Inside Innovation: Skylo Hackathon yields clever (and useful) IoT applications
It’s true that Skylo has rewritten the economics of Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity through narrowband satellite communications. We are also driven to do more—creatively. To prove that narrowband data connectivity isn’t just for classic applications such as location services and temperature monitoring, we recently hosted our inaugural Skylo Hackathon, with impressive results.
Building the new applications proved to be pretty simple, as well. Using Skylo’s drag-and-drop development tool, non-technical users were able to easily build and customize their IoT apps quickly; our graphical interface brings together an entire ecosystem of IoT components to streamline development and unleash creativity.
The winners are … Almost a dozen teams signed up for the hackathon. It was difficult to choose three winners from such an impressive field, but we managed. The Hackathon winners are:
First prize: The winning team used Skylo to stake out our parking lot with smart IoT surveillance. Traditional video surveillance is continuous, racking up significant transmission and storage fees. Smart IoT surveillance with Skylo detects objects as they enter into the monitored area and then generates a live report, transmitting short bursts of information over the narrowband satellite network—saving untold costs compared to live feeds and never-ending video storage. Surveillance and processing was all done at the edge. Using an inexpensive 1080P security camera connected to a local processing unit running machine learning algorithms, the winning solution was able to detect and classify all of the objects in our parking lot, including my bicycle when I rolled up, and generate live reports of how many cars and people were present in the lot throughout the day. Image processing is a natural fit for high-bandwidth 5G wireless systems, and image classification unlocks extraordinary value in IoT. Use cases range from security (object detection), energy (deployment of safety measures) and agriculture (drone surveillance crop health) are just a few of the novel applications now possible with narrowband IoT solutions. This kind of edge-first computing will not only improve the efficiency and profitability of businesses, but it will also help to better the lives of consumers around the world.
