KUALA LUMPUR | March 24, 2017 – Dr. Mazlan Abbas will officially step down as CEO of REDtone IOT on March 31, 2017. Together with several passionate individuals, he co-founded FAVORIOT Sdn Bhd, the latest IOT Startup in the Malaysian scene to continue his IoT journey focusing on developing IoT solutions in the areas of Smart Health and Smart Cities. Details of FAVORIOT will be announced on April 1, 2017.

Dr. Mazlan started his career at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia as a lecturer in 1984, going all the way up to the role of Associate Professor before he left in 1994 to take on his first role in Celcom as an R&D manager. Later, he moved to MIMOS in 2006 as Senior Director of Wireless Technology.

In 2014, he left MIMOS, with his technology background and seeing his interest in Internet 
of Things, Dato’ Wei Chuan (then the Managing Director) and Lau Bik Soon (Group CEO) of REDtone International agreed to co-found a new subsidiary called REDtone IOT Sdn Bhd that became one of the digital services pillars of REDtone.
He also plays an active role in various Universities as Industrial Advisory Panel and Adjunct Professor. Since 2014, he has brought many accolades to REDtone IOT such as Frost & Sullivan Malaysia Innovative Smart City Solution Provider of the Year 2016 and Merit Best of e-Government & Public Sector Year 2016. With his contributions in Smart City initiatives, the World CSR 2017 recently awarded him as 50 Most Impactful Smart Cities Leaders.

Where is FAVORIOT in the IOT Value Chain, one might ask? In the diagram above, we can see that not a single player can offer the whole value chain of IoT. Even the big players, either they chose one (or more) of them or partner or acquire other smaller companies to complete their ecosystem.

As stated in the article “Internet of Things – Business Models” written by Mohit Agrawal – “IoT platform is perhaps the most misunderstood terminology in IoT. There are different kinds of IoT platforms like the connectivity/M2M platform (primarily focused on connecting the devices via telecom networks/SIM cards without much focus on analytics or data processing), Hardware specific IoT platform (these types of platforms are most likely the proprietary platforms developed by device vendors, e.g. Nest) and Pure IoT platforms (platforms that have been specifically developed for IoT keeping the scale, standards and requirements in mind). Not all kinds of platforms would have the ability to lead the IoT effort. The winning combination is a platform that offers device management, cloud based storage, analytics, data visualization and ability to integrate with 3rd party systems via API or SDK to be able to take advantage of legacy systems as well as wide variety of other IoT hardware and software.”

FAVORIOT focuses on certain verticals that the team has the most experience and also right ecosystem partners i.e. smart cities and smart health.

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KUALA LUMPUR March 14, 2017 – MARA (Majlis Amanah Rakyat) invited me to their Academic Advisory Workshop to develop the new curriculum and syllabus for Internet of Things by giving some comments and advise on behalf of the industry.

What’s interesting is that their plan to offer one of the latest topic in the industry for their Diploma intake. It will definitely take sometime to prepare the full contents of their syllabus including the lab facilities, proper teaching materials and equipped their lecturers with the complete knowledge of IoT.

Due to the cross-discipline nature of IoT between Engineering and Computer Science Faculty, it has always become a big debate who will conduct the full IoT course. We approached the discussion based on the 7 Layers of OSI. Since IoT comprised of the first 4 layers (Sensors, actuators and connectivity) and the next upper 3 layers (applications and analytics), new syllabus content need to be developed.

It has always been a challenge by Higher Institutions to justify new and trendy curriculum as a course because they might be preparing the new graduates with competencies for jobs which are not in existence today (but will be big in future).