Six New York-based developers, Jesse Lee, Geoff Woo, Helen Huang, Lara Mendelssohn, Shea Molloy, and Tony Li won the M.A.D. Challenge. Their groundbreaking ElectroDialysis Desalinator for Irrigation (EDDI) system enables farmers to separate salt from water before they irrigate, allowing them to use only the necessary amount of water needed to achieve maximum crop yield. Using the SAMSUNG ARTIK IoT platform, the EDDI system controls smart activation of its device’s pumps and valves, while collecting data related to water salinity and flow. Smart activation also helps reduce water waste.

The team built the EDDI system after studying the various large-scale changes that happen during a drought crisis and how those changes affect people and ecosystems that are susceptible to changes in water abundance. Together, the winners will receive a check for $100,000. The M.A.D. global challenge drew more than 500 entries from 57 countries, awarding $210,500 in prizes overall. The EDDI developers’ next step is to continue honing their innovation and one day offer it to farmers everywhere.

“We’re a small group of friends who care deeply about solving global problems with technology,” said Jesse Lee, EDDI developer team lead. “Working with the SAMSUNG ARTIK platform was a great experience for us, as it provided a giant canvas to create a system of infinite possibility.” He added, “The challenge has given us the lift we need to reach even further into the promise IoT technology offers.”

Second place runner-up, Ness leveraged the SAMSUNG ARTIK platform to develop a system that saves water that’s normally wasted by people while waiting for their water taps and showers to get hot. Ness can save 200 gallons per household per month. The Tadpole Automation and Monitoring System, the third place runner-up, leveraged the SAMSUNG ARTIK platform to reduce the amount of water needed to grow food by over 90 percent compared to traditional methods. A diverse mix of judges representing state government officials, venture capitalists, and green tech industry leaders evaluated the innovation projects and selected the winning and runner-up teams and technology.

Samsung identified drought as the focus for the IoT maker challenge, after witnessing firsthand the devastating impact of the California drought that started in 2011. Samsung reviewed the entries and narrowed the pool down to 150 contenders, providing complimentary SAMSUNG ARTIK 5 and SAMSUNG ARTIK 10 development kits to the contenders for their projects. The judging criteria was based on; creativity and originality of the idea; and technical implementation, including how well the idea was executed by developers, and how well they utilized the SAMSUNG ARTIK IoT platform in their project. Additional criteria included the benefits and impact on the California water crisis and on droughts in other parts of the world as well as the overall user experience.

“We were extremely impressed by the EDDI team. They developed a prototype to desalinate the water, and they also gathered and leveraged data from various sources to manage the salinity in water specific to different plants,” said Curtis Sasaki, VP of Ecosystems at Samsung. “The potential for IoT is incredible for all kinds of looming issues. We’re delighted the SAMSUNG ARTIK platform is playing a vital role in inspiring developers and makers to create a better future. We have a tremendous opportunity to think big and address global issues in entirely new ways.”

To learn more about the finalists and the winner of the program, please visit http://artik.devpost.com/.

Compelling Statistics:

• Water Intensive: agriculture accounts for 70% of the world’s water consumption (UNESCO)
• Some experts estimate that as much as 50% of irrigation water is wasted due to evaporation, wind, or runoff caused by inefficient irrigation methods and systems. (U.S. EPA)
• Approximately a third of the world’s population, or 2.5 billion people, are living in water-stressed areas. (Growing Blue)

The SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud, along with the previously announced SAMSUNG ARTIK family of integrated IoT modules, enables faster and simpler development of new enterprise, industrial, and consumer applications. The SAMSUNG ARTIK modules and SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud are an open platform including a best-in-class family of integrated production-ready modules, advanced software, development boards, drivers, tools, security features, and cloud.

“Our vision for the ARTIK platform is an end-to-end experience that reduces the obstacles, challenges, and time-to-market for IoT solutions,” said Young Sohn, President & Chief Strategy Officer, Samsung Electronics. “We’re excited to announce the SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud after three years of development and feedback from hundreds of developers. Unlike many other IoT cloud platforms, ARTIK Cloud breaks down data siloes between devices and enables a new class of IoT applications and services.  The launch of this exciting new platform not only signals Samsung’s foray into the cloud services market but reinforces our belief that, by creating powerful open platforms, we can harness the information generated by IoT to develop new insights and new approaches to address the major global challenges of today and tomorrow.”

Companies face numerous challenges when connecting different devices and cloud services together into unified experiences. These challenges include: collecting data from a diverse set of devices using a variety of protocols; enabling legacy, new, and third-party devices and cloud services to interact with each other with minimal effort; storing data from siloed devices in a single location and deriving meaningful insights; managing data security and privacy; and providing developers with easy-to-use APIs and tools.

“As more and more consumer IoT devices are created and brought to market, the need for interoperability becomes paramount as it is the key to creating more compelling and integrated experiences.  The need for an open cloud solution that can work with any connected device, and with other cloud services is critical for broader consumer adoption,” said BK Yoon, President and CEO of Samsung Electronics. “The launch of ARTIK Cloud is extremely exciting because it promises to not only help Samsung connect our diverse portfolio of products, but also enable other companies to participate in a growing IoT ecosystem.”

“SmartThings believes that having integrated experiences within one unified application will simplify the user experience across a wide range of devices and services,” said Alex Hawkinson, CEO of SmartThings. “It is hugely beneficial that the new Samsung ARTIK Cloud can easily add more devices and services that SmartThings users can immediately take advantage of. As SmartThings continues to expand our offering beyond the home, open solutions like ARTIK Cloud can bring more devices into our open ecosystem as we aim to deliver even more IoT benefits to our customers together.”

How SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud Empowers IoT Developers and Enterprise Customers

The SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud makes it extremely easy to connect all devices – those powered by ARTIK modules and by other modules. Using SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud, companies can securely collect, store, and act on any data from any connected device or cloud service. With easy-to-use, open APIs to ingest and query data, and powerful tools to visualize and act on the data, ARTIK Cloud empowers developers and solution providers to build new innovative IoT apps and services.

The SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud is highly scalable, with an architecture designed to support the billions of IoT devices expected in the next few years, while keeping latency low to enabling fast interactions. Key features of ARTIK Cloud include:

Device and Data Interoperability: Easily enable devices to communicate with other devices or cloud services.

• Device Manifests: Rapidly onboard any device using a universal language to describe device states and actions.
• Multi-Protocol Connectors: Connect any device to the cloud using multiple protocols – REST/HTTP, Websockets, MQTT, and CoAP.
• Cloud Connectors: Connect to any cloud service and collect data from it.
• Heterogeneous Data Collection: Collect any data (continuous, discrete, real time, or historical) from any device or 3rd party cloud.
• Two Way Communication: Securely exchange messages between device and cloud, even on low power devices such as wearables and end-node sensors.
• Data Normalization and Analytics: Gain fast access to data, statistics, and aggregations with multiple backends to store, replicate, and index data.

Security & Privacy: Secure device, app, and user interactions and protect data privacy

• Secure Device Registration: Securely connect devices to the cloud using TLS, secure element, and certificates issued by a trusted certificate authority.
• Authentication and Authorization: Secure every device, app, and user interaction with open Internet standards based authentication and authorization.
• Privacy Management: Protect data privacy with built-in identity and permissions management.

Developer Tools: Empower developers to build new IoT apps using easy-to-use, open APIs, SDKs, and tools

• Universal Data Access APIs: Collect, and query data from disparate devices using easy-to-use, open APIs.
• SDKs: Enable developers to easily build apps and services using a number of mobile and platform SDKs: Objective C / iOS, Java / Android, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, and C#; as well as Tizen 3.0 when released.
• Rules Engine: Easily trigger cross-device actions and alerts with a powerful built in rules engine.
• Visualization Tools: Visualize data from disparate devices in context.
• Developer Portal: Increase developer productivity with self-service access to rich API documentation, API console, blogs, samples, forums, and more.
• API-first: Manage and extend platform entities using built-in REST APIs.

Companies are reimagining how data from many connected devices can be used to build innovative apps and services. Legrand, a global leader in electrical and digital building infrastructures, is working with Samsung to connect the Legrand Cloud platform to the SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud to drive the Internet of Things revolution in the building sector.

“Legrand is excited to partner with SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud to enable new smart solutions for buildings,” said Ernesto Santini, Legrand VP Innovation and Systems. “To be connected to the ARTIK Cloud is another step in our openness strategy, which aims to make Legrand’s legacy devices and new smart devices interoperable with other connected products, and increases the value we deliver to our users.”

Digibe Software is also embracing IoT and the SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud. The company delivers products for the industrial Internet helping customers optimize assets and connect data from machines, databases and people in meaningful ways. “Digibe is excited to partner with ARTIK Cloud to connect the worlds of IoT and enterprise collaboration,” said Pierre Lecointre, co-founder and CTO of Digibe. “The APIs and developer tools in ARTIK Cloud helped us deliver, in less than 2 months, a solution to access siloed IoT asset data and trigger collaboration to address anomalies – directly from Salesforce.”

Any company – enterprises, start-ups, device makers, IoT operators, and developers – can initially start using the SAMSUNG ARTIK Cloud for free by visiting artik.cloud. Using simple pay-as-you-go tiered pricing, customers can upgrade to the tier of service that’s right for them.

Samsung is currently working with select enterprise customers. If you would like enterprise pricing, please contact us at artik.cloud/pricing.

Samsung Developer Conference 2016

The Samsung team supporting the SAMSUNG ARTIK platform will be at Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco showcasing demonstrations and technical sessions. For more information or to schedule a meeting, please contact ssic@ssi.samsung.com.

Samsung Electronics recently opened the development of IoT.js, a web-based Internet of Things (IoT) platform that connects lightweight devices. Examples of lightweight devices include micro-controllers or devices with only a few kilobytes of RAM available.

The IoT.js project is one of numerous activities Samsung is undertaking to make all devices interoperable in the IoT space by enabling more devices to be interoperable, from complex and sophisticated devices such as home appliances, mobile devices and televisions, to lightweight and small devices such as lamps, thermometers, switches and sensors. Ultimately, the interoperability of all of these devices will allow people to enjoy a smarter, more convenient lifestyle.

The IoT.js platform is comprised of JerryScript, a lightweight version of the JavaScript engine, and IoT.js is a lightweight version of node.js. JavaScript is a script language on the web and node.js is a platform that builds with the JavaScript engine. IoT.js platform makes JavaScript and node.js lightweight, thereby increasing interoperability among devices.

JavaScript and node.js require large memory and high capacity. It would have been difficult for all “things” to be connected, and that much more critical for making these technologies applicable to lightweight devices such as lamps or thermometers.

Additionally, the IoT.js is interoperable with existing technologies, allowing developers to easily and conveniently develop IoT applications using their existing development methods.

It is important to note that the focus of this project is not to disclose the final outcome of development, but rather to fully open the platform from the start of the development process. Through opening the platform, Samsung and developers can collaborate, starting from the design stage, throughout the entire development process.

”We will look to expand interoperability among more devices through the IoT.js project,” said Kyeongwoon Lee, Vice President of Software R&D Center at Samsung Electronics. “IoT.js is a platform that will be built together with developers, and it is our hope that many developers will actively participate in this project with us.”

For more information how to participate in the development, please visit www.iotjs.net and www.jerryscript.net.

Samsung Electronics announced the Samsung ARTIK platform to allow faster, simpler development of new enterprise, industrial and consumer applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). ARTIK is an open platform that includes a best-in-class family of integrated production-ready modules, advanced software, development boards, drivers, tools, security features and cloud connectivity designed to help accelerate development of a new generation of better, smarter IoT devices, solutions and services.

“We are providing the industry’s most advanced, open and secure platform for developing IoT products”, said Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer, Samsung Electronics. “By leveraging Samsung’s high-volume manufacturing, advanced silicon process and packaging technologies, and extensive ecosystem, ARTIK allows developers to rapidly turn great ideas into market leading IoT products and applications.”

The ARTIK Family

All members of the Samsung ARTIK family incorporate unique embedded hardware security technology, on-board memory and advanced processing power in an open platform. Security is also a key element of the advanced software integrated into the module along with the ability to connect to the Internet for cloud-based data analytics and enhanced services. As an open platform, Samsung ARTIK can be easily customized for more rapid deployment of IoT devices and the services that can be delivered using them.

Samsung ARTIK platform comes in a variety of configurations to meet the specific requirements of a wide range of devices from wearables and home automation, to smart lighting and industrial applications. Initial members of the ARTIK family include:

• ARTIK 1, the smallest IoT module currently available in the industry at 12mm-by-12mm combines Bluetooth/BLE connectivity and a nine-axis sensor with best-in-class compute capabilities and power consumption. It is specifically designed for low-power, small form-factor IoT applications.
• ARTIK 5 delivers an outstanding balance of size, power and price-performance and is ideal for home hubs, drones and high-end wearables. It incorporates a 1GHz dual-core processor and on-board DRAM and flash memory.
• ARTIK 10 delivers advanced capabilities and high-performance to IoT with an eight-core processor, full 1080p video decoding/encoding, 5.1 audio and 2GB DRAM along with 16GB flash memory. The Samsung ARTIK 10 includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/BLE and ZigBee connectivity and is designed for use with home servers, media applications, and in industrial settings.

“Industry requirements for IoT devices vary in terms of battery life, computational horse power and form factor,” said Sohn. “With this family of ARTIK offerings, Samsung is directly addressing the needs of the widest range of customers, uses and applications.”

Additional Technical Highlights of the Samsung ARTIK Family

• Security and Privacy: The ARTIK platform offers a best-in-class, end-to-end security solution. At the hardware level, ARTIK contains am embedded secure element that goes beyond software-based encryption solutions alone. At the application level, ARTIK is equipped with a machine learning based anomaly detection system. This allows the user to identify abnormalities and unusual behavior in order to address possible hacking or intrusion activity.
• IoT Software Stack: Samsung’s ARTIK platform comes with an extensive IoT software stack and tools needed to accelerate product development. Developers can go directly to application framework development, instead of spending time building low-level software libraries.
• Local Storage and Computational Capability: ARTIK supports unique local storage and computational capabilities that in most current IoT environments are generally only addressable by large-scale cloud servers. Depending on user requirements, data can be managed locally or in the cloud in encrypted or unencrypted formats.
• Low-Power Architecture: The ARTIK platform offers best-in-class power consumption to enable longer battery life for battery operated IoT devices like wearables. The platform includes a tiered architecture that allows applications and tasks to run at the right power-optimized performance and memory utilization.
• Small Form Factor: All ARTIK modules offer the smallest form factor in their class. Certain ARTIK modules use Samsung’s next generation ePoP (embedded Package-on-Package) technology. Samsung Electromechanics, a global leader in component manufacturing, played a key role in developing advanced packaging technology for ARTIK.
• Connectivity: Depending on the configuration, the ARTIK family offers all major connectivity protocols including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (including BLE) and ZigBee.

More information about the ARTIK platform and development tools may be found at www.artik.io.

*All functionality features, specifications and other product information provided in this document including, but not limited to, the benefits, design, pricing, components, performance, availability, and capabilities of the product are subject to change without notice or obligation.

Samsung has announced the launch of InteractiV – a platform that brings new possibilities to the way that users interact with one another and local businesses, while generating significant monetization opportunities for network operators.

Previously demonstrated at Mobile World Congress 2014, InteractiV enables new and interesting ways for smartphone users to share content and applications during calls. Developers who design their applications to leverage the InteractiV Application Programming Interface (API) can give users the ability to share information, media content and even the screen itself when they are connected with other people, businesses or devices. These applications are then hosted and distributed by the InteractiV server, located in the operator’s IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core network.

“We originally envisioned InteractiV as a unique and seamless way to upgrade the traditional voice call experience into something more collaborative for users,” said Joonho Park, Senior Vice President and head of Global Sales & Marketing, Networks Business. “It has since grown into something far more flexible, enabling rich terminal-to-terminal communications across any number of traditional usage scenarios¾whether a user is talking to a friend or booking a flight using VoLTE, watching a live broadcast via eMBMS, doing research on the Internet, or just casually playing games. In any of these cases, InteractiV provides a better opportunity to connect people with their friends, family or businesses.”

The applications for the InteractiV platform are endless. From a peer-to-peer standpoint, users can share and interact with content in real time during a phone call. For example, during a VoLTE call with a friend, one user will have the ability to flip through a photo album from a recent vacation, while the other sees the photos appear on their own device. Both users can collaboratively sketch directly onto the images, as they discuss the trip, and save the modified photo for later.

The InteractiV platform also has benefits for local businesses. A customer will be able to call their local pizzeria to place a delivery order and if there are changes to the menu, such as specials or added ingredients, the pizzeria can share an updated menu with their customer while on the phone. The customers can then browse the menu, place their order and complete the payment process on their screen in real time.

Additionally, InteractiV can provide a whole new way of interacting and communicating with devices in the home. For example, a user will be able to view their living room through the camera on their Smart TV by connecting to the device via their smartphone. This application provides an added layer of home security without the need to install a separate camera.

For network operators, InteractiV creates new revenue potential through the enhancement of voice services for customers. User-to-merchant applications provide significant value to businesses by increasing the ease with which they can engage customers, with operators facilitating the improved interaction. Meanwhile, user-to-user applications provide a premium service to individual customers, further improving the value of VoLTE over 3G voice. Ultimately, InteractiV has the ability to make mobile communication more seamless and engaging, benefiting individual users, business owners and operators alike.