Waste-to-hydrogen plant planned for Suez greenfield site

Waste-to-hydrogen plant

The facility in East Port Said will produce clean hydrogen to power Egypt’s domestic energy transition and enable it to become an exporter of hydrogen and a major player in the hydrogen economy. The General Authority for Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with H2-Industries to build a waste-to-hydrogen facility at a new greenfield site in East Port Said. The project has an estimated cost of US$4bn. Yehia Zaki, SCZone’s chairman, explained that MoU is not mandatory until H2-Industries finish all the feasibility studies…

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Mitsubishi Electric to Launch New Industrial Robotics System in 2023

Mitsubishi Electric Robotics System

Mitsubishi Electric Corp. has unveiled a system that enables robots to perform industrial tasks in environments they have had difficulty working in before, such as food-processing plants. In these settings, items change frequently and thus humans are faster in sorting and arrangement. Now, Mitsubishi has introduced a robotics system to work as fast as humans – and that can be instructed using voice commands. The new system incorporates Mitsubishi Electric’s Maisart AI technologies – including high-precision speech recognition – to initiate work tasks and then operators can fine-tune robot movements…

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Five-minute charge electric car batteries developed

StoreDot battery

Israeli company StoreDot claims to have developed a five-minute charge lithium-ion battery which could eliminate range and charging anxiety for electric vehicle (EV) users and accelerate adoption. The company, a specialist in extreme fast charging (XFC) battery technology, is releasing the first production batch of sample cells, which can offer ultra-fast charging to a number of other industries, such as commercial drones and consumer electronics. Overcoming major issues The first-generation engineering samples demonstrate to EV OEMs and battery manufacturers the successful replacement of graphite in the cell’s anode using metalloid…

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Smart factory market to cross US$155 bn by 2025

U.S. smart factory market, by application, 2018 & 2025

Global Smart Factory Market is set to grow from its current market value of more than $75 billion (€66 billion) to over $155 billion (€138 billion) by 2025; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. The smart factory market is driven by the growing demand for intelligent industrial solutions that organise output and save huge labour & operational costs. These factories are digitally advanced & connected facilities that enhance the manufacturing performance along with replacing human workers in a variety of operations. Several technologies including IoT,…

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5 Benefits of Commercial IoT and Automation

Commercial IoT and Automation

Some of the current applications of the Internet of Things feel more trivial than others. Humans have been outrunning each other for a hundred thousand years without the aid of internet-connected sneakers, for instance. And using telephones to close the blinds in our homes often feels like more, not less, work. But commercial IoT is a different beast. It’s distinct from consumer IoT and arrives with different challenges and a separate set of benefits and opportunities. Here’s a look at five of them. 1. Make Your Buildings More Efficient Optimizing…

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How the Internet of Things improves financial investments

IoT Finance

Can smart technology lead to smart investing? There is ample evidence that this is the case, says Marc Weisberg, managing principal for Soho Investment Partners, given the prominence and proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) over the past few years. While there were 15 billion connected devices in 2015, one estimate is that there could be as many as 20 billion by 2020. Sales of IoT devices, meanwhile, rose from $18 billion (€16 billion) in 2009 to $1.1 trillion (€0.97 trillion) by 2017. That figure will likely reach $1.7…

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World-leading smart factories identified by World Economic Forum

WEF Smart Factory

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released a list of what it says are nine of the world’s smartest factories when it comes to adopting industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies. These ‘lighthouse’ facilities, as they are called by the WEF, have been selected from an initial list of some 1,000 manufacturing companies, based on their successful implementation of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) thinking, in ways that have had proven financial and operational benefits. The aim of the WEF initiative is to build a network of such ‘lighthouses’ worldwide, in order to…

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Alibaba showcases vision of ‘retail store of the future’

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba shows off a new, IoT-enabled furniture store in Hangzhou and announces a new $15 billion R&D program. When it comes to online shopping in China, Alibaba Group is a colossus – but its founder Jack Ma reckons that the next big opportunity lies not in the online-only model, but in offering shoppers a blend of digital and bricks-and-mortar retail services. With that in mind, the company has been opening up physical stores at a feverish pace over the last two years, and spending some $8 billion…

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Dell takes a fresh look at IoT with Aerofarms

At Dell’s IQT event in New York this week, Andy Rhodes, vice president of IoT edge computing at Dell, was joined on stage by David Rosenberg, CEO and founder of AeroFarms, to discuss how a smart warehouse full of plants exemplifies a forward-thinking IoT strategy. ‘Disruptor’ is probably a term that’s thrown around too easily in the world of technology – but in the case of AeroFarms, it’s hard to argue with that description. The company is a specialist in what it calls ‘vertical farming‘, an emerging form of agriculture…

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The internet of things will disrupt manufacturing for ever, but are you ready?

Digitization is a major driving force of our time, turning our world inside out. Smart and connected systems are increasingly pervading all types of applications. The internet of things (IoT) is already starting to affect environments of all kinds – homes, cities, travel, logistics, retail and medicine, to name just a few – and it will not stop at our factory gates, either. According to a recent estimation by McKinsey, the potential economic impact of IoT applications in 2025 is between US$ 3.9 and $11.1 trillion, of which $1.2 to…

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IoT use cases in manufacturing: opportunities and context

If we look at IoT in manufacturing from an IoT use case perspective (the areas where IoT is leveraged within a practical usage context), we see that one use case is sticking out: manufacturing operations, which is also the largest use case across all industries globally (the only region where manacturing operations aren’t the first use case is EMEA where freight monitoring comes first). In 2016, manufacturing operations accounted for a total IoT spend of $102.5 billion (on the mentioned total of $178 billion), according to the same IDC 2017…

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Qualcomm says it is shipping more than one million chips per day for the IoT

Qualcomm Technologies has announced that it currently ships more than one million chips per day into a wide range of connected applications. The company is using its technical expertise to design platforms that help customers commercialize IoT products quickly and cost-effectively in areas including wearables, voice and music, connected cameras, robotics and drones, home control and automation, home entertainment, and commercial and industrial IoT, according to the press materials. Qualcomm Technologies has its grip in IoT spanning across various networks. For instance, the company’s wearables platforms have been adopted in…

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How the Internet of Things Can Boost ERP

The Internet of Things holds great promise for manufacturers, from within the four walls of the factory all the way through the supply chain. But amid the excitement around the increased connectivity of industrial products, it’s important that manufacturers do not overlook the significant impact the Internet of Things will have on their enterprise resource planning systems and the business processes they support. The core goal of an ERP system is to provide actionable data and information to company leaders. But collecting accurate data is an ongoing and vexing challenge.…

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Innovative zero-gravity arms recognised by construction company

Headquartered in Hong Kong, Gammon Construction is one of SE Asia’s leading construction companies, with an annual turnover of US$2.5bn, and is a keen adopter of new technology with a focus on adding value for its customers through innovative and sustainable solutions. With over 8000 employees, the engineering and construction company, like others in the Hong Kong construction industry, has long faced manpower shortages, together with an aging workforce. Consequently, in an effort to lure talented new workers and to reduce the workload of its employees, the company recently invested…

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How the Internet of Things is revolutionizing manufacturing

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing business models, increasing output, and automating processes across a number of industries. But no other sector has been more impacted by this technological revolution than manufacturing. Manufacturers across all areas —automotive, chemical, durable goods, electronics, etc. — have invested heavily in IoT devices, and they’re already reaping the benefits. Manufacturers utilizing IoT solutions in 2014 saw an average 28.5% increase in revenues between 2013 and 2014, according to a TATA Consultancy Survey. What is Smart Manufacturing? In short, smart manufacturing is the use…

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