Recently, I have been working on a smart building project and needed to find some intelligent hardware product solutions, so I visited the International IoT Exhibition held in Shanghai.In the past, we initiated our digital twin business from various IoT exhibitions. Due to our target customer positioning, although we are a GIS vendor, we generally do not participate in surveying or geographic information forums because digital twins and IoT are the best match.Sometimes, when peers ask me how to promote their products, I suggest they spend some money to try out industry exhibitions where their target customers are located; this can be seen as a path dependency.Unlike before when we participated as exhibitors, now we are participating from the perspective of an integrator. Since our goals are quite clear, we spent a day and basically finished looking at the entire exhibition. The corresponding forums now feel increasingly distant from our main direction.Overall, I have a few noticeable impressions:First, the popularity of exhibitions has somewhat recovered. In fact, we first participated in the Shenzhen station of this IoT exhibition, and compared to that, the scale of the Shanghai station is much smaller. The overall enthusiasm of the Shenzhen exhibition was quite high, with various categories of solutions available; we attended the event while also taking time to learn from other booths.However, due to the pandemic, exhibitions started to become quite deserted, with low input-output ratios, and most of the time turned into exchanges between exhibitors. Due to a contraction in our business, we also stopped participating in these exhibitions.This time at the Shanghai IoT exhibition, the attendance seems to have somewhat recovered to the initial feeling of the pandemic, with quite a number of visitors, but the overall scale is still smaller, which is a bit unsatisfactory.However, participating is still quite good. Recently, the discussions around me have been quite negative, with topics like layoffs, salary cuts, and how to negotiate with the company. It is also necessary to change the environment, see what others are doing, and move around more; this can improve one’s mindset, which is also a gain.Second, AI and energy have become new focal points. During my participation, I noticed a significant change: there were basically no mentions of “digital twins” at the exhibition. In the past, many digital twin vendors participated in IoT exhibitions, with booths carefully decorated, and the exhibitions would also set up sub-forums for smart parks and smart cities. I had signed up for one of the smart park sub-forums; the themes of these forums can reveal the current industry and technology hotspots. The organizers of these industry exhibitions are quite sensitive to changes in industry hotspots.
Forum speeches require extra fees. If the entire company is in a business development stage with new technologies and products to launch, they will strive for exposure and will sign up for these forums. However, if they are in a mature industry with no significant updates to products, they will not participate.I roughly looked at the themes of the forums, which are related to radar, AI, and energy, completely different from the past themes. Thus, in most cases, I could only listen in, but overall, many combinations with AI are still in the early exploration stage, with two main approaches:First, adding some dedicated AI processing chips on the edge; second, using existing data to improve recognition quality with AI. However, the results do not seem to show any significant improvement.As for energy storage, after communicating with some vendors, the main application scenarios still remain in areas with significant electricity price differences and specific industries. Otherwise, customers find it difficult to recoup their investments. Additionally, due to the safety risks of batteries, they are rarely applied in building scenarios, unless a dedicated energy storage area is set up outside the building in the early planning and design stages, which might pass approval.Another category related to GIS, with many participating vendors, is positioning vendors. These products seem to have high enthusiasm for IoT, indicating that these vendors likely gain something from such exhibitions. However, based on our past promotion experiences, indoor positioning is still a niche field, only certain industries have demand, while most other industries show little interest.Third, the value orientation is not very clear.At this stage, when investing in information technology, customers are more concerned about the relationship between investment and return. Currently, most vendors’ solutions cannot clearly explain the specific benefits that a customer would gain from installing this set of equipment.For example, many vendors have proposed energy consumption optimization solutions that involve installing various types of sensors. However, when asked about the actual effects of these sensors, basically no vendor can provide a clear answer. It is possible that after installing these devices, energy consumption could actually increase rather than decrease.
Finally, to add one more point, recently many people have asked me about future development directions. Sometimes I also don’t know how to answer. My suggestion is to attend more high-quality exhibitions; the results will be clear. Most people are quite aware, but they have a bit of a daunting attitude.
