PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

Companies are investing millions of dollars in research for the next generation of autonomous cars. Mobileye has developed an interesting approach to guarantee the safety once we will use such cars in the future. This approach is interesting because they assume that in the real world you cannot prevent an accident to happen, but what you can do is to prevent that the autonomous car will cause one.

pixabay.com We are aware of the general definition of IoT and what does it mean for consumer products like fit trackers. In manufacturing, connected devices that collect data through sensors are part of an ecosystem called Industrial IoT. As usual, this ecosystem is made by endpoints, a communications infrastructure, and an IIoT platform. One of the problems for such an ecosystem is the assurance of the compatibility among the components that form the system. Another problem is the selection of the IIoT platform. Such a platform provides a set of software capabilities with the following functions: Device Management Data Management Analytics Security Integration with other systems and services Application management There are platforms that can be installed on the premises or that are available as a service: SAP Leonardo IoT Oracle IoT PTC ThingWorx IBM Watson Microsoft Azure Siemens Mindsphere The business and technical requirements should lead t...

Source Pixabay Digital transformation is the change in business management with the support of digital technologies. One of the consequences of this change is the removing of paper-based processes, another is the re-design of the value chain. Approaching the digital transformation means embracing a journey that is made by several steps, for example: Understanding and documenting the requirements; Processes mapping; Defining the To-Be status; Evaluating solutions and trends available in the market; Making the architectural choices, e.g., on premises, XaaS, or hybrid; Planning and executing the changes.  Main risks and issues are, for example: Support from sponsors and key stakeholders; Performance of the new system; Change management, therefore, the user's adoption.  To manage and reduce the risk linked to the last point, an important step in the digital journey is the design of the user experience  through a user-centric approach. Design think...

Microsoft Solution for chocolate Nestle Supply chain management and traceability are pain points in today global business. These problems affect almost all the industries, like electronic devices, med tech, pharma, and food. I have been attending the meeting organized by the Microsoft blockchain meet-up in Zurich. They have presented the use case that has been developed for Nestle in order to control the supply chain of their chocolate. An interesting point to see is how multiple technologies (e.g., the blockchain, IoT, cloud, communication) concurred in solving the problem. This solution delivers several benefits, for example, limited operating costs, good scalability, and high security. Cloud Security Alliance has released a white paper about the architecture of  IoT solutions with the blockchain technology. I believe that can be applied to such use cases.

Bitcoin has been the start of a revolution in the digital age. The coin was made because of the failures in the bank system (e.g., financial crisis in the past 10 years). The systems were designed to be free from intermediaries (e.g., the banks, the exchanges). Is it still the case? If you want to start playing in such market you need to utilize exchange platforms, in many cases ruled by individuals or companies that are located in fiscal heavens. As an alternative, if you have already your wallet, you might use one of the exchanging machines (e.g., SBB ticket machines). In both cases, you will be charged a fee, for example, SBB originally charged 6% . Hence, the answer to the question is not:  you need an intermediary . Most of the exchange platforms are not secure, meaning that you should check their reputation first, and you should not hold your wallet, nor your private key, online. In fact, there have been many cases of security accidents . At the end of 2017, we have se...

The recent issues with Facebook and Twitter highlight that building a strong cyber resilience management system is not easy. We have seen that such system involves both technical aspects and as well as human behaviors. The scope of this article is to provide a short overview of cyber resilience management in private organizations and public offices. Let's take a step back and start with the basics. Definition Some years ago, we could have thought about cybersecurity like something related to preventing unwanted accesses to information within the fence of a company. Hence, prevent not authorized people to access company information system has been historically a “job” for the IT personnel. In today world the situation is more complicated. Think about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), or the possibility to cooperates with partners and suppliers. The borders are so extended that the decision makers should not ask the question "if" an accident may happen but ...

The 25th of May is an important day for all individuals living in Europe. The new law for data protection will enter in force therefore companies holding personal data are running to align their systems with the new law. Below there is a video posted that introduce this law.

    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). 

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies fall quite rapidly, as reported by the BBC . It happened only few weeks ago that the price of the famous currency created by „Satoshi Nakamoto“ was quoted above 25000 USD. However, many countries are putting in place controls and new regulations to this phenomenon. For example, South Korea has prohibited the ICO (Initial Coin Offering). The drop of the cryptovalue is the consequence of being under the radar of many legislators. What is going on in Switzerland? At the moment the Swiss crypto city Zug is very active in the new market, however there is a interesting article about  companies that operate in Switzerland  in relation with the current legislation. It seems that they are not licensed by the FINMA. I do not find interesting the application of blockchain to cryptocurrencies, instead I think that this technology is interesting for other applications. In particular in supply chain for solving problems with goods traceabilit...

The picture above shows that currently many companies are working to introduce new products in the market. However, we all know that these devices will expand the boundary of our cyberspace . With the current competition: How many of these products will be tested to have an acceptable level of protection against cyber attacks?  On the other hand, how many consumers are aware about the risks? For example:  How many consumers change the default password ?  How many of these use a secure password?  Do they know that every device (e.g. Blu-ray player, TV set, camera monitor) is a potential target for a DDoS, or a potential zombie computer for a botnet ?  Being victim of a cyber attack is a problem for an individual and is costly for businesses. A manufacturing facility or a power plant can lose a lot of money (thousands if not millions of dollars a day) when their operations are compromised due to a vulnerability. It is important to establish a str...

This is very interesting, two giants are combining their effort to provide a solution for clinical decision based on digital solution (i.e. analytics). GE, Roche Enter Partnership to Develop Integrated Digital Diagnostics Platform to Improve Oncology and Critical Care Treatment: take a look at this  link  

How to get your ROHS, REACH or Conflict Minerals free certificate? Compliance certificate is one of the problem that Blockchain technology can solve. How much does it cost today to your company and how much will it cost using that technology? Take a look at this example.

Send money across the border: how much does it cost? How much does it take? Take a look at this video, it is happening now!!!! Blockchain and smart contracts are changing the way banks perform such transactions.