT devices have the potential to increase the number of vulnerabilities that companies have to deal with, it’s safe to say that this issue is more important than ever before. So what exactly can be done to increase the security of everyday devices connected to the internet? Well, we brought on the...

Does your product have a soul? We are heading into a future where more and more things are getting digital “souls” or IDs these days. We are talking about an identity that transcends the life and even the second life of a product. It’s a compelling concept, as it unlocks waste reduction, product safety, regulatory compliance, efficiency and new revenue models.   Max Winograd’s team is co...

Last week the GS1 Connect conference came to San Diego. Speakers included auto-ID leaders from Mc Donald’s, Wendy’s and Chipotle. It reminded us of one of our favorite conversations with Melanie Nuce, SVP at GS1, a fascinating person who happens to be a leader at the standards body that is responsible for almost all of the bar codes and data encoded on the products we see everyday....

Logistics is pivotal in shaping modern business operations. As businesses compete and deal with supply chain disruption this is driving some fascinating new technologies and systems. For technologists that seek to embed their technology into the arteries of modern supply chains, it’s important to understand the problems and trends that are driving the adoption of these latest technologies. &n...

This week we talk with the leader of the lab that is at the heart of RFID and Auto-ID, about tags in outer space and on the ocean floor. We learn about Auburn University’s pivotal relationship with the giants of retail, aerospace and the biggest vendors of the technologies that are bringing the digital and physical worlds together. Justin Patton is the Director of the Auburn University RFID Lab, a...

What’s going to happen to the world when the Internet explodes by a factor of 100 times, from billions to trillions of things? Steve talks with a friend of the show, and Deloitte’s Chief Futurist, Robert Schmid, to explore when this change will happen, where the opportunities lie, and how to take advantage of what will be a disruptive revolution in the IoT. We also discuss the prospects for the re...

This week we switch things up as Steve puts his Wiliot hat on and shines a light on the inside story of Wiliot’s initiative to democratize access to its revolutionary Internet of Everyday things technology. Sitting on the other side of the virtual interview table and asking the questions is Robert Schmid, Deloitte’s Chief Futurist, otherwise known as Mr IoT. We’ll talk about Wiliot’s starter kit a...

This week we are joined by Mattan David, the UK Managing Director of Digipal, an innovator in the next generation of plastic pallets. We discuss how sustainable plastic pallets -  as well as trackable ones - are game-changers. Years of coping with the limits of RFID tracking - clumsily monitoring movement as pallets enter and leave storage facilities - is being replaced by the superpower of B...

We are thrilled that George Anderson - the all-seeing, all-knowing Editor-in-Chief of Retail Wire - will be sharing his often unexpected wisdom on the impact of Covid-19 on the retail economy. Of course, the supply chain implications are profound, which brings us around to the IoT. Given that the pandemic has accelerated everything - collapsing five years into one, as the clich...

This week we have a very special guest, the CEO of Wiliot Tal Tamir. We’ll talk about Wiliot’s latest release, which includes new versions of their IoT Pixel tags (battery-free, postage stamp sized computers), and version 2.0 of their cloud service, designed to scale the IoT 100x, from billions to trillions of intelligent connected everyday things.  These technologies are primed to disrupt th...

This week on The Mr. Beacon Podcast we’re talking with the CEO of Blyott, Gery Pollet. Healthcare is one of the most lucrative markets for asset tracking solutions, but how do you crack it? Gery reveals his company’s approach and tells the story of how he figured out the secret. We go deep on the importance of asset tracking in the medical space. Covering the best tools for keeping track of both e...

This week on The Mr. Beacon Podcast we’re talking with Brielle Jaekel, who is the Managing Editor of Supply and Demand Chain Executive, and host of the L.I.N.K. podcast. She has a lot of insight on the current issues with the supply chain. How can innovations in the IoT help? We talk about this, as well as the environmental implications, tech company visibility, and much more. Hosted on Acast. See...

This week we get to know Russian indoor location and Indoor Positioning System vendor of 10 years standing Navigine. We're joined by the CEO, Alexey Panyov, and partnership manager, Margarita Vlasova. They've adopted an open source strategy, giving away some of the most valuable software assets they have developed. We learn why they did it and some surprising benefits. Songs mentioned by the guest...

Can you guess what the world's largest indoor location services platform is? Cisco’s DNA Spaces platform handles over 1 trillion location updates from 1 million access points deployed across 120,000 locations worldwide, so it is a serious contender for this title. The strategic implications of a giant like Cisco building a services platform like this impacts the entire ecosystem of customers and v...