60 | AutoPartsAsia | FEBRUARY 2018airports. Ola and Uber operators
can utilize such data in planning
their routes for pickup and drop-off.”Manufacturing In India
Among its various new ventures,
the company has started working
with different types of kiosk
manufacturers in the US. These are
deployed at different locations for
various purposes. Some are mobile
charging stations for phones,
some for gaming equipment.
Acknowledging the “Make in India”
initiative, NetObjex has plans to
manufacture some hardware in
India.
“We have brought some hardware
to India for mobile phone charging
kiosks; now we are trying to
manufacture them here because
it is less expensive than shipping
and paying customs duties etc. Weare talking to a few companies for
partnership,” Bala said.He said the process is under
way. NetObjex has its Indian
headquarters in Thane,
Maharashtra. Answering a question
on how soon this would happen, he
said, “We are doing it now. We have
brought it to our office in Thane a
month ago. We are in the process
of reaching out to public locations
with high traffic (malls, airports
etc) to supply our mobile phone
charging kiosks. These kiosks are
state-of-the-art IoT devices with
finger print recognition that can be
locked while your phone is getting
charged, so that you don’t have
to hover over your device while
charging for the fear of it being
stolen. We have also included an
advertisement model – in exchange
for charging your device, you will
be asked to participate in a surveyand/or watch an advertisement.
The data collected in the process
is monetizable, while it’s still free to
the consumer. The ad campaigns
will be run by the vendors wherever
this is located or even national
campaigns; the idea is to exchange
data for charge. This is one of the
things we are trying to bring into
the Indian market – an interesting
product, easy to understand.”
In order to illustrate further this
point, Bala spoke of a prospective
client in India who supplies
heavy machinery tools to several
companies. When a machine
breaks down, it can significantly
reduce labour efficiency as workers
remain idle for short periods. This
impacts revenues and bottom-
lines of those organisations; the
longer the equipment is down for
a week the greater the impact. A
combination of IoT and Blockchain
can help prevent such
occurrences.
“In IoT, there
is a concept
called Preventive
Maintenance.
In machines the
temperature could
go up, if the oil level
is low or because of
vibrations. You can
gauge the temperature
or vibration by using
sensors that collect
data in real time and
transmit them to
the cloud where our
platform runs. We have
edge-devices that
compute all these.”FOCUS