bp and Microsoft Form Strategic Energy Innovation Partnership
This is one of a steady stream of announcements coming my way about companies joining one or another of the cloud services. That is still big business. bp and Microsoft Corp. have announced that they have agreed to collaborate as strategic partners to further digital...
Podcast 213 Bright Ideas Beyond Automation
Did you ever get a bright idea for a new product or service? You might have even sketched it and written a product outline. Then you filed it. One day you noticed someone else had taken that same idea and created a billion-dollar company? Bright ideas and doing the...
Another Well Done Virtual Conference—Ignition Community Conference
Just to keep my perspective in balance, I attended a national soccer referee instructor virtual training. It was terrible. The presenters were not familiar with the technology and the presentation was incoherent. Therefore, what a joy to attend another well done...
An IIoT Solution for Smart Manufacturing
I doubt that there exists a useful pure Industrial Internet of Things (IioT) solution. Simply putting a number of devices on an IP network solves little. However, combining IIoT with data analytics and visualization offers useful solutions to managers and engineers....
Emerson Invests As Software Eats The Industrial World
Marc Andreessen the famed technologist and investor famously said almost 10 years ago that “software is eating the world.” The industrial market, famously slow to move, has been resembling that remark over the past year. In this episode, Emerson has announced an...
Universal OS Transforms Robots into Intelligent Collaborators
Qobotix coordinates automation between manufacturers’ existing robots to boost productivity, lower costs; Enables flexibility to quickly adapt manufacturing processes while allowing for social distancing to keep workers safe During the week of RIA’s Robotic Week...
Swift Sensors Appoints Ray Almgren CEO
Executive promotions and shuffling are not my stock in trade, but I’ve known and respected Ray Almgren for a long time. Very happy to see him take on this sensor company—the essential basic element of an Internet of Things ecosystem. Sensors don’t get all the glory,...
For Those Curious About Technology
No less a thinker and scientist than Albert Einstein extolled the value of curiosity. A lifelong pursuit of learning is the mark of being human. This month kicks off what would have been conference season complete with airline and hotel reservations. However, we are...
Born To Manufacture
This is a stylized bullet used in aircraft machine guns during World War II. By 1940 my grandfather had become a manufacturing production superintendent of a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio that manufactured Frigidaire refrigerators. With the entrance of the US into the war,...
OMAC Remote Access Working Group
The first end-user driven industry-standards working group I ran into as a new editor at Control Engineering magazine several (22) years ago was the Open Modular Architecture Controller (OMAC) group spearheaded primarily by the major automotive players plus Boeing and...