In this installment of the Cutting Edge, I’m going to suggest a big picture hypothesis for why edge computing will matter for businesses in the future while attempting to avoid hyperbolizing the possibilities that often are the outcome of such exercises. Hopefully, I can get your creative juices flowing with some inspirational perspectives on edge computing and how it can help you rethink process automation and operations optimization.
Continue readingIndustry Insight: The State of Smart Transportation
Smart transportation is closely tied with smart city initiatives. What happens when vehicle travels from a smart city to one that might not be so smart? Will autonomous vehicles bridge the intelligent transportation divide, or will autonomous vehicles rely on a smart infrastructure to support functions critical to improving public safety, traffic efficiency, and sustainability?
neXt Curve is joined by Bill Pugh, co-founder and managing partner of Smart Connections Consulting LLC to explore the following topics:
- Why does transportation need to be smarter? – Bill and Leonard discuss the motivations and the objectives that the auto industries and municipalities have for smart transportation. What is the carrot that is getting parties excited, or is the carrot not big enough to bring about the digital transformation we have all been expecting in some form?
- What are the challenges facing smart transportation? – Smart transportation has taken a patently vehicle-centric focus as of late with excitement about self-driving cars that will function as robotaxi’s that will chauffeur us around. But progress for smart transportation solutions that could benefit the broader driving community have been nothing short of stagnant with only a few pilot project of any notice. What are the persistent challenges that get in the way of the smart future of transportation?
- What kind of mindset change is need to make progress? – Do we have the right attitude about smart transportation? Could it be that we don’t think broadly enough about the benefits of modernizing our transportation system and how we will make that modernization happen?
- What can the tech and “IoT” industry do to deliver the promise? – Bill and Leonard brainstorm what the tech community and industry can do to make IoT a thing for transportation. We discuss the approaches that can be considered to get investments and commitments to stick given short-term political and administrative agendas of our cities, counties, states, an dour nation.

Our reThink Media Center features the YouTube video podcast of this episode.
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Realizing IoT Project Success
Technology Insight: NEOM
What if technology could not just make cities “smarter” but help us entirely reimagine the idea of a city of the future? NEOM is a visionary giga project that aspires to apply the most advanced in current and emerging technologies to realize a bold urban development concept called THE LINE, the revolutionary infrastructure concept that will bring about the world’s first “cognitive city”.
Continue readingIndustry Insight: Who Will Win 5G Gold?
Telco operators have great expectations of 5G and the industry hype mill has set very high bar for the value that 5G technologies and new market possibilities will bring to the communications sector. Is this excitement justified given the rapidly shifting ICT landscape? We are witnessing a dramatic change in the face of competitors and partners as new entrants into the communications service provider (CSP) space change the OTT dynamic and introduce a new breed of UTB (Under the Bottom) threat to traditional telco operators. Who will win 5G gold?
Continue readingIndustry Insight: Jio Platforms and Facebook Driving Digital India
Facebook’s recent investment and partnership with Jio Platforms was met with a great deal of media and industry excitement. This move was widely touted as a coming of age of Digital India. The largest US tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft are looking to expand their global fortunes in the new digital economic frontier that is India with its 1.32 billion large consumer market. What is really at stake here and what does it mean in the broader context of India’s economic digitization?
Continue readingIndustry Insight: COVID-19 Tests China’s Resiliency
We have come a long way in a short time since COVID-19 emerged from Wuhan, China late last year. The virus has stealthily yet rapidly evolved from a provincial epidemic to a pandemic that is suffocating the largest and the smallest of economies around the globe.
Continue readingIntegrated Tools for the Hybrid Operation of the Evolving 5G Infrastructure
The evolution of 5G infrastructure will not be homogenous. Operators will be deploying islands of 5G across a sea of 4G and 3G. They will be faced with the challenges of developing, deploying and managing services across hybrid infrastructures that will be comprised of a fragmented mix of the old and the new. In order to accelerate returns on 5G investments operators will need a common, integrated toolchain that allows service providers to scale operations and services across a mixed portfolio of technologies and operating environments.
Continue reading5G: The Carrier-Grade Digital Infrastructure for the Software-Defined Factory of the Future
With the advent of 5G there has been growing interest in what the next-generation mobile network technology means for industry. Operators and industrial OT (Operational Technology) players have been investigating the use cases and potential value that the 5G promises and technology can bring to manufacturing, supply chain and the factory of the future. It is commonly known and expected that 5G will bring about massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC), Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), but what do these use cases mean for manufacturers? Are these really the 5G promises that matter for the smart factory and the ongoing evolution of Industry 4.0?
Continue readingHybrid Approaches to AI for Realizing Intelligent Networks in the 5G Era
You can’t blame technology vendors and service providers for pushing the limits of marketing hype with Artificial Intelligence (AI). After all, it is hottest buzzword since cloud computing. But digital service providers in the emerging era of 5G need practical, real “AI” solutions to cost-efficiently scale their operations and deliver the quality of service that will deliver the promise of 5G to themselves as well as their customers. Hybrid approaches to AI are needed to accelerate return on investment as operators evolve their infrastructure and operations for a 5G future.
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