The Lecturers and Students of School of Computer and Communication Engineering, UniMAP

I am honored to be invited as one of the Keynote Speaker and also a judge for UniMAP’s Final Year’s Projects (Individual and Group) that are focused on Internet of Things on May 29, 2017, at School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Pauh Putra Campus in Perlis. The School shortlisted and displayed 26 IoT showcases.

The presentation slides can be seen and download from HERE.

Below are my short comments and review regarding the overall displays.

1. The projects covered various application scenarios such as health, aquaculture, smart home, car security, hazardous environment, garbage, environmental, parking, transportation, security, LoRa, forest, smart mirror, etc.
2. The students are very innovative and creative in developing the solutions. They have thought through various usage scenarios in detail.
3. All the projects displayed are complete working prototypes. Even though there are some hiccups with the Internet/WiFi connectivity, the students have made an effort is showing their recorded videos. There is a group even show a detailed video how their car surveillance works with some “actors”.
4. The mockups are displayed in such detail which amazed me how much effort and thoughts have been put into the project. These mockups really help the overall project presentation. Seeing a demo with mockup is far better than posters on the wall. Mockups such as parking lot, supermarket, wearable shirt, train, house, aquaponic, automated roof cooling system, smart bin, smart pillbox, smart mirror and much more.
5. It’s surprising to see how interests in IoT manage to bring about the energy, effort, commitment, and self-learning to the students. Integrating sensors, microcontrollers, GSM modems, GPS, connecting to the cloud using IoT middleware, building backend web solution and mobile app development by a single student deserve a big applause.
6. IoT is all about solving a business problem and the students with the help of their UniMAP lecturers understand this quite well. Defining the right problem statement is key to start developing IoT.

Below are some points that can further improve future projects:

1. This year can be considered as Version 1.0 and thus new feature enhancement can be built for Version 2.0. It’s important to re-use or add new functionalities to the project rather than re-create new project topics. Let Version 1.0 project to continuously gathering the data. Keep the historical data.
2. Customer Validation – meet the actual customers, conduct a survey and ask for feedback. The customer might different view how to use the product. Nowadays, product development is agile using the Lean Startup method. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), show to the user, measure some parameters and learn from any mistakes – and quickly refine the product.
3. Help the students to learn the basics of Raspberry Pi, Arduino, IoT middleware and Big Data in the early stages of the course rather than asking them to learn by themselves. Embed these topics in the some of the subjects or Lab experiments. By doing this, it will help the student to quickly build the prototype much faster.

Congratulations to the students whom I believed will be the upcoming Generation-IoT. You are now ready to face the IoT World!

Generation-IoT of UniMAP

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOu9s7oGSLc&w=560&h=315]

About the Author

Dr. Mazlan Abbas is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of FAVORIOT Sdn Bhd. He is an IOT Evangelist and a Thought Leader. He received an award as 50 Most Impactful Smart Cities Leaders by World CSR 2017. He is ranked No. 20th Thought Leader in IOT by 2014 Onalytics Report – “The Internet of Things – Top 100 Thought Leaders”, ranked Top 10 in IoT Top 100 Influencers by Postscapes 2016/2017, ranked Top 100 in Smart Cities Top Experts by Agilience Authority Index May 2016. He is also a Global Vision Board Member. You can reach him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Check all his presentation slides HERE.

More Info about FAVORIOT – Click LIKE, SHARE, SUBSCRIBE and FOLLOW:

1. Facebook Page
2. Twitter
3. Instagram
4. Youtube
5. Website

Since July 9, 2015, when Malaysia first announced and rolled out its National IoT Strategic Roadmap, many have asked what happened next? I have been very persistent in my opinions regarding how to grow IoT in the country such as going beyond conferences, funding, digital transformation and create a healthy ecosystem. I was expecting that 2017 can different from the previous years. Although they are many IoT activities in Malaysia I felt the pace is still insufficient. If Malaysia wants to compete and become more competitive, we need to generate 100K IoT professionals by 2020. Thus, we do we start?

Here’s where FAVORIOT plays a key and significant role in helping the Universities to equip the graduates with relevant and up-to-date hands-on skills. Recently we have six (6) Malaysian Universities agreed to partner with FAVORIOT whereby we provide our FAVORIOT platform for their Lab usage, projects and Beta trials. The hands-on experience with a commercial IoT middleware will help to increase their skills in developing IoT solutions. There are Tutorials with sample source codes to quickly connect either their Raspberry Pi or Arduino onto FAVORIOT.

The IOT journey is long-winded and full of challenges. There are many barriers to overcome. But with the right skills and ecosystem, we can achieve our objectives to become IoT hub of the Region.

About the Author

Dr. Mazlan Abbas is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of FAVORIOT Sdn Bhd. He is an IOT Evangelist and a Thought Leader. He received an award as 50 Most Impactful Smart Cities Leaders by World CSR 2017. He is ranked No. 20th Thought Leader in IOT by 2014 Onalytics Report – “The Internet of Things – Top 100 Thought Leaders”, ranked Top 10 in IoT Top 100 Influencers by Postscapes 2016/2017, ranked Top 100 in Smart Cities Top Experts by Agilience Authority Index May 2016. He is also a Global Vision Board Member. You can reach him on LinkedIn or Twitter. Check all his presentation slides HERE.

More Info about FAVORIOT – Click LIKE, SHARE, SUBSCRIBE and FOLLOW:

1. Facebook Page
2. Twitter
3. Instagram
4. Youtube
5. Website

Cyberjaya (May 23, 2017) – Even though FAVORIOT, the latest startup in Malaysia, is only about 2 months old in the industry, we felt that we can’t wait for the Internet of Things to be in full market readiness and thus we accept the invitation to showcased our FAVORIOT platform publicly for the first time. We have also included the demo with Promosys HawkEYE Cloud monitoring gateway.

FAVORIOT First Public Showcase

The event was held at MCMC. All of the presenters are from vendors and network provider such as SigFox, Atilze (LoRa), NB-IoT (Huawei), Nokia and ST Microelectronics.

Panel Session

Together with the rest of IoT industry players, we were given a small booth at the Experiential Learning Spaces to showcase our products. It comprised of various companies that are part of the IoT ecosystem. It’s exciting to see a variety of players started to mushrooming – that’s good for a start. Hope more of these events can be supported by the government agencies such as MCMC. Creating awareness about IoT is not only meant for the technology players but also to the people at the street and the actual users.

IoT players need to get together

For a start, getting to know who are the players in the industry is also important. I have mentioned many times that IoT can’t be delivered by a single company. You can try to be a “lone ranger” but it will take much longer time to deliver. Every company has their own specialization and collaboration is a better way to deliver a better end-to-end IoT solution. The industry is still fragmented and no single company monopolizes the game.

IoT in Malaysia is still in the embryonic stage but the opportunity is still very big and it’s everyone’s guess what are the killer IoT applications.

Friends from the industry

And the fact that many organizations have started asking for an IoT solution (although they are not sure what “solution”) showed that the interest is growing daily.

With John Tay and Toh Swee Hoe from MCMC