Wiliot Voted "Best Innovation" at CableLabs Innovation Showcase

Placing bets on emerging technologies is tough. You do the analysis, you make a decision and commit based on your belief that a company is going to be disruptive, that it could change the industry and help your business.

That commitment may be your time, your money, your reputation or political capital. That's why we here at Wiliot are grateful that so many of you have placed a bet on what we are doing.

When you make such a commitment it’s gratifying to see when others validate that decision. It’s in that spirit that we share the news that Wiliot was voted ‘best innovation’ by the audience of executives attending the annual CableLabs Summer Conference In Keystone Colorado, a meeting of leaders of cable companies from around the world, with speakers such as Michael Powell the ex-Chairman of the FCC.

Wiliot had strong competition from the seven other finalists in the UpRamp Innovation Showcase which spotlights promising technology companies with offerings relevant to some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. Congratulations to Aporeto, Aurora Insight, Hippo Health, Immersion Neuroscience, Misty Robotics, Nodin, and Platina Systems.

Our presentation was short. You can watch it below. Our value proposition:

1. Wiliot can help field organizations improve operational efficiencies with Real-Time Inventory (RTI) of parts. Tracking and tracing without requiring field engineers to tap or scan
2. A better customer experience can be delivered by using customer equipment with Wiliot tags embedded, using auto-identification to assist in installation and troubleshooting and with smart sensing to preemptively detect faults
3. That Wiliot can open up revenue opportunities with new services such as the Internet of Finding Things, a carrier-class lost and found service using the many apps and devices that carriers have.

The ideas were relevant to the communications companies in the audience and may be relevant to you too. Have a look and see what you think.

Thanks for your support. This was our pitch...

The final one-minute pitch-off and vote

Video Transcription

Let's have some fun. Let's use our imagination and pretend that we've all been given a superpower. It's the ability to see radio waves. So look around you. What do you see, there's a rainbow of colors coming from your phones from earbuds smartwatches. From the Wi Fi access points, televisions, even light fixtures are now being deployed with Bluetooth radios. So we're surrounded by this sea of energy, that just that is just waiting for someone to tap into it. And that's what Wiliot is doing. And think of it as a Bluetooth superpower that we're using to change and disrupt the way things are made, the way they're distributed, the way they're sold, the way they used, and also the way they're recycled.

So Wiliot is a semiconductor company. And we've made a technology breakthrough by creating the world's first sticker sized post postage stamp format computer with your cause the powers itself by harvesting the radio frequency energy that surrounds us, and broadcasting a standard Bluetooth Low Energy packet that any BLE device can read. We're very fortunate. And we're backed by some amazing investors, Qualcomm and Samsung, Amazon and Alibaba. Avery, Dennison, and Merck. So what does this mean for you all in the cable industry? Well, we think of it as a new kind of triple play, the ability to add efficiency to your field operations to create a better customer experience at times when things get stressful at home. And also an opportunity to drive more revenue. With a new kind of service, which we're seeing one of our early adopters already deploying. What we're doing is we are reinventing this.

So this is one of the first battery free Bluetooth beacons that was deployed by Qualcomm and all of the Apple stores and it triggered the Welcome to the Apple Store messages you crossed the threshold rather than when you drove into the into the car park. So let me let me here, pull the curtain back. And let me describe to you a little bit about how the technology works. And then we'll go back to these applications that are relevant to the cable industry. So the way the tags work is they can harvest any kind of Bluetooth, Wi Fi, cellular, or even sub other sub gigahertz radio signals. Whatever comes in, the same thing comes out a standard Bluetooth low energy, non connectable advertising packet. What does that mean? It means that you don't have to worry about pairing, so long as you have a smartphone, a Wi Fi access point that has a Bluetooth radio in which most of them do now, even smart speakers and those lighting fixtures, they pick up these signals, and they then relay them to the cloud, where they're decrypted, so that you retain control over privacy and who sees the tags that are flowing through your network.

In addition to all of that these sticker size, Bluetooth tags do sensing so they can sense temperature, they can even sense when a product they're attached to is being picked up from a shelf, they can sense whether a package is being opened. And there's a host of other things that they're doing too. So let's actually see some of this in action. What I'm holding here is one of the world's first battery free Bluetooth tags. And it's harvesting energy right now from the environment around us. It's basically transmitting the same thing as what this much larger battery powered device is, is transmitting. And so if we can switch over to the ELMO device, you'll see a another tag that's doing the same thing. It's broadcasting to that gateway that's nearby. You can see the scale from the penny. All that's going up to the cloud where it's being decrypted. And then you can see on the dashboard, every time a packet is received, you'll see a on The screen there, which puts it up in into the cloud and makes it available to any application that you want to develop. So will like this biracial child from a Bluetooth farther and an RFID mother. So we benefit from a lot of the advantages that Bluetooth has, which is this very low cost, ubiquitous infrastructure, we all carry a reader with us. But the problem with Bluetooth is the tags tend to be expensive. RFID on the other hand, the tags are super cheap, the last 20 years, the mass production techniques are amazing. And because we've reduced everything onto a single chip with a crystal Free Radio, which is a major breakthrough, then we can run our chips through the same machines that are used to create RFID tags. And so we enjoy the connectivity of Bluetooth, with the low cost of production of RFID.

So let's go back to those three applications and talk about what you can actually do this technology. One of the areas where we're receiving some of the most interest is from companies with large field organizations, with 1000s of staff, vehicles, and even millions of parts and products that need to be tracked, losing track of them cost money and impact service. And the great thing about these Bluetooth tags is because they're constantly broadcasting in real time, you can have low cost gateways that are constantly reading them, we call this continuous inventory. And so by eliminating the last part, we have the opportunity to save money and improve service. Let's use our imaginations again. And let's pretend that we just got given a brand new luxury car, this is a Oprah moment. What is it that is so fantastic about this car? Well, one of the things is, it's the attention to detail that a really well crafted product has, it's those little touches that are designed to eliminate frustration, and hassle. So by tagging the equipment that goes to your subscribers, we can capture some of that ease of use at a time that's most stressful. These parts can identify themselves. And that can be very useful for when customers are doing self install. And when they when they need help.

We're actually working with a cable lab member now to go beyond that and actually use the sensing capabilities of the tags to preemptively diagnose potential problems to make that installation experience even smoother. So here's a scenario that doesn't require any imagination. Think back though to the last time you lost something, keys, wallet, a jacket, pets, small children. It's something that impacts us all. And what we are seeing is a new class of service, which again, another cable labs member is already deploying. And this is something they call the Internet of finding things. So you all have radios all over the place, you have customers with apps, all of these can be listening for these tags. So imagine a carrier class tile service that can offer services, with tags on key rings, even a Bluetooth postage stamp on parcels to give the Uber experience to track their arrival when a customer's expecting a high value package. So this is an opportunity to create additional value to drive additional revenue from the infrastructure that you already have. So the opportunities are huge.

We would love to work with you on how to upgrade your asset tracking to get it to state of the art world class continuous inventory to improve the customer experience with tagging of the assets that are on in your on your customers sites, and to explore adding this internet of finding things idea to the portfolio of services that you offer so that cable can be a real problem solver. So we're really excited to be here. It's a real honor. It's a real privilege. We'd love you to come and visit us in tech stadium. And so we can imagine together how battery free Bluetooth can be an innovation that can help to to enhance your business as well thank you very much