In todays blog post, we will be interviewing our New Market Product Development Manager, Tim Williams

Can you share a little on your background?

• I am the former Co Founder of a company called NanoThings. At NanoThings, we pioneered the smart label, leveraging LoRaWAN as the communication backbone, and printed electronics to reduce size and cost. We even partnered with companies that make printed batteries. One small tangent- the NanoTag smart label as it is today, was actually a complete accident. We were trying to digitize print media, and to do so, we needed to print the sensor directly into the paper based substrates using standard media printing technologies, hence printed electronics. Once we realized that we had actually created a new breed of electronics, we immediately pivoted into supply chain/logistics and turned the NanoTag into a standalone smart label. Today, at its ripe old age of 8 years, NanoThings is well known in its little corner of the world as the grandaddy of smart label technology.

How did you hear about OnAsset Intelligence and what attracted you to the company?

• I was introduced to OnAsset a few years ago by a mutual industry connection. The first person I spoke with at OnAsset was Paul (Global Business Development Manager). I was immediately drawn to their apparent success with track and trace technologies in the life sciences industry. As I did more of my own research, I kept hearing of OnAsset’s amazing reputation in the industry, which was fascinating, since I had never heard of this company, and their website at the time offered little more than a teaser of their capabilities. They were sort of this enigma that you couldn’t really find much on, and yet everyone in the industry knew of them and either loved them (customers) or hated them (competitors). I knew I needed to take a deeper look. It wasn’t until my first call with Adam (CEO of OnAsset) where I realized that OnAsset has one thing that no one else in the world has, and that’s what they call their Global Network, which in layman’s terms are gateways at major airports and freight forwarding warehouses around the world. And here is where it got really exciting - this global network has already been designed to use a combination of cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and LoRa. I was astonished to learn that all the major technologies required to support nearly any track and trace use case were already support by OnAsset’s Global Network. As soon as he told me this, I knew I had to help them build a new generation of flexible tags to exploit this unbelievable asset.

Can you explain what LoRaWAN is and describe some of the advantages and disadvantages of the technology?

• LoRaWAN is just a fancy, scary sounding acronym for Long Range Wide Area Network. I like to describe LoRaWAN as simply a brand of wireless technology, just like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or 5G. So how is LoRaWAN different than every other flavor of wireless? Unlike all of the aforementioned flavors, LoRaWAN was designed specifically for machine to machine communication. I don’t want to pigeonhole the technology as just a B2B technology, but it is primarily leveraged by businesses to gain intelligence on business operations like monitoring water usage, wireless temperature monitoring, and autonomous inventory monitoring. Businesses have been gravitating towards LoRaWAN for such applications (and more) because of two main reasons. First, LoRaWAN is an open source technology, which means it’s open for the wider market to use and build upon. Compare that to any cellular technology, which is owned and leased by governments for billions of dollars to the wireless carriers, who then slap large monthly fees on connectivity plans. Open source technologies are inherently lower cost than paid ones. The second defining feature of LoRaWAN is the protocol itself, which emphasizes low power and long range. Low power means devices can be made smaller (by using smaller batteries), and they can live longer. How much longer? A cellular temperature monitor will live for roughly 30-60 days maximum. A LoRaWAN temperature monitor set to the exact same parameters will live for 1-4 years easily. So for businesses who truly want to set it and forget it, your only real choices are LoRaWAN or Bluetooth. So here’s where the importance of ranges comes in. Bluetooth is lower power than LoRaWAN. So Bluetooth devices should outlive LoRaWAN devices in general, however the range is super limited with Bluetooth. Think about your Bluetooth headphones. If you walk more than 50 feet away from your phone while wearing your headphones, you’ll very quickly lose connection. That limitation in range is also highly limiting in the business world. Imagine you’re a grocery store trying to get real time temperature data on all of your in-store refrigeration units and you have to put a Bluetooth reader every 50 feet. It’s simply impractical and too costly. LoRaWAN has up to 1000X the range of Bluetooth, and that is not an exaggeration. So take that same grocery store application that once required 25 Bluetooth readers, and now it takes a single LoRaWAN gateway (reader). It’s a real game changer in terms of scalability.

So why isn’t LoRaWAN the predominantly used wireless technology for “track and trace” applications?

• The biggest challenge businesses face when trying to leverage LoRaWAN for tracking applications is that LoRaWAN isn’t a true global standard. Take Bluetooth for example. Bluetooth operates the exact same way anywhere in the world. If you buy a Bluetooth device in Europe or the U.S., it will work exactly the same. LoRaWAN does it a little differently, with distinct LoRaWAN regions that all have their own specific frequencies. The main LoRaWAN regions are US915 (US+ many other countries), EU868 (European Union + many other countries), AS923 (mostly Asia), AU915 (Australia, Brazil, and other countries), and IN865 (India). The challenge with this is, let’s say you have a shipment with a temperature sensor that starts in the US and goes to Europe. That temperature sensor needs to operate with the US915 parameters in the U.S., and the EU868 parameters in Europe. So the challenge has been how to make devices “edge aware”, or aware of where they are at any given time. It’s something that literally no one has figured out in the real world. Enter OnAsset. OnAsset’s global network is specifically positioned in key areas to enable us to offer a seamless global solution. This enables the devices to immediately switch to the correct frequency wherever they go. It’s a total game changer for LoRa, and will finally allow us this impactful technology to shine in the world of global supply chain visibility to support customers that want smaller and less expensive devices for global shipments.

What is the Sentinel Flex tag product, and how does it work?

• The Sentinel flex is a true tag/smart label product, which I define as mechanically flexible. We built the Flex Tag to solve all of the problems that have plagued other devices. The first problem we solved is location accuracy. The Sentinel Flex has very impressive location accuracy both indoors and outside. We also added Bluetooth capability to provide another layer of indoor positioning capability and some other super cool top secret features, including our proprietary GPS-less satellite positioning technology. The Sentinel Flex leverages public LoRaWAN Networks and the OnAsset Global Network together to provide excellent coverage across most areas of the world. We’ve added a pharma grade temperature sensor and a shock sensor for damage detection. Last but not least, we’ve constructed the Flex Tag with the lowest carbon footprint of any connected device in the world. We are excited to evidence this with CO2 savings certificates!