For years, cars have no longer just been a machine to transport us from one place to another; they have become an extension of our mobile phones. Getting real-time traffic information, inquiring about the weather forecast or opening the garage door from behind the wheel is now all possible thanks to connected cars. With the Mobile World Congress just around the corner, SEAT Digital Officer Fabian Simmer explains how these technologies help us in our everyday lives and gives us some insights into future trends:

"No longer available" – for collectors of rare classic cars, the unavailability of spare parts can quickly lead to problems. In the worst case scenario, the car may even be forced out of action. Porsche Classic, the division of Porsche dedicated to classic vehicles, has come up with a solution to this problem: namely, producing extremely rare parts that are only needed in small quantities using 3D printers. All parts that are produced using the 3D printing process meet the requirements in terms of absolute fidelity to the original specifications – both from a technical and a visual perspective.

At the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, every millisecond counts. Timekeeping technology has evolved since the early days of Olympics. 2018 is no exception. OMEGA has been the Official Timekeeper of the Games on 27 occasions since 1932. At PyeongChang, OMEGA will once again take on the role of the official timekeeper. 

Through incredible sensor systems, the brand will now provide continuous mea­surements from start to finish of events, meaning that athletes can gain an imme­diate understanding of where they gained or lost time, or where they won or lost points.From the live speed of a single alpine skier - to the formations of an entire ice hockey team – the information provided will add a brand new dimension to every performance. 

Connected Baltics OÜ and Levira can now enable hundreds of thousands of smart devices across Estonia to connect directly using Sigfox LPWAN technology, which provides the most energy and cost efficient IoT connectivity solution to the market.

Tallinn, Estonia, January 31, 2018 - Connected Baltics, the exclusive Sigfox operator of the world's leading provider of connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT), and Levira, the leading digital services provider from Estonia, entered the IoT partnership to offer Sigfox's low-powered connectivity into the Levira's IoT offerings and solutions.

The City of Copenhagen’s IT service provider Koncern IT has selected leading data centre and cloud service provider Proact to provide monitoring and alerts for more than 100 critical components in its complex IT infrastructure, outside working hours. This tailored version of Proact’s Premium Support+ will help Koncern IT reduce incident response times from hours to minutes, ensuring IT operations are supported round-the-clock.

A blue light goes on at 5 o’clock in the morning in the engines warehouse. It belongs to one of the 125 robots that begins its route in one of the workshops at the SEAT factory in Martorell, where it makes up to 2,800 rounds every day. This is how these mobile robots work:

Devices connected to Internet are now part of our everyday life, as well as in small animal clinics. Provet Weight Check Point, developed by Finnish Net Solutions, has been eagerly adapted by clinics.

Internet of Things (IoT) means the expansion of the Internet network into devices and machines. Provet Weight Check Point is doing just that.

Automating a simple, constantly repeating routine is of interest to everyone. If the clinic has 10,000 animals to be weighed each year and each animal’s weighing, saving the weight, and microchip reading takes 1 minute, then automating this step saves 10,000 minutes per year, i.e. 20 working days a year. Managing the job automatically saves both staff time and considerable money.

OriginTrail, European IT company known for its traceability solutions, developed the first blockchain protocol that is purpose-built for data exchange between organizations along the supply chain. It announced a token sale (ICO) starting in January with a mission to bring decentralized data exchange available to every organization. It enables mass adoption which will increase trust and efficiencies on a global scale. 

Smart robots are capable of perceiving and responding to their surroundings. For this purpose, they require sensors that simultaneously detect various stimuli. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed multimodal sensors that respond to motion and touch and thus provide the ideal complement to conventional optical systems.

Virtual reality (VR) often makes the headlines as a game changer in technology, but is actually a niche brand of technology with very limited applications for the wider business community, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.