IOTA Foundation and Fujitsu Tangle Up in Manufacturing Auditing Project
August 25, 2018 by Ian Edwards
The IOTA Foundation and Japanese tech giant Fujitsu have partnered up for a proof-of-concept for a manufacturing auditing process. It’s another small piece of good news for IOTA, which has seen the price of its token drop dramatically in 2018.
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Immutable Data Storage for Production Processes
A tweet was put out by Fujitsu’s German division, which said, “Product quality is a critical factor in the success of the #manufacturing industry. Fujitsu shows how product quality is documented with #IOTA.”
Produktqualität ist ein kritischer Faktor für den Erfolg der #Fertigungsindustrie. Fujitsu zeigt, wie Produktqualität mit #IOTA dokumentiert wird. @iotatoken https://t.co/NEipKghpur pic.twitter.com/Aj4k3WQmii
— Fujitsu CE (@Fujitsu_DE) August 24, 2018
In the document the company released, Fujitsu, the fifth-largest IT service provider in the world, revealed its plan to use IOTA’s Tangle system as an “immutable data storage medium” for production audit data in the manufacturing and automotive industries. An accompanying illustration provides a high-level overview of how the system will work:
Fujitsu apparently has big plans for IOTA’s system, as it is planning to make it a “protocol standard,” according to a quote attributed to Leopold Sternberg, a program manager for the company. The Tangle will be used as part of a global open source supply chain network, as well as integrated into Fujitsu’s PalmSecure Palm Vein Pattern Recognition Technology, which is an identity and access management system.
The documents state that IOTA technology will improve quality management, after-sales processes, and customer care management in its manufacturing business. It will also provide “a cryptographically secure source of unified truth” for production data, and will also have security advantages such as reducing the incidence of security breaches, data corruption, and fraud.
MIOTA Price Down, But Foundation Busy
The IOTA Foundation developed a technology based on a mathematical concept called a directed acyclic graph, which it calls the Tangle. Technically different from the blockchains that Bitcoin or Ethereum use, it has possible applications as part of an Internet of Things system. The project raised around $434,000 USD via an ICO in 2015 and has a cryptocurrency that trades on exchanges.
After peaking at over $5 in December of 2017, the price of IOTA has since tumbled more than 90 percent. It recently hit a low of around 41 cents in the middle of August, a price level not seen since November 2017. While the decline has been steep, it is in line with the performance of other altcoins in the 2018 bear market.
Despite the falling price of its token, the German-based foundation has had a fairly steady stream of positive news in 2018. Dr. Sergei Popov, a mathematics professor at the University of Campinas in Brazil, joined the IOTA Foundation Board of Directors a few weeks ago.
IOTA Foundation Busy With Partnerships, Projects
In July, a partner of IOTA, the smart city project +CityxChange received €20 million in funding from the European Commission and was invited to join the E.U. research program Horizon 2020. Tangle technology will be involved in creating mobility, energy, or data marketplaces as part of a smart city digital network.
That news came a month after the IOTA Foundation participated in New Cebit, a European technology conference, as part of Volkswagen’s Future Mobility presentation. It had previously been announced in January that Volkswagen’s Chief Digital Officer, Johann Jungwirth, had joined the IOTA Foundation’s Supervisory Board.
May was also a busy month for IOTA, with the announcement that the foundation had signed a memorandum of understanding with UNOPS to help the organization with its operations. Also that month, IOTA released beta versions of its Trinity mobile wallet for Android and iOS, though the desktop wallet was still in Alpha as of July.
Have your say. Is IOTA’s Tangle system likely to be deployed in more applications? Are you positive about the IOTA Foundation’s future?
Images via Pixabay
