Augumenta at CEATEC as part of IoT Acceleration Lab

Augumenta was chosen as the only and first ever Finnish participant to join the Japanese IoT Acceleration Lab program and to exhibit at CEATEC technology expo. CEATEC is one of the largest tech events in Asia. This year the expo took place 16.-19. October and registered over 156 000 visitors and 725 exhibitors exceeding all official expectations of the organizers. It was a great privilege to be selected to this program and to be recognized for our expertise in combining the best features of IoT and AR.

A platform to advance IoT initiatives in Japan

The IoT Acceleration Lab is a program between the Japanese government, academia and enterprises to advance and support the deployment of IoT projects in Japan. The program arranges yearly matchmaking events for a selected group of foreign companies to create connections with Japanese organisations and offers an opportunity to showcase their technology at the CEATEC expo. There were several hundreds of applicants for the program this year, with only 40 companies from India, Asia, Israel and Europe finally chosen to participate after a multistep selection process that included a voting by 3000 Japanese enterprises and the Ministry of Economy itself. We were not just the only company from Finland but also the only company in the program providing enterprises with AR expertise and Industry 4.0 AR solutions.

The program started with investor meetings followed by matchmaking between the foreign and Japanese organisations. It was evident that there is a vast interest in digitization initiatives amongst the Japanese industrial manufacturing organizations. The local companies were highly knowledgeable about the type of services and technologies they were looking for and they were very well prepared with defined use cases. We met with several potential customers, partners and other organizations with which we are continuing discussions.

The program continued with a 3-day exhibition session at the expo, which defines itself as an ultimate forum for the co-creation of ultra-smart communities of the future where IoT, robots and AI will all play important roles. We were showcasing our SmartAlert and SmartPanel solutions at the IoT Acceleration Lab exhibition area located in the IoT Town. The expo audience represented a wide variety of Japanese enterprises and organisations. Smart factories, AR, digitization and Industry 4.0 were the keywords leading visitors to this section of the expo with interest to learn and find the best solutions in that area.

We were very pleased with the number of visitors as well as the quality of contacts at the event. The Japanese manufacturers are struggling with many of the same phenomena as our European and US customers. The relatively expensive workforce requires organisations to find new ways to improve the productivity of operations. And with Japan’s ageing population, companies need to rethink how to organize the future work and train their workforce.

Visualized real-time and interactive data using augmented reality and IoT is, without a doubt, one of the key technologies to solve these problems.