PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

    The market of the EV (Electric Vehicle) is growing every year, Bloomberg  reports  that by 2040 the 54% of new cars will be EV.  For this market, the main problem is still the infrastructure. In fact, the number of charging stations is limited and prevent a potential buyer to make the decision to enter the club of EV owners.   Echarge  is a startup company based in Zug (CH) that will roll out the charging stations in hotel parking lots. In this way, the customer can recharge the car while using the parking place. Echarge has designed the infrastructure has a smart-grid, therefore every EV can trade energy (buy/sell). The basic technology is the blockchain and its associated cryptocurrency (ECHG). Every customer uses an app to book the place and his/her wallet to “trade” energy. The first rollout will start in May 2018 at Dubai.

SONO Motors is a young startup from Munich (Germany). They have developed the Sion, a 5 seats electric car with a range of 250 Km and that cost only16 KEur, battery excluded. Like some other competitor, the user can buy the Li-Ion battery pack (35-45 KW) for 4000 Euros or lease it for about 100 Euros a month. Till here nothing special, however, there are some interesting items to underlining: There are 7.4 square meters of solar panels mounted on the body of this car, they can provide up to 30 KM of charge per day;  The car is a power station, in fact, it is provided with plugs to provide energy to another car or to other electrically powered objects (e.g. a PC, a pump, ... ). This “power-sharing” feature is controlled by the user through a mobile application; The car is manufactured with standard components (e.g. some parts of the interiors are taken by the BMW i3); The maintenance concept is quite interesting: user manual, tutorials, 3D models are all av...

from pixabay Professionals are interested in the growing business of the IoT. This month, PMI-Switzerland has published my article on this subject. You can read more here . MXCHIP IoT DevKit If you want to experiment IoT and make your first application, you may want to try MXCHIP  and some examples provided by Microsoft through its cloud platform Azure .  

From "Using Blockchain Technology to Secure the Internet of Things paper" Two weeks ago the CSA has released the white paper that should help companies in the IoT business to understand how to secure their IoT devices through the adoption of Blockchain technology. With this paper, CSA intends to suggest an architecture that overcomes the limits of these devices and solve their security problems. As you may know, IoT devices have limits in terms of memory, power consumption and CPU. Hence, they cannot be (as per today) nodes of a blockchain. With the proposed architecture these limits are bypassed. In fact, the blockchain nodes are maintained in the clouds, while the devices are provided by capabilities to secure enroll them in the network and to secure machine-to-machine communication. With this architecture, the IoT device manufacturer can assure a clean bootstrap into the blockchain network, and subsequently, other services like identity management, software update, ...

Paige Bailey on AI The second day at the Tech Summit has been quite intensive. Microsoft, like the competitors, invests a lot in AI and today the development life-cycle in Azure is straightforward. The application of AI in the industries is quite common for example to solve clustering problems. One of the interesting business cases is to use AI for recognizing defects in PCB assembly production. Paige Bailey has demonstrated this case with Jabil, a giant EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Service) provider. Another valuable point has been the support of Azure for IoT Devices. Here you can see how the platform and the related services can support enterprises that operate in the IoT space. The platform supports device twins and massive data exchange (e.g., 2 Million devices that send telemetry data every 2 minutes). Azure IoT Device Hub The last presentation that I find important to mention is about blockchain support in Azure. Stefano Tempesta made a good presentation...

The  Microsoft Tech Summit  Switzerland  is the Free learning event where experts can touch the latest news from the company of Redmond. This year the keynotes of the first day have been carried out by:  Mark Russinovich - CTO of Microsoft Azure (in the picture above) Patrick Chanezon - Chief Developer Advocate at Docker   David Kurth - Cloud + Enterprise Business Group Lead, Microsoft Switzerland Mark has spoken about Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform in the cloud and he has made a demo about some uses cases. In particular, he has shown the  project Brainwave  where Microsoft has chosen to use FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology to achieve the performance of its real time AI system. Patrick, from  Decker , has shown the solution to deploy containers into the cloud . It is a cost-effective solution to modernise legacy applications. David has made latest keynote where he has explained the importance of security in today digital worl...

Good Morning, this is a thought for the weekend. We see in Europe that companies are moving jobs from West countries (e.g., Italy, UK, etc.) to East (e.g., Slovakia, Czech Republic, etc.). What about the corporate social responsibility? Would it be better to "transform" factories, take advantage of automation and transform some jobs? You may still cut workforce, but you do not destroy the industry in a country. For example, Swatch has demonstrated that you can build automatic watches for the mass market in Switzerland. They have automatized the production that remains in the country. You can bet that, while they have created some jobs to run the factory, they remain competitive.

Nowadays there is a huge debate on blockchain technology among communities of business and technical experts. However, if you are new to it and need to know more, then I suggest attending this course . Most of the articles or videos address the application of blockchain to cryptocurrencies. Nevertheless, I believe that the killer application is the management of transactions among businesses. One example is the management of supply chains and logistics. Blockchain Traceability and compliance in electronic devices Let's consider the problem of assuring compliance and traceability in the electronics industry. The manufacturers need to prove that they do not use material that comes from lands where there are conflicts like a civil war. Besides, they need to show that they use material environmentally friendly (e.g., no lead). However, this is only one side of the coin. There are many applications where  traceability   is crucial to a business, such as in medical ...

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA sets out how it intends to apply financial market legislation in handling inquiries from ICO organizers. Here you find the link to the press communication and the to the guidelines. This guideline is a step forward in Switzerland and I am sure it will drive the development of this market.

We are glad to announce that the German business website is now up and running. In addition, to promote our activities and services in Switzerland, we are using Google services to their full extent (e.g. blogger, Google My Business, Google Adwords, Google analytics and Google search Console).