The sixth MWC Shanghai will open from June 28th ~ July 1st, 2017 with the theme of THE HUMAN ELEMENT. ARM will showcase how leading brands in China and across the Asia Pacific region are spearheading IoT innovation and commercial IoT devices at the event.

ARM executives, including Michael Horne, deputy GM and VP of Marketing and Sales for IoT, will be available in person to discuss this momentum of exciting products at MWC Shanghai 2017.

Much has been discussed around the potential of IoT in shaping sectors around smart cities, energy management, industry 4.0 through operational efficiency but as part of the industry showcase, MWC Shanghai marks the time when we can start seeing how commercially available IoT devices are bringing the human element in the centre of our experiences with brands. Three key trends stand out:

1. Secure voice-enabled AI in the home
2. Acceleration for applications driving personalised experiences in retail  
3. Certified stacks are ready for products where experiences depend on connectivity

Secure voice-enabled AI in the home

The quest for new and unique customer touch-points has been the holy grail for consumer goods companies since the dawn of e-commerce. IoT allows brands to move to fulfilling consumer needs in real time, or even in a pro-active manner by anticipating customer needs or wishes . However, customer satisfaction doesn’t necessarily come with bombarding potential goods and services to a consumer’s needs and hence with mobile, digital commerce trends have looked for moments that shape ‘commerce as conversation’.

One of the most exciting opportunities enabled by IoT is offering these moments through intelligence and particularly voice-enabled AI in the home, where such conversations are most prevalent.

47% of all voice-AI capable devices by 2021 are expected to be in Asia Pacific (Ovum, 2017).

The trick is in identifying this opportunity, and what is needed to make it successful, early. Leading brands such as Baidu and RDA are forming a strong ecosystem of devices that offer consumers peace of mind with robust security and connectivity while still being able to differentiate on affordability and functionality.

Meet DuerOS, championing Chinese voice AI-capable device ecosystem in the home:

IoT enabled devices using mbed OS 5, Baidu’s DuerOS ecosystem offer one-stop intelligent voice interaction solutions that take advantage of the most efficient compute processing, built-for-IoT security features and quicker time to market.

“By leveraging the robust connectivity and security features of ARM mbed IoT Device Platform in Baidu’s DuerOS product, Baidu will be able to provide smart home AI devices to millions of households by the end of 2017.”

- Xingfei Ge, Deputy General Manager, Baidu Duer Business Unit

“Our ARM mbed OS compatible RDA 5981 WiFi MCU platform supports OEMs to shorten the time to market requirements for IoT device development and manufacturing. By providing a rich set of expansion interfaces, RDA 5981 finds popularity among OEMs in the fast growing applications such as smart buildings and consumer electronics. We anticipate shipping 20 million pcs over the next year.”  

- Shuran Wei, CEO of RDA Microelectronics

Transforming retail experiences

Since the advent of e-commerce, retail growth has become closely linked with how consumers can access goods and services with increasing convenience. Today, our most trusted interactions are delivered through smartphones and mobile devices. To drive meaningful and more satisfying interactions, the growth of IoT Beacons is offering new opportunities to retail.

IoT Beacons are expected to grow at over 24% year over year, capturing a sizeable share of the global retail IoT market that is expected to grow to USD 94.44 billion by 2025 (Grand View Research, 2017).

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is expected to enable the fastest growth in retail:

Driven by beacon technology for pre-tailing, payments, and post-payments operations, the stage for lots of applications driven on BLE beacons is set.

Developers can capitalize on this growth by taking advantage of the robust BLE support in ARM mbed OS 5, and ARM mbed for Eddystone released by Google.

“By utilizing ARM mbed IoT Device Platform, Minewtech has been able to rapidly develop BLE beacons targeting smart retail applications. The expected commercial deployment from Minewtech over the next 12 months is over 100,000 mbed BLE beacon devices to be deployed globally.”

- Dragon Long, Co-Founder and Vice President of Minewtech  

“By utilizing ARM mbed IoT Device Platform, Thundersoft, an ARM mbed partner since 2014, has developed IoT applications for healthcare, building automation, logistics and retail monitoring, targeting an estimated $80 billion total market size. Thundersoft has deep embedded system integration expertise combined with ARM mbed’s rich IoT technology features brings much value to our customers.”

- Larry Geng, CEO of Thundersoft

Creating new experiences with connectivity innovation

Pace is key to capturing the opportunity in high growth markets for IoT. Products that are based on interoperable, open standards based, certified and supported connectivity stacks can reduce time to market significant for components and end products. Whichever market you want to aim for, the journey to production devices is made easier with two critical elements:

• Latest certified stacks for connectivity – like, the certified mbed OS Thread 1.1 specification which eases device certification, and
  
• Ease of using the same application between devices using different connectivity through a choice of supported platforms and modules.
  

This is allowing visionary companies building on ARM mbed OS 5 to rapidly create new IoT solutions that transform the human experience in more markets in exciting ways.

Multi-vendor choice for the connected device ecosystem:

Choice spanning modules, 85+ supported silicon platforms and interoperable components are all key to getting end-products quickly to market. These have huge potential to extend the human experience beyond home and retail.

“HUAWEI OceanConnect and ARM mbed OS are working together to build an edge-cloud collaboration platform. We are committed to the openness and standards to accelerate innovation in IoT systems. HUAWEI is focus on connected car, smart city, smart home, utilities and other fields to promote technology and business prosperity. Expected in 2020, HUAWEI, ARM and third party partners will join forces to build ten million of connections and more than $1 billion in total market size.”

- Jin Guo, OceanConnect IoT Platform Director, HUAWEI

Interested in keeping in touch with the latest commercial IoT devices? Find out more about the latest ARM mbed OS 5.5 and join the wave of successful IoT devices commercially available. Follow @ARMmbed or via the hashtag #ARMmbed on Twitter.

Bee Hayes-Thakore is director of marketing programs for IoT at ARM.