Home > News > Latest > SparkLabs Launches Connex IoT, an Accelerator Program for Smart City Tech

SparkLabs Launches Connex IoT, an Accelerator Program for Smart City Tech

At a Glance:


  • SparkLabs group launches Connex, a new startup accelerator program focusing on IoT, smart cities, and proptech.

  • Singapore will continue to remain one of the top investors in smart cities initiatives followed by Tokyo, New York City, and London.

  • Smart utility metering and video surveillance will hold a significant portion of the smart city segment, with the number of connections representing 87% of the total estimate of smart city connections by 2026: ABI Research.


Cities are facing new threats, such as cyberattacks, climate change, and natural disasters. As a result, they are embracing, new smart city solutions. In fact, according to the ABI research, the investments in smart city technologies will eclipse $61 billion by 2026. According to the United Nations by 2050, 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas. This increase in population and urbanization has led the community leaders to rethink how cities are organized and more specifically how digitization and new technologies can help the cities become smart.


SparkLabs Group launched SparkLabs Connex, the latest program in its network of startup accelerators and venture funds. Focused on real estate technology (proptech) and the Internet of Things, SparkLabs Connex will tap into startup ecosystems in Silicon Valley, Seoul, Shenzhen, Taipei, and Singapore.


 

Learn more: Sparklabs Connex, a New IoT, Smart City & proptech Accelerator, Unites the Supply & Demand sides of the Technology Ecosystem to Accelerate Access to Innovation


 

SparkLabs Connex’s start-ups will be tasked with leveraging technology enablers that underpin B2B IoT, smart city and PropTech solutions, such as connectivity (5G, NB-IoT, eSIM, etc), analytics and AI, and security. Charles Reed Anderson, the founder of Singapore-based IoT, mobility and smart city advisory firm CRA & Associates, will lead SparkLabs Connex as its managing partner.


We are fortunate to have Charles Reed Anderson join us as the Managing Partner of SparkLabs Connex. He is one of Asia's leading advisors to governments, enterprise customers and technology vendors on how to successfully navigate the increasingly complex IoT, smart city and proptech solution ecosystems. He is a recognized thought leader in these areas, so we are excited to have him on board.

Jay McCarthy, Co-founder of SparkLabs Group.


My ambition for SparkLabs Connex is to become the innovation hub for the IoT, smart city, and proptech ecosystems, and I’m excited with the quality and variety of partnerships we have signed at launch-and will sign in the future. SparkLabs Connex is more than an accelerator, it’s an ecosystem play, and we believe it creates a unique value proposition for startups, partners and investors.

Charles Reed Anderson, Managing Partner of SparkLabs Connex.


The program’s partners include Nokia, True Digital, Beca and Skyroam, as well as the cities of Taipei, Taiwan, Songdo, South Korea, and Darwin, Australia, which will be working with its portfolio startups to test and deploy their technology. SparkLabs Connex is also working with Go Smart, the Taipei City initiative to create a global network of smart cities, and the Urban Technology Alliance, which tests smart city tech in France, Spain, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.


 

Learn more: Here’s why smart IoT  is future


One customer looking at Connex is Nokia. “Working with SparkLabs Connex will enable us to address the growing smart city opportunity. We can help solve the challenges of smart city orchestration with our solutions, and expand our smart city ecosystem while answering the needs of our enterprise customers.

Danial Mausoof, global head of enterprise sales at Nokia.


According to IDC research last month, worldwide spending on smart city initiatives will total £95 billion in 2020 at an increase of 18.9% year over year. The top 100 cities that made investments in smart initiatives in 2019 represented nearly 29% of global spending, the research found. IDC also predicted that Singapore will continue to remain one of the top investors in smart cities initiatives followed by Tokyo, New York City, and London.


Additionally, ABI Research’s latest smart cities market data report, released in January, predicted that smart utility metering and video surveillance will hold a significant portion of the smart city segment, with the number of connections representing 87% of the total number of smart city connections by 2026. According to the report, though surveillance cameras with embedded AI computing capabilities from vendors like NVIDIA are already being deployed, low latency 5G connectivity will allow real-time local response management in the future by utilizing powerful cloud-based AI capabilities.


About SparkLabs Group


SparkLabs Group is a network of startup accelerators and venture capital funds that have invested in over 280 companies across 6 continents. SparkLabs Group was awarded the Newsweek Momentum Award in November 2019, ranking it as one of the "Top 100 Smart City Partners" globally, and the only venture capital firm or accelerator included in the ranking.

SparkLabs' accelerator network consists of SparkLabs Korea (Seoul), SparkLabs Cultiv8 (AgTech, FoodTech & Sustainability in Sydney & Orange, Australia), SparkLabs Taipei, SparkLabs Frontier - ASU (Arizona State University), and others. In 2019, SparkLabs Group launched SparkLabs Foundry, an "innovation-as-a-service" platform for the Forbes Global 2000.

Spotlight


Other News
Enterprise Iot

Nozomi Networks Delivers Industry's First Multi-Spectrum Wireless Security Sensor for Global OT and IoT Environments

Nozomi Networks | January 25, 2024

Nozomi Networks Inc., the leader in OT and IoT security, today introduced Guardian Air™, the industry's only wireless spectrum sensor purpose-built for OT and IoT environments worldwide. With 80 percent of new IoT deployments wirelessly connected, wireless is quickly becoming a preferred network. The explosion of wirelessly connected devices increases potential access points and exploitation of networks. This puts critical infrastructure at risk of cyberattacks and disruptions to operations. Guardian Air provides much-needed visibility into wirelessly enabled devices which until now were only detected once connected to the wired network. Guardian Air monitors several prominent wireless frequencies, not just Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to provide security teams with immediate visibility of connected sensors, devices, laptops and cell phones. With the addition of Guardian Air, customers have a comprehensive network solution all in one integrated platform. "Nozomi Networks has once again innovated to address an unmet need for wireless-level monitoring in OT and IoT environments," said Danielle VanZandt, an industry manager for commercial and public security research at Frost & Sullivan. "From smart manufacturing to digital medicine, to building automation, to modern oil field production and more, today industrial organizations are relying on billions of wireless devices to speed production and time to market. Guardian Air gives IT security professionals and OT operators the visibility they need to get a firm handle on wireless risk management and response." With Guardian Air, IT security professionals and OT operators can: Continuously monitor prominent wireless frequency technologies used in OT and IoT environments including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, LoRaWAN, Zigbee, GPS, drone RF protocols, WirelessHART and more, Immediately detect wirelessly connected assets and gain asset information to quickly address unauthorized installations, Detect wireless-specific threats, including brute force attacks, spoofing, and bluejacking – with the added ability to determine the location of the devices performing the attacks, Seamlessly integrate wireless data into a single OT & IoT security platform that unifies asset visibility from the endpoint and across wired and wireless networks. "Wireless is fundamentally changing the way industrial organizations operate. Unfortunately, it also massively expands the potential attack surface," said Nozomi Networks Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Andrea Carcano. "Guardian Air solves this problem by giving customers the accurate visibility they need at the wireless level to minimize risk while maximizing resiliency. Because Guardian Air integrates easily into the Nozomi Networks Vantage platform, customers can combine network, endpoint and wireless for the greatest visibility, threat detection and AI-powered analysis for real-time security management and remediation across the entire attack surface." The Nozomi Guardian Air wireless sensor will be available this spring from Nozomi Networks and its extensive global network of channel partners. About Nozomi Networks Nozomi Networks accelerates digital transformation by protecting the world's critical infrastructure, industrial and government organizations from cyber threats. Our solution delivers exceptional network and asset visibility, threat detection, and insights for OT and IoT environments. Customers rely on us to minimize risk and complexity while maximizing operational resilience. www.nozominetworks.com

Read More

Industrial IoT

Tuya Smart Delivers IoT Best Practice Using Amazon Aurora, Leads the Direction of Cloud Database Innovation Use Cases with Amazon Web Services

Tuya Smart | January 24, 2024

Tuya Smart, the global IoT developer service provider, has delivered its Best Practices in using Amazon Aurora at IoT industry. Amazon Aurora is a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Tuya and Amazon Web Services (AWS) built a solid basis of collaboration in database use cases exploration while also delivering smooth operation of billions of devices requiring high concurrency and low latency. Tuya and AWS: Building a benchmark for database implementation practice Tuya is a leading technology company focused on making our lives smarter. Tuya does this by offering a cloud platform that connects a range of devices via the IoT. By building interconnectivity standards, Tuya bridges the intelligent needs of brands, OEMs, developers, and retail chains across a broad range of smart devices and industries. Tuya's solutions enable partners and customers by improving the value of their products while making consumers' lives more convenient through the application of technology. As of September 30, 2023, the Tuya IoT Developer Platform has accumulated over 909,000 registered developers from over 200 countries and regions, covering industries including real estate, hospitality, residential, industry, agriculture, etc. The greater the breadth of business coverage, the more advanced technological support required. Tuya faces high-frequency reads and writes as well as enormous data storage challenges from billion-level online devices. Meanwhile, due to the commercial scenarios involving smart homes and smart industries, Tuya's operating response demands low latency in order to deliver a smoother user experience. Furthermore, Tuya's quick expansion and regular business changes have posed significant challenges to its operation and maintenance management. Tuya selected Amazon Aurora as core database engine for its unparalleled performance and availability at global scale. How does Tuya specifically leverage the Amazon Aurora database? Tuya currently manages billions of real-time online devices and can keep cloud message processing response times under 10 milliseconds. However, billions online devices provide a challenge. During holidays, there will be peak traffic volume, with tens of millions of devices going online and offline virtually simultaneously. Tuya used Amazon Aurora to construct a data storage solution to solve the main problem of rapid increase in short-term traffic, and to fully utilize resources. Aurora's design, which separates compute and storage and low-latency replication functionality, improves system throughput by enhancing the effect of read-write separation. Aurora provides up to 15 read replicas, setting the groundwork for Tuya's read flexibility development. At the same time, Tuya has integrated Aurora Serverless, which includes seconds-level elastic expansion and contraction, allowing Tuya to handle extremely heavy business traffic smoothly. Tuya's customers are located throughout more than 200 nations and regions, and they deal with widespread access to IoT data. Different countries and regions have different regulations on data compliance, such as GDPR and local PII. Tuya needs to adhere to each region's data security compliance regulations. As Tuya's primary business data storage provider, Amazon Aurora was among the first in the public cloud sector to enable physical encryption for database products, which significantly decreased the cost of Tuya's security compliance transformation and gave Tuya excellent basic security guarantees. In addition, Tuya is continuously testing out additional new innovation unique to Aurora, such as Enhanced Binlog, zero-ETL, and Limitless Database. Aurora's ongoing investment in innovative technologies provides more opportunities for Tuya to expand its business. Additionally, based on Tuya's comprehensive IoT developer platform architecture, both parties have collaborated to enhance Tuya IoT applications performance indicators like stability, low latency, scalability, and security in the real-world application of databases, revealing more potential and possibilities and enabling the IoT. Tuya and AWS: Continuously promoting the evolution of cloud experience Data-driven approaches will usher in a new era of innovation in tandem with the swift advancement of data applications. At this year's re:Invent conference, Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS, reviewed the relational database's development history in great detail. In 2014, AWS created Aurora based on log architecture. In 2018, the release of Aurora Serverless allowed for seamless scaling of database resources through virtualization technology. This year, AWS announced the launch of the Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, which automatically scales to millions of write transactions per second well beyond current limits of a single PostgreSQL instance. It is apparent from Amazon Aurora's development history that AWS has always been dedicated to innovation. Customers and partners from a range of industries actively utilizes AWS to enable rapid innovation in a variety of ways, while also working together to enhance the cloud experience. Similar to how Tuya and AWS work together, Tuya's effective and user-friendly IoT developer platform and rich and varied IoT solutions have built a significant lighthouse, embracing the Amazon Aurora's innovation and accelerated the process of building a more secure and reliable IoT database use case. Amazon Aurora VP Yan Leshinsky said, "Amazon Aurora is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS and is trusted by hundreds of thousands of customers. We innovate by working backwards from customers' needs, and we appreciate the feedback that Tuya has shared. We remain committed in developing new Aurora features and capabilities so all customers can accelerate their applications' capabilities and business growth by using Aurora." "Tuya has always committed to strengthening advanced and valuable innovations, while offering open and neutral ecosystem assistance for global partners. We provide our developers with enhanced operational and maintenance control, adaptable data storage options, superior product experience, and a global business layout by utilizing the Amazon Aurora database. We will continue to work with AWS to benefit the world in the future in areas including technology, ecosystems, and cloud computing, helping customers achieve commercial success." said Eva Na, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Cooperation, and CMO of Tuya Smart. Enhancing the partnership with AWS, Tuya delivered IoT best practice using Amazon Aurora database, giving the industry's growth additional impetus. Tuya will maintain its open and neutral stance going forward, collaborating with cloud service providers like AWS to offer global developers a more secure, reliable, and productive cloud environment, thereby advancing the innovation and development of the entire industry.

Read More

Enterprise Iot

Nozomi Networks Delivers Industry's First Multi-Spectrum Wireless Security Sensor for Global OT and IoT Environments

Nozomi Networks | January 25, 2024

Nozomi Networks Inc., the leader in OT and IoT security, today introduced Guardian Air™, the industry's only wireless spectrum sensor purpose-built for OT and IoT environments worldwide. With 80 percent of new IoT deployments wirelessly connected, wireless is quickly becoming a preferred network. The explosion of wirelessly connected devices increases potential access points and exploitation of networks. This puts critical infrastructure at risk of cyberattacks and disruptions to operations. Guardian Air provides much-needed visibility into wirelessly enabled devices which until now were only detected once connected to the wired network. Guardian Air monitors several prominent wireless frequencies, not just Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to provide security teams with immediate visibility of connected sensors, devices, laptops and cell phones. With the addition of Guardian Air, customers have a comprehensive network solution all in one integrated platform. "Nozomi Networks has once again innovated to address an unmet need for wireless-level monitoring in OT and IoT environments," said Danielle VanZandt, an industry manager for commercial and public security research at Frost & Sullivan. "From smart manufacturing to digital medicine, to building automation, to modern oil field production and more, today industrial organizations are relying on billions of wireless devices to speed production and time to market. Guardian Air gives IT security professionals and OT operators the visibility they need to get a firm handle on wireless risk management and response." With Guardian Air, IT security professionals and OT operators can: Continuously monitor prominent wireless frequency technologies used in OT and IoT environments including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, LoRaWAN, Zigbee, GPS, drone RF protocols, WirelessHART and more, Immediately detect wirelessly connected assets and gain asset information to quickly address unauthorized installations, Detect wireless-specific threats, including brute force attacks, spoofing, and bluejacking – with the added ability to determine the location of the devices performing the attacks, Seamlessly integrate wireless data into a single OT & IoT security platform that unifies asset visibility from the endpoint and across wired and wireless networks. "Wireless is fundamentally changing the way industrial organizations operate. Unfortunately, it also massively expands the potential attack surface," said Nozomi Networks Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Andrea Carcano. "Guardian Air solves this problem by giving customers the accurate visibility they need at the wireless level to minimize risk while maximizing resiliency. Because Guardian Air integrates easily into the Nozomi Networks Vantage platform, customers can combine network, endpoint and wireless for the greatest visibility, threat detection and AI-powered analysis for real-time security management and remediation across the entire attack surface." The Nozomi Guardian Air wireless sensor will be available this spring from Nozomi Networks and its extensive global network of channel partners. About Nozomi Networks Nozomi Networks accelerates digital transformation by protecting the world's critical infrastructure, industrial and government organizations from cyber threats. Our solution delivers exceptional network and asset visibility, threat detection, and insights for OT and IoT environments. Customers rely on us to minimize risk and complexity while maximizing operational resilience. www.nozominetworks.com

Read More

Industrial IoT

Tuya Smart Delivers IoT Best Practice Using Amazon Aurora, Leads the Direction of Cloud Database Innovation Use Cases with Amazon Web Services

Tuya Smart | January 24, 2024

Tuya Smart, the global IoT developer service provider, has delivered its Best Practices in using Amazon Aurora at IoT industry. Amazon Aurora is a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Tuya and Amazon Web Services (AWS) built a solid basis of collaboration in database use cases exploration while also delivering smooth operation of billions of devices requiring high concurrency and low latency. Tuya and AWS: Building a benchmark for database implementation practice Tuya is a leading technology company focused on making our lives smarter. Tuya does this by offering a cloud platform that connects a range of devices via the IoT. By building interconnectivity standards, Tuya bridges the intelligent needs of brands, OEMs, developers, and retail chains across a broad range of smart devices and industries. Tuya's solutions enable partners and customers by improving the value of their products while making consumers' lives more convenient through the application of technology. As of September 30, 2023, the Tuya IoT Developer Platform has accumulated over 909,000 registered developers from over 200 countries and regions, covering industries including real estate, hospitality, residential, industry, agriculture, etc. The greater the breadth of business coverage, the more advanced technological support required. Tuya faces high-frequency reads and writes as well as enormous data storage challenges from billion-level online devices. Meanwhile, due to the commercial scenarios involving smart homes and smart industries, Tuya's operating response demands low latency in order to deliver a smoother user experience. Furthermore, Tuya's quick expansion and regular business changes have posed significant challenges to its operation and maintenance management. Tuya selected Amazon Aurora as core database engine for its unparalleled performance and availability at global scale. How does Tuya specifically leverage the Amazon Aurora database? Tuya currently manages billions of real-time online devices and can keep cloud message processing response times under 10 milliseconds. However, billions online devices provide a challenge. During holidays, there will be peak traffic volume, with tens of millions of devices going online and offline virtually simultaneously. Tuya used Amazon Aurora to construct a data storage solution to solve the main problem of rapid increase in short-term traffic, and to fully utilize resources. Aurora's design, which separates compute and storage and low-latency replication functionality, improves system throughput by enhancing the effect of read-write separation. Aurora provides up to 15 read replicas, setting the groundwork for Tuya's read flexibility development. At the same time, Tuya has integrated Aurora Serverless, which includes seconds-level elastic expansion and contraction, allowing Tuya to handle extremely heavy business traffic smoothly. Tuya's customers are located throughout more than 200 nations and regions, and they deal with widespread access to IoT data. Different countries and regions have different regulations on data compliance, such as GDPR and local PII. Tuya needs to adhere to each region's data security compliance regulations. As Tuya's primary business data storage provider, Amazon Aurora was among the first in the public cloud sector to enable physical encryption for database products, which significantly decreased the cost of Tuya's security compliance transformation and gave Tuya excellent basic security guarantees. In addition, Tuya is continuously testing out additional new innovation unique to Aurora, such as Enhanced Binlog, zero-ETL, and Limitless Database. Aurora's ongoing investment in innovative technologies provides more opportunities for Tuya to expand its business. Additionally, based on Tuya's comprehensive IoT developer platform architecture, both parties have collaborated to enhance Tuya IoT applications performance indicators like stability, low latency, scalability, and security in the real-world application of databases, revealing more potential and possibilities and enabling the IoT. Tuya and AWS: Continuously promoting the evolution of cloud experience Data-driven approaches will usher in a new era of innovation in tandem with the swift advancement of data applications. At this year's re:Invent conference, Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS, reviewed the relational database's development history in great detail. In 2014, AWS created Aurora based on log architecture. In 2018, the release of Aurora Serverless allowed for seamless scaling of database resources through virtualization technology. This year, AWS announced the launch of the Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, which automatically scales to millions of write transactions per second well beyond current limits of a single PostgreSQL instance. It is apparent from Amazon Aurora's development history that AWS has always been dedicated to innovation. Customers and partners from a range of industries actively utilizes AWS to enable rapid innovation in a variety of ways, while also working together to enhance the cloud experience. Similar to how Tuya and AWS work together, Tuya's effective and user-friendly IoT developer platform and rich and varied IoT solutions have built a significant lighthouse, embracing the Amazon Aurora's innovation and accelerated the process of building a more secure and reliable IoT database use case. Amazon Aurora VP Yan Leshinsky said, "Amazon Aurora is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS and is trusted by hundreds of thousands of customers. We innovate by working backwards from customers' needs, and we appreciate the feedback that Tuya has shared. We remain committed in developing new Aurora features and capabilities so all customers can accelerate their applications' capabilities and business growth by using Aurora." "Tuya has always committed to strengthening advanced and valuable innovations, while offering open and neutral ecosystem assistance for global partners. We provide our developers with enhanced operational and maintenance control, adaptable data storage options, superior product experience, and a global business layout by utilizing the Amazon Aurora database. We will continue to work with AWS to benefit the world in the future in areas including technology, ecosystems, and cloud computing, helping customers achieve commercial success." said Eva Na, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Cooperation, and CMO of Tuya Smart. Enhancing the partnership with AWS, Tuya delivered IoT best practice using Amazon Aurora database, giving the industry's growth additional impetus. Tuya will maintain its open and neutral stance going forward, collaborating with cloud service providers like AWS to offer global developers a more secure, reliable, and productive cloud environment, thereby advancing the innovation and development of the entire industry.

Read More

More Trending news

Spotlight

Resources

Application Layer Protocols for Networking

Infographic

Top 10 Tools for IoT Security Testing: Mitigating Cyber Threats

Article

Essential IoT Security Books for IoT Professionals

Article

Application Layer Protocols for Networking

Infographic

Top 10 Tools for IoT Security Testing: Mitigating Cyber Threats

Article

Essential IoT Security Books for IoT Professionals

Article