Untangled

In the nineteenth episode of Untangled we are talking to Fabrizio Rovati, SW Platforms & Cloud Director from STMicroelectronics, also just known as ST. ST and IOTA have been partners since summer 2019 and are especially focusing their mutual efforts around the realm of Internet of Things, also just known as IoT. ST is a big, global company with close to 50.000 employees worldwide, and is Europe’s biggest semi conductor company. In the interview with Fabrizio Rovati we most importantly talked about what exactly ST is doing as a company and how they are working with IOTA to enable a machine economy by merging the forces of IoT and distributed ledger technologies, such as IOTA’s Tangle. We also heard more about ST's sustainability approach for their products and policies alike as well as some good tips on how to get started with a microcontroller and how to download the X-CUBE-IOTA1 software.

As we heard in the Global Trade & Supply Chain episode of Untangled a few weeks back, supply chains are complex systems that currently lack transparency. Increasing supply chain transparency is a tricky task and exposing this transparency to consumers is even more difficult. But what if consumers could demand transparency? Today, consumers want to make informed choices about the products they purchase. Particularly in the food and fashion industry, provenance data can help consumers assess the authenticity and sustainability of their shopping. Public distributed ledgers, such as IOTA's Tangle, can help manufacturers open up supply chain data to their customers. Storing the data on distributed ledgers allows any customer to access it either from a dedicated app or with a simple web interface, without sharing any personal data. In the fashion industry, producing the garments can be a deadly task and more and more brands are seeking to showcase their sustainability. The food industry can be equally fatal, also on the consumer's end, for instance when allergen labels are incorrect. EVRYTHNG and Primority are two companies that are both addressing these issues and have both partnered up with IOTA to add an additional layer of digital trust for their customers. James Flynn and Dominique Guinard, both CTO's and co-founders in respectively Primority and EVRYTHNG, are sharing insights from their expert domains and telling more about how they are working with IOTA and the Tangle.

In the third episode of the second season of Untangled we are back in the realm of futuristic mobility solutions. EDAG is a German company operating on a global scale with offices all around the world and one of the world's largest independent development partners to the automotive industry. Now EDAG and IOTA are cooperating on two solutions to solve current problems of mobility in the cityscape. The EDAG Citybot is an autonomous car that can drive around controlled enviroments and through its modularity concept take on different tasks such as taxi service, package delivery, garbage management or even gardening work.  The Citybot comes with an entire ecosystem surrounding it and IOTA is also a stakeholder in this project.   Together with d-fine, EDAG and IOTA have also cooperated on the trive.me Smart Parking App and developed a Proof of Concept where IOTA is being utilized as the transaction mechanism. Hear more about all of it in the latest episode of Untangled with the respective product owners from EDAG, Johannes Barckmann and Alexander Süssemilch.

5% of the global GDP is at stake, but regulatory and procedural challenges remain. Global Trade & Supply Chain is expected to be go through monumental changes due to distributed ledger technologies and other emerging technologies. But it is not an overnight operation to unlock the full potential of the ledger. Emmanuelle Ganne, Senior Analyst and Blockchain Lead at the WTO Economic Research Department, Pashupati Pandey, Senior Technical Officer at Complicance and Facilitation in the WCO, and Jens Munch, Head of Global Trade & Supply Chain in the IOTA Foundation all share their insights about what it takes to successfully implement distributed ledger technologies under global trade frameworks.

Automotive and mobility are among the sectors predicted to undergo the most drastic changes throughout the next decade due to IoT and digitalization with Mobility-as-a-Service growing, vehicles becoming their own autonomous agents, and ever-increasing amounts of data being collected and shared between vehicles and other parts of the infrastructure. The first episode of the second season shines a light on some of those changes, specifically the Smart Wallet developed by Jaguar Land Rover. Russell Vickers and Aaron Hetherington from Jaguar Land Rover's Software Engineering Centre will explain more about what a Smart Car Wallet is and Anne Smith, Head of Automotive & Mobility in the IOTA Foundation, and Martin Koers, Managing Director in the German Automotive Association (VDA) offer their perspectives on the current and upcoming situation for the whole industry with emerging technologies like distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) on the front seat of innovation.

In this episode of Untangled we are talking to Dan Simerman, the new Head of Financial Relations in the IOTA Foundation and Frank Zhou, founder & CEO of Zeux, a banking and payment app that recently partnered with IOTA. We talked about why tokens are part of distributed ledger technologies, the future use of cryptocurrencies and what it will take for cryptocurrencies to reach mainstream adoption.

In the thirteenth episode of Untangled we are exploring a use case of platooning. Jonas Brügmann, Nicolas Ruhland and Matthias Babel from the Fraunhofer Blockchain Lab of the Bayreuth University has developed a business model for vehicles to organise themselves in a platoon. Only the leader of the platoon will be controlled by a person, while the rest of the vehicles are driving autonomously. By using the Tangle, the platoon leader can get compensated in real-time for the leading efforts. Listen to the episode here to learn more.

The twelfth episode of Untangled is exploring how we can restore the quickly disappearing forests of the planet and how we can build new sustainable systems to provide a good life for both animals, plants and people. Willie Smits from the Masarang Foundation in Indonesia is talking about his efforts to rebuild the rainforest on Borneo after it was devastated by the palm oil industry. And Jan-Peter Doomernik, Enexis, and Sam Butler are giving insights on how to create new and out-of-the-box ecosystems from the Odyssey Hackathon that we visited for the last episode of Untangled.

In the eleventh episode of Untangled we are visiting the world’s biggest blockchain and artificial intelligence hackathon Odyssey, which is the peak of the year for the organisers from Dutchchain, an open innovation program. To hear more about the event, we interviewed the founder himself, Rutger van Zuidam. And to hear more about why the Dutch government takes part in a hackathon and how the development of digital identities is moving ahead, we also interviewed Wouter Welling from the Dutch Interior Ministry. Out of the 99 teams present, 8 of them were using IOTA technology to power their solutions in attempts to solve complex real world problems dictated by a multitude of companies, organisations and ministries. We talked to a couple of them, including Jelle Millenaar from VX Company and Andre Fialho and David Hawig from Untangled Care that were also on the second episode of Untangled, but this time with a different project.

For the tenth episode of Untangled, we went to the Hannover Messe in Germany. Out of the more than 6000 exhibitors at the industrial trade fair, several of them were using IOTA as their underlying data processing structure. To hear more about it all, we talked to Thorsten Kroke, General Manager at the product standardization consortium, eCl@ss, and Jörg Nagel, Director of Technology and Operation at Neoception. We also talked to Director of Partnerships in the IOTA Foundation, Holger Köther, about the different use cases and the future of IoT.

The ninth episode of Untangled is the second of two about the concept of Smart Cities and energy distribution's upcoming transition. This episode focuses specifically on consumer centric solutions and how better sharing of knowledge and failures must be established to succeed with the goal. The guests on the episode are the same as the previous one: André Bryde Alnor, Market Developer at Energinet's Digitalization Department, Danish operator of energy infrastructure and Patrick Driscoll, Project Developer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and Technical Manager of the EU-funded Smart City project, +CityxChange plus Wilfried Pimenta, Business Development Manager in the IOTA Foundation.

In the eighth episode of Untangled we are digging into the substantial topic of Smart Cities with a specific focus on the energy sector and the immense challenges residing therein. To uncover what the cities of the near future will be like to live in and how they will be shaped, we are talking to André Bryde Alnor, Market Developer at Energinet's Digitalization Department, Danish operator of energy infrastructure and Patrick Driscoll, Project Developer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and Technical Manager of the EU-funded Smart City project, +CityxChange. We are also talking to our very own Business Development Manager, Wilfried Pimenta, about the roles of distributed ledger technologies in the creation of Smart Cities and in the existing and upcoming version of the energy sector. There is a lot of territory to cover within the realm of Smart Cities, so this will be a two-part-series, with the second part airing already next week with the same guests, but with a specific focus on citizen centric solutions within Smart Cities and energy distribution.

In the seventh episode of Untangled we are continuing in the realm of research and are talking to the IOTA Foundation's new Director of Research, Moody Alam, and one of the IOTA originals and author of the IOTA Whitepaper, Serguei Popov. They are giving an overview of what the Research Department was and is, and an introduction to the IOTA Research Council. They also have some words and numbers to share about the progress of their top priority, Coordicide.

For the sixth episode of Untangled we went to Barcelona to follow the IOTA Foundation Research Summit 2019. The entire Research Department was for the first time ever all gathered in the same place and many fruitful discussions, ideas and possible solutions came out of it. The two main topics at ReSum were Coordicide and Attack Analysis, which Alon Gal, Research Scientist on the Coordicide Team, and Bartosz Kuśmierz, Research Scientist on the Attack Analysis Team, will discuss on this episode of Untangled. Besides these two technical topics, Alon and Bartosz are also sharing their impressions on the experience of ReSum, the value of teamwork in the scientific field of work and the process of researching uncharted waters.

In the fifth episode of Untangled we are exploring how to combine hardware sensors with the Tangle. We are talking to Daniel De Michele, founder of XDK2MAM, about their grant winning project and the future need for more code writers. We are also talking to IOTA Ecosystem Director, Lewis Freiberg, on why the IOTA Foundation does not produce hardware, how the Foundation supports those who do and what it takes to get a grant from the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund.

In the fourth episode of Untangled we are exploring the domains of indoor mapping and localisation. Mapping and localisation has reached incredible levels of accuracy over the years, but indoor mapping is lacking far behind. To find out why that is and how it can be improved through the use of distributed ledger technologies we are talking to Georgios Pipelidis, co-founder of NavIndo, a Munich-based start-up dedicated to indoor mapping and localisation. We are also speaking to Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Director of USC Viterbi Center for Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things and Engineering Professor.

In the third episode of Untangled we are exploring how distributed ledger technologies are and will be playing a role in the fourth industrial revolution and how they are part of creating completely new business models within industrial manufacturing and Industry 4.0. We are speaking to Simon Jegelka, Managing Director in the German flood protection start-up topocare, and to Daniel Trauth, Leader of the Industrial IOTA Lab Aachen and Chief Engineer and Department Head at the Laboratory for Machine Tools and Production Engineering of RWTH Aachen University. Both of them have received grants from the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund in their efforts to improve industrial business models by using distributed ledger technologies.

In the second episode of Untangled we are examining the current challenges in the health care sector and exploring how the Tangle and distributed ledger technologies can ease the upcoming paradigm shift of truly digitalising health care. We are speaking to co-founders Andre Fialho and David Hawig from the health care start-up, PACT Care; Jakob Uffelmann, Director of Innovation at sundhed.dk, the public Danish health care portal, and Navin Ramachandran, eHealth Lead in the IOTA Foundation. They all offer their different perspectives about this universally evolving sector.