China: Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth

The IOTEXPO, the 3rd conference for telecommunication dedicated to Internet of Things, gave me the opportunity to visit Shanghai. I was very amazed about the strong motivation for Internet of Things in China. Several talks mentioned the opportunities for network carries and solution providers for implementing better services and solving society problems. I learned that the entire hype for Internet of Things has actually been jump started by the current premier minister Wen Jiabao mentioning Internet of Things as one of the key industry areas for China. In accordance to that, the chinese government decided that the city of Wuxi should be premier place for IoT in China: every year the lpolluted ake of the city could not provide drinkable water anymore, until the local government has installed a huge sensor network – the national government was so excited that Wuxi is now the home of internet of things in China. Furthermore, the local party leader had the ambition to attract in the next 5 years 30 talents and entrepreneurs, which coined the 530 plan, This plan supports start-ups in Wuxi, e.g. with free office space.

Backed by this political order various company leaders discussed the opportunities of RFID and sensor networks. In my first talk I took the opportunity to reflect on the history of the Internet of Things strongly emphasized that IoT goes far beyond RFID and has to focus on citizens and consumers and not companies and commercial businesses only. In my second talk I presented a number citizen IoT examples of our current research in Zurich.
Later, I also could visit the Auto-ID Lab of Hao Min at Fudan University. I pretty astonished about his company Quanray. Besides the development of chip design for EPC UHF Gen 2, which is applied to Liquor bottles preventing counterfeit and as well as for ticketing featuring 64kbit of memory. The most stunning development, however, was the integration of NFC into a SIM card: As the SIM is owned by the TelCo’s the get into the position of offering NFC payment services now including over-the-air configuration (OTA) without depending on the hesitating handset manufacturers. In order to get the signal out of the SIM which is usually shielded by the battery, Quanray’s RFID sticker which is powered by the external reader amplifies the SIM’s NFC signal and load-modulates it to the reader. Thus, all smart phones could turn in to NFC phones soon, Even if this just happens which the major TelCo in China, this already targets 500 millions of consumers...
Overall, Shanghai is really a very exciting fast changing place...I went to a restaurant with fishes swimming inside the table.