Innovation

The Power of Partnership: How Startups and Scaleups Help Advance Connectivity (Part 2)

neXus

Lisa Schwab
Director of Strategic Growth Engagement

Dec 19, 2024

Key Points

  • From simplifying complex data workflows to drone flight management, these emerging technology companies have the potential to transform the connectivity landscape. They were highlighted this year in CableLabs' neXus: New Partner Showcase.
  • Charter and Vodafone DE are among the CableLabs members that are celebrating successes with rising innovators. 

Today is the second and final part of the recap of my SCTE TechExpo24 event, neXus: New Partner Showcase coverage. In Part 1, I highlighted some emerging and up-and-coming companies that are poised to drive growth, innovation and transformation in our industry. Today, I am sharing the final groups that I featured this fall:

  • Charter shared their partnership with BugLabs to discuss the power of Low-Code/No-Code, simplifying onboarding and minimizing development for Network as a Service (NaaS) deployment.
  • Vodafone Germany featured their recent collaboration with Flynex and Dimetor to develop DroNet Hub an innovative online platform designed to streamline the planning and management of commercial drone flights for businesses.

Bug Labs and Charter

Charter and Bug Labs announced their new partnership on stage at SCTE TechExpo24, which coincided with Charter’s launch of Bryte IQ. Bryte IQ is a B2B NaaS platform that exposes APIs and functionality to third-party developers to help integrate and create amazing experiences for customers. This enables seamless, consistent deployment of services across wired and wireless networks, which empowers fast, versatile application advancement and adoption.

Within the United States, there are over 33 million businesses. There are around 130 million full-time employees, with 77 percent of those employees working in businesses with fewer than 500 people. The capital prioritization faced by most companies of this size makes it challenging to have many developers on staff.

Charter and Bug Labs, with Bug Labs’ Signalpattern platform, are committed to improving user productivity and agility through software solutions that simplify access to network information.

Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, stated, “In today’s dynamic technology landscape, Signalpattern presents a transformative alternative to traditional application development. By offering discrete, modular workflows that can be accessed independently or in combination, via any interface type — web, chat, audio — Signalpattern reimagines information flow, enabling companies to lower costs and boost operational efficiency."

Signalpattern supports all popular workflow applications, from dashboards to Slack, Teams and even SMS, making it adaptable and easy to use. Users can create personalized visualizations and interactions, seamlessly share them, and access a library of ready-to-use, interactive widgets. This approach accelerates development while ensuring solutions are customized to meet users’ unique needs.

Working together, Charter and Bug Labs are providing end users with tools to quickly and efficiently create and personalize their own solutions, supporting the emerging "composable enterprise" model, where agility and responsiveness are essential for staying competitive. They aim to remove obstacles for users, making the information they need accessible anytime, on any device.

By year end, Bug Labs will introduce a new suite of AI-driven features that enable users to input their job context, role and industry. Signalpattern will then automatically generate interactive visualizations and intuitive user interfaces tailored to their specific needs, further streamlining the creation of customized solutions. These new capabilities allow users to save time, reduce dependency on technical teams and quickly adapt insights for their unique business environments. By simplifying complex data interactions, Signalpattern empowers professionals to make informed decisions faster, boosting productivity and enabling more agile responses to business challenges.

Vodafone DE, FlyNex and Dimetor

Vodafone DE (Germany) in Düsseldorf is working to constantly innovate and find new revenue streams (Beyond Connectivity Solutions) using an open innovation approach. For Michael Reinartz, director of innovation at Vodafone DE, the key to successful innovation is curiosity and openness, on top of a lot of research, trend-watching and analyses.

While they have autonomy in Germany to do their own innovation work, a larger goal is to take the solutions to Vodafone Group in the United Kingdom to serve their other markets.

Michael leads their team of 40 people who focus on the areas of extended reality (XR), data analytics, sustainability, payment/identity/messaging, network-driven innovations, content solutions and drones. They have successfully launched products and services in many of these areas on their own as well as with specialized partners, who are often startups and scaleups. When that additional knowledge and flexibility is required, their department’s cooperation initiative called “UPLIFT” scouts for relevant startups and scaleups that can help solve the problems of their customers — both B2C and B2B.

A recent example of this co-creation is in the drone space, where the flight planning, regulatory compliance, and data analysis is quite complex for companies — and even regulators — to navigate. (It should be noted that operators, drone pilots and regulators are working on a joint regulatory and compliance base with the EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency).

Furthermore, BVLOS (beyond the visual line of sight) is becoming a driving force for the commercial drone market, and mobile connectivity plays a central role for the implementation and commercialization of BVLOS flights.

Imagine a railway company that needs to check their tracks after a big storm or disaster. Or a pilot that needs to check on a remote construction site or bridge, for example, to monitor the status. Or the large wind farms, electricity pylons and industrial plants that require complex inspection and maintenance. Currently, people physically go to these locations to perform this work. This is inefficient, costly, not always possible and slows down the progress that needs to be made in repairing the situation. Other use cases include emergency package delivery, first responder reconnaissance, infrastructure surveys and many more.

Vodafone DE wanted to offer their drone-interested B2B customers a user-friendly platform to plan, execute and analyze their drone flights with ease. Together with companies they pinpointed, FlyNex and Dimetor, Vodafone DE announced their drone offering to business customers, DroNet Hub, DroNet API, and DroNet Connect, earlier this year.

This cloud-based solution can be customized for B2B companies, leveraging the expertise of Vodafone DE’s two partners and their own network capabilities:

Dimetor and the DroNet API

Vodafone DE tapped into Austrian-based Dimetor for the DroNet API. Headed up by Thomas Neubauer and Thomas Wana, Dimetor brings years of experience in aviation, mobile networking and software engineering to deliver highly scalable software to streamline the flight planning and control processes for UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) operations. The DroNet API gathers connectivity prediction and population density data on the ground and sends to the DroNet Hub to allow speedy approval of drone flight schedules.

Vodafone DE and DroNet Connect

Vodafone offers a mobile connectivity plan that ensures drones stay connected for the entire flight and through Vodafone’s 5G network, density and connectivity predictions function as an enabler for the drone solutions.

FlyNex.io and the DroNet Hub

To pull it all together for the DroNet Hub, Vodafone used FlyNex out of Leipzig, Germany, which specializes in digital data collection, analysis and management. They created one platform to manage the complete drone mission process. Headed up by three drone experts and one geoscientist (Andreas Dunsch, Christian Caballero, Michael Petrosjan and Holger Dirkson), FlyNex’s technology analyzes the aerial imagery taken by the drones and monitors them using AI, enabling the quick generation of automated reports and the creation of 3D models or digital twins of monitored areas. This informs the platform in real-time if there are risks that need to be addressed, like breaks in the tracks on a railway or damage to windmill turbines, for example.

The introduction of DroNet Hub marks a pivotal moment in accelerating the use of drone technology across businesses in Germany. This partnership not only highlights the ingenuity of the FlyNex and Dimetor, but also the innovative mindset and commitment of Vodafone DE in creating Beyond Connectivity Solutions for their customers.

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Innovation

The Power of Partnership: How Startups and Scaleups Help Advance Connectivity (Part 1)

CableLabs neXus

Lisa Schwab
Director of Strategic Growth Engagement

Dec 17, 2024

Key Points

  • From AI-driven data insights to AI for frontline workers, these emerging technology companies — highlighted in CableLabs' neXus: New Partner Showcase — have the potential to transform the connectivity landscape.
  • CableLabs members like Mediacom, Charter and Vodafone Germany are excited to share their recent successes partnering with these up-and-coming innovators.

Industries across the world have an interest in working with startups and scaleups for a variety of reasons. Younger companies setting out to improve or revolutionize ecosystems bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas and disruptive technologies that can help established corporations stay competitive, adapt to changing markets and drive innovation within their own organizations. Additionally, newer companies are typically more agile and flexible than larger corporations, allowing them to respond quickly to changes in the market, which can be a huge asset when partnering with our industry.

As the head of Technology Outreach at CableLabs, I am constantly on the hunt for emerging tech companies around the globe that are looking to create change in the connectivity landscape. My mission is to build meaningful bridges between our Technology Vision for the industry, our member operators and external tech communities.

Whether your interest is in partnership, investing, acquisition, trend-watching or deeper collaboration, the companies I will spotlight in this two-part blog series are sure to spark your interest.

This fall, I hosted a session called neXus: New Partner Showcase in person at SCTE TechExpo in Atlanta and virtually to my UpRamp Community. The session highlighted the intersection of new partner technology and our member operators’ offerings. The startups and scaleups I featured have the potential to drive growth, innovation and transformation in our industry.

  • Mediacom joined the stage with Aispire to discuss how they are unlocking the power of customer and network data to build a foundation for AI/ML applications.
  • Frontline worker AI company Anthill highlighted how they help use AI with company data through a no-code platform built for non-technical experts, elevating the work of humans for the AI era.

Aispire.ai and Mediacom

Like many operators, Mediacom has challenges with siloed tools and data. While effective individually, their tools are focused on specific aspects of the network, making it difficult to see the bigger picture.

This is where Mediacom’s partnership with Aispire.ai comes in, providing a comprehensive solution that integrates all these tools and data into a cohesive system. Aispire's Network Intelligence Suite offers network-wide visibility, from individual subscribers to the entire network, using standard protocols. The system is non-invasive and can be added to any operator network. The first goal is to gather data (flow, BGP, SNMP, DNS, operator tags) and correlate it to provide insights and perspectives. From there, Aispire can apply analytics including AI/ML workloads for deep analysis.

The key features and use cases:

  • Subscriber Insights understands consumption by subscriber grouping, service and where that traffic is entering the network from a peering perspective. For example, during a recent Peacock TV live-streaming event, Aispire’s tools helped Mediacom track and analyze the data with ease and speed, providing a comprehensive view of the network's performance in near real time.
  • Peering Insights pulls data from peering routers and correlates it on a per-router, per-peer basis. This helps Mediacom understand traffic patterns and consumption, and even identify issues like unusual drops and spikes on specific routers, individual peers or overall on a service-by-service basis. It also identified target equipment where engineers were able to narrow to an IOS issue. Peering Insights helps operators quickly see what is entering the network from a free or paid perspective and if free peering is taking a more costly route, reducing OpEx.
  • Security Insights provides visibility into traffic entering the network and allows for ad hoc reporting on any layer 3 or layer 4 conversation, including being able to identify subscribers involved in residential proxy events.
  • Video Insights helps Mediacom with their IPTV rollout by analyzing bandwidth usage and predicting future needs, ensuring that all customers have the same experience.
  • Performance Insights finally answers the questions: Is it the customer's problem? The content provider’s problem? Our problem?

Overall, the partnership between Mediacom and Aispire integrates and correlates data from various sources to provide a comprehensive view of the network. This enables Mediacom to address current challenges and prepare for future AI/ML workloads, ultimately identifying performance issues before they impact customers and improving network performance.

The best part? This work paves the way for an incredibly improved customer experience, churn reduction and the customer centricity of the platform maximizes the customer lifetime value. It’s a win-win-win.

To learn more, visit www.aispire.ai or email evan.davis@aispire.ai.

Anthill.co

Anthill is an automation platform designed for the frontline workforce to simplify recruiting, onboarding, training and retention. I met the co-founder, Muriel Clauson-Closs, when I attended Singularity University last April. She gave a talk on the future of work that blew me away. For example, did you know that deskless professions make up over 80 percent of the current workforce and that it is overrepresented by workers over 55? This struck me as I know some of our operators are struggling with losing some of their best talent in the field due to retirements.

Muriel really challenged everyone there on whether we are asking the right questions about AI in the workforce.

Muriel is from Alaska and, growing up, most of the people she knew were working in frontline jobs and out in the field. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we all realized the critical role these workers play, something that Muriel had known for years due to the Ph.D. work she had been doing in this space. She identified an unmet need in the technology advances that knowledge workers get but saw that the frontline workers were being left out. And this is how Anthill was created.

Muriel pointed out a significant population shift expected by 2030, with a projected addition of 12 million new jobs in the United States — but only 1.4 million people available to fill them. This shortage is compounded by the rapid change in required skills due to advancements in AI. Anthill helps organizations manage this by scaling best practices in workforce management through automation.

Anthill's platform offers five key benefits:

  • Efficient management of the frontline workforce
  • Hiring and managing non-English speakers
  • Increasing retention rates
  • Improving safety and compliance
  • Gaining insights from frontline interactions

The platform is built with responsible AI, ensuring data safety and human-in-the-loop review, making it accessible even to non-technologists.

And, as I mentioned above, very relevant to the problems we are seeing with some of our operators, Muriel also shared how Anthill supports companies with an aging field operations workforce. Many industries face this challenge, with the average age of field workers being 56. Anthill's workflow automations include exit interviews to capture valuable experience and knowledge from departing employees. This data is then used to create training content for new workers, providing them with a virtual expert to consult in real time.

Additionally, Anthill adapts to the needs of Gen Z workers, who expect more communication and answers to their questions, by implementing supportive automations.

Anthill's impact is evident in its work with call centers, where they have seen more than 10 percent improved retention rates and reduced management staffing needs by 10 times. They are now looking to partner with the broadband industry to bring these benefits to a new sector.

You can learn more at www.anthill.co and get in touch with them at partnership@anthill.co.

I will be featuring the remaining companies in another blog post this week. Come back to learn about what Vodafone Germany is doing with FlyNex and Dimetor with commercial drone flights and what Charter has cooked up with Bug Labs as part of their Network as a Service (NaaS) deployment.

If you’re an operator working with or investing in an interesting startup, scaleup or a new company from adjacent ecosystems, I would love to hear from you. Please contact me using the button below.

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News

Introducing #Fiterator3: CX, Edge Compute, and Cybersecurity

Fiterator 3

Lisa Schwab
Director of Strategic Growth Engagement

Aug 6, 2018

In late 2017, we graduated three incredible startups from the second Fiterator cohort. While we continue to collaborate with them and help them gain traction within (and outside of) our industry, they’re busy making over 40 deals happen - so it’s time to look into the future and introduce the 2018 Fiterator cohort!

We’re really excited about the technologies our new cohort brings to the table this year, ranging from identity security to AI-enabled VR/chat support to a twist on cloud computing. The teams are also pretty badass, and what’s even more exciting is how they are going to impact member companies and their customers. We’ve been hard at work vetting the technology, teams, and business models of these startups - and we’re excited to introduce them.

We proudly present Fiterator 2018:


Read More on the UpRamp Blog