Launched in 2014 as a sustainable alternative to Formula One, the single -seater race series sees 22 drivers representing 11 teams in 16 races across 10 global venues. According to the FIA, around 400 million people tune in to watch the electric cars race.

Like its Formula One cousin, there is a massive machine behind the motorsport, with staff moving an entire data centre and broadcast facility to a new venue every two weeks.

But unlike other major motorsports, Formula E isn’t raced inside stadiums or existing tracks like Silverstone. Instead, races take place in cities, or in parks, or conference centres, which may not be designed for a broadcasting behemoth.

“There is a culture within our organisation that we want to push the envelope,” explains Formula E vice president of technology Eric Ernst.

“Where we go is a parking lot or a grass field in the middle of nowhere, and we have to run a high availability data centre set-up quickly.

“That’s why we need to opt for technologies that guarantee reasonable service level agreements (SLAs) but can be flexible.”

Take the final race of Season 10 of Formula E, which was a double header for the championship. The FE team transformed London’s Excel Centre – normally home to global tech conferences and Comic Con – into a racetrack, fanzone, pit lane, and broadcasting hub. They had a week to carry out most of the turnaround.

One of the biggest challenges, Ernst explains, is setting up a private network in some locations would either be extremely complex, expensive, or have poor environmental outcomes. These considerations led Formula E to run all its broadcasting and connectivity across the public internet, as part of an agreement with Tata Communications.

Global IP backbone

Tata Group’s involvement in Formula E goes beyond its role as a communications partner, with Tata Consultancy Services – another division of the Indian conglomerate – also sponsoring Team Jaguar Racing’s car since 2021

Tata Communications – which is the telecoms division of the firm – is one of only a handful of global Tier 1 networks who together form the internet backbone we all use on a daily basis.

Tier 1 networks exchange traffic with each other on a settlement-free interconnection basis – ie no fees are paid for traffic in either direction. This has long been a key component of keeping the internet public, making it much more accessible.

Formula E’s cousin F1 uses a private network (also coincidentally provided by Tata) to provide broadcasting and connectivity services, linked back to its media and technology centre in Biggin Hill, London. But Formula E took a different road.

In February 2023, Tata Communications was unveiled as the official broadcast distribution provider to the Formula E World Championship in what it described as a “multi-year strategic relationship”.

The agreement sees Tata deliver high-definition, high-resolution and high-speed live broadcast content to viewers around the world as part of Formula E’s remote broadcast production of live races, reducing the environmental impact typical of major live international sports events on TV.

Tata’s software-defined media edge platform delivers more than 160 live video and audio signals from Formula E races across continents within milliseconds, using 26 media edge locations across North America, Europe and Asia.

Production takes place remotely – at the former home of the BBC in London -and it is all carried over the public internet.

Edge-of-the seat racing

Prior to onboarding Tata, Formula E was using what Ernst describes as a “legacy solution” involving more traditional forms of broadcasting – such as satellite – and connectivity.

“Before we came on board, the solution was being forced to fit with the sport,” explains Tata Communications vice president & global head, Media & Entertainment Business Dhaval Ponda.

“When we first started having conversations with Eric, our solution wasn’t as prevalent in the industry. We were quite fortunate because it takes the right sort of CTO to take a stand and adopt a future-proof solution.

“We loved the challenge of providing connectivity to Formula E and embarked on using public Internet leveraging edge-based distribution for video because FE required a unique solution.”

By this, he means Tata was tasked with providing connectivity that could be supplied almost anywhere, without laying specialised infrastructure such as fibre cables or private Wi-Fi networks.

“Tata was one of the few vendors offering a solution that could do everything needed and be deployed at this scale,” adds Ponda.

“Even now, when we talk with other organisations about our partnership, they are often surprised at the scale of what we deliver using public internet and edge-based delivery.”

Ernst agrees, saying that Tata’s global reach and experience of operating in multiple markets also makes it easier when accessing infrastructure. If they had picked another partner, they may have ended up using part of Tata’s network, or would have had to strike individual agreements with other organisations, and this is something Tata Com takes care of for Formula E.

“It was a no-brainer to cut out the middleman,” he adds. “The size of the network, the size of their partners that they have to distribute that last mile of Internet in a reliable way with monitoring with permits is pretty much unique in the market.

“And Tata is unlike any other partner – it is a communications company that has a massive technology company behind it, so we keep on pushing each other.”

Pitfalls in the pitlane

Enterprises will often turn to dark fibre or other private options for large scale connectivity, due to concerns around security, latency and performance. Traditionally, broadcast events would involve some kind of OB setup located on site.

And while there is a tech centre located on site, the editing is all done in London, so for Formula E and Tata, this is where edge computing plays a vital role.

By deploying 26 media edge locations across the US, Europe and Asia, Tata is able to carry out processing much closer to the action, allowing it to reduce latency when transferring from the 85 cameras deployed during a race.

Tata Communications says its media edge cloud is capable of enabling very low latency video processing from any venue using first-mile internet while processing and distributing the video signals to any platform globally with high availability.

Ponda explains: “In terms of cloud and edge deployment, we have a very rigorous way in which we choose the technology. A lot of the infrastructure we own ourselves  and that gives us a very unique sort of capability in terms of leveraging that.

“In terms of the infrastructure planning, design and architecture, we look at how it is deployed globally in a secure manner.

“Secondly, we look at the automation and tools around it. You cannot really operate in an environment where you have a lot of manual intervention because manual intervention is weak and you’re always a step back in terms of how quickly you’re able to fix it. So, a lot of focus goes into automating and we go through scenario analysis to test our network, to see what might break it.”

Finally, he points to teamwork as a key component. Tata is offering a managed service, and its team works closely with Formula E on delivering its platform, including a team on the ground available to assist during race day.

Ernst agrees, saying the two teams had formed a close bond while deploying Tata’s solution.

Regarding security, he explains: “Our biggest security concern is a framework of confidentiality, integrity and availability but, most importantly, the availability part.

“We have secured this with the redundant passes into that cloud network and we go to great lengths to communicate across the teams to make sure that we fully understand the diversity that these routes have.”

Keeping the wheels on

However, there can still be challenges, for example, when major incidents occur on the internet, such as the recent CrowdStrike outage.

“Those are risks you take when you go with this technology,” he admits. “But you’re not necessarily safeguarded if you use dark fibre either – it is a bit of a false economy because a lot of the security concerns happen at the application level now.”

Those applications, he adds, already come with buffers and encryption that offer a level of security irrespective of whether you are operating over a private or public network.

Ernst acknowledges this may not work for everyone. “If I worked in a different sport, with a different audience , maybe dark fibre is something I would throw into the mix. But for what we do, this solution is absolutely the best approach.”

Another key consideration – one that is at the heart of Formula E as an organisation – was to make sure its approach to any technology is as environmentally friendly as possible.

This was achieved by specially designed data centre equipment that can be shipped from location to location by freight with minimal footprint. And anything that can be done remotely helps to reduce the carbon footprint.

“For us, that is just day-to-day,” adds Ernst. “It is built into the ethos of this sport.”

The post Formula E shifts gears: revolutionising broadcasting with edge compute appeared first on TechInformed.

Though one-click buying is undeniably convenient, at least one helpful element of the in-store experience is missing — a store assistant.

In stores worldwide, staff are on hand to answer a simple question: “What do you think would work best for me?”

This is doubly true when it comes to buying skincare or haircare products. Though there are countless articles online about the “best moisturiser for dry skin” packed with ad placements, it takes a long process of trial and error to find the right one for your skin type.

To solve this, consumer goods giant Unilever developed its own AI beauty assistants in-house: BeautyHub Pro and Pond’s Skin Institute.

Available in the Philippines and Thailand, BeautyHub Pro is an AI-powered selfie tool that offers product advice for skincare and haircare on a downloadable app.

By completing a quiz and sharing a selfie, BeautyHub Pro uses its Computer Vision AI to ‘see’ and assess up to 30 visual data points and offer personalised product recommendations from one of Unilever’s brands, such as Dove, Dermalogica, Paula’s Choice, TRESemme, or Vaseline.

Similarly, Pond’s Skin Institute, available in the Philippines and Indonesia, uses users’ selfies to identify skin care concerns and recommends a product from the Pond’s Skin Institute range.

Aaron Rajan, global VP for consumer experience technology at Unilever, says these offerings follow its Beauty & Wellbeing Business Group’s mantra: “Purpose, science, and desire.”

“This means creating purposeful and meaningful brands that positively impact people and the planet, using cutting-edge science and technology to deliver unmissably superior products, and continuing to make our brands relevant and timeless,” Rajan explains.

Getting under the skin

Rajan says the foundation of BeautyHub Pro and Pond’s Skin Institute lies in extensive R&D clinical studies spearheaded by Unilever.

He explains that the team used algorithms trained on a diverse dataset encompassing all skin tones and hair types.

“Data and AI are intrinsically linked,” says Rajan. “Data gives us the power to make informed decisions and drive action based on business insights, while also providing the fuel.

“AI is the engine that transforms raw information into actionable insights and content.”

He adds that the quality of an AI model heavily depends on the quality and relevance of the data training it. So, a thoughtful approach to data collection, preparation, and usage directly impacts the effectiveness of AI systems.

“It’s important that we first develop a solid data foundation. For these personalised beauty experiences, this could be consumer research to better understand our consumers or a knowledge base of information about the products.”

The team will then test the AI before deployment to ensure the quality of the responses.

“We train the model using a mix of deidentified data from various skin and hair types to cover a wide range of needs,” Rajan says.

“The AI then analyses aspects such as hydration, redness, wrinkles, frizziness, volume and colour consistency.”

Quality testing

The team will continually update the AI with new data and feedback to keep its recommendations accurate and effective.

For instance, to ensure the accuracy of results for its algorithm for hair damage, its tool has been trained on a dataset of over 10,000 standardised selfies – gathered with full consent as part of its research and development, and lab images across a diverse range of hair types.

It certified that each image was standardised in style, such as similar head positions and lighting. Then, it was tested on over 150,000 additional data points to check the quality of the responses provided.

To ensure security, Rajan explains: “Unilever reviews all AI-powered tools before deployment with a cross-functional team of experts including privacy, cyber security, and local legal teams to ensure compliance with applicable laws and best practices.”

“Given the speed at which AI is developing, we have faced challenges in moving into this space where there are so many unknowns,” says Rajan. “Working collaboratively with our tech partners, internal tech teams and brands, we have learned together and developed these powerful experiences for our customers.”

Selfie-assessment

Taking a selfie and receiving a product recommendation saves users time and money spent on trialling and testing multiple products.

“Consumers have shared the feedback that the BeautyHub Pro quiz is simple and easy to use, is credible with expert advice, and provides helpful product recommendations,” says Rajan.

He explains that the feedback is reflected in its data. For BeautyHub Pro, a basket size is almost 40% higher than those who shop elsewhere, and consumers are 43% more likely to complete a purchase than those who browse on other channels.

In 2023, more than 80,000 users experienced BeautyHub Pro, and it’s expected to reach more than 3 million people.

Whereas for Pond’s Skin Institute, more than 30,000 consumers have used its AI Skin Expert, and the brand is predicting more than 100,000 users by the end of this year.

For the future, Rajan explains that Unilever is testing how it can use technology and AI to continue providing personalised and immersive experiences.

“We see AI continuing to play an important role in helping consumers learn about their skin and hair concerns and recommend the right products and regimes.

“AI-assisted beauty is something that will stay but will take different shapes and forms.”

The post How Unilever is ensuring inclusivity in its AI-powered beauty experiences appeared first on TechInformed.

Two hundred and six countries will be represented at the Olympics – which runs from 26 July to 11 August – while 184 countries will compete in the Paralympics, between 28 August and 8 September. Overall, around 15,000 athletes will compete in almost 900 events.

On top of this, there are broadcasters from across the world who will descend on Paris, who need robust connectivity to deliver their feeds back to their home nations. And millions of spectators who will want to use their mobile phones to post about the event, buy products, or track down their hotels.

That’s not to mention the four billion people expected to tune in around the world.

To ensure all of this goes off without a hitch, organisers turned to France’s biggest telco, naming Orange as connectivity partner for the 2024 Games.

Orange wants to deliver “the most connected competition in Olympic Games history”. Explaining the scale of the task Orange’s project lead for Paris Games Alexis Berger says:

“If you’re a fan, at home, a referee, organiser, journalist, you cannot live your passion and do your job without Orange. A referee cannot start a game if Orange is not ready. All of this is through our network.”

Private 5G over Wi-Fi

The last Olympics was held in Tokyo in 2021, having been delayed from the previous year due to Covid. Due to the shadow of the Covid pandemic, attendance was much smaller than organisers had planned.

Fearing connectivity challenges, the IOC and Tokyo organisers had turned to five telecoms providers to ensure a robust network that included both 5G and Wi-Fi. But in Paris, bosses chose a different route.

To power the Olympic connectivity, Orange is set to run a private 5G network throughout Paris.

“In France, we don’t use Wi-Fi, we use mobile networks,” explained Orange Events chief technology and information officer Bertrand Rojat.

The 5G network will provide capacity across 32 spots and 120 official sites across the city. It will also power the Olympics Broadcast Service, which will produce 11,000 hours of live TV.

“One thing that’s very important. In France, we don’t use Wi-Fi, we use mobile networks. If we go to a stadium and use the mobile, Wi-Fi is not the natural choice. So, the Wi-Fi in the venues that we are deploying is for media, for the organising committee, for all the technical staff.

“For the public, this is why we have enhanced all our mobile coverage, to enable mobile connectivity to all spectators including in big stadiums, all using our mobile network.”

Private 5G is a network that operates separately from Orange’s commercial network – a dedicated service constructed on a 6km stretch along the Seine for boating events, and in several venues including the Stade de France, Arena Bercy and Paris La Défense Arena.

The network uses the “standalone” version of 5G (5G SA), which means not just the radios but also the core of the network – the control centre for the entire system – has been upgraded beyond 4G.

This allows Orange to leverage network slicing capabilities that are one of the much-touted benefits of 5G SA. Slicing means operators can reserve a part of the network – called a slice – for a dedicated use case, guaranteeing performance on this virtual slice.

Orange’s private network solution, however, will use “dedicated infrastructure which runs alongside the commercial network,” explained Rojat. “We are using different frequencies, we are using different infrastructure, just to make sure we can on one side provide the quality of service required for the public and on the other side we can meet what is required for TV broadcast.”

Gold standard broadcasting

The Olympics is one of the largest broadcasting events in the world, with nearly four billion viewers expected to tune into scenes from Paris this summer.

To guarantee the best footage, more cameras will be deployed in Paris 2024 than at any previous Games. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies alone will feature almost 500 cameras, compared with around 60 used at previous events. Around 200 of these will be smartphone cameras – Orange will use the Samsung Galaxy S24 handset – located on ships and boats forming a procession along the Seine, said Rojat.

These will leverage Orange’s private 5G network, which has been configured to have 80% of its throughput on the uplink. The French telco opted to partner with Cisco for both the core and radio access network, with hardware featuring Intel’s chipsets.

This marks a deviation from Orange’s public network, which is primarily supplied by traditional telecoms vendors Ericsson and Nokia.

An even bigger challenge, perhaps, will be at the Marina de Marseille, where the sailing events are set to take place. Vessels off the south coast of France will be fitted with cell antennas to screen competitors racing for gold.

Events like this require low latencies, which, according to telecoms vendors, is one of the key benefits of 5G SA. They also need high throughput to upload ultra-high-definition content to the production centre – known as the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC).

“This is why it is a fully separate network,” said Rojat. “We are using the full scope of what a 5G standalone network can provide, where we prioritise also the uplink.”

Media support

Despite Rojat’s earlier dismissal of Wi-Fi, it will feature at the event, but primarily to support “media partners, for the organising committee, for all the technical staff” he explained.

“It is a B2B Wi-Fi network. For the public, this is why we have enhanced all our mobile coverage.”

The network is underpinned by 100 gigabits, 60-site IP network featuring around 100,000 “internet plugs” connecting the media, cash machines, ticketing machines and other functions. It will also support around 10,000 access points.

Some sites will be temporary – around 50 moveable cell sites will be used during the Olympics – but Orange is also involved in permanently upgrading several venues, including the Stade De France.

The 100G network will plug into the IBC and the Technical Operations Centre, which are the two primary hubs for tech at any Olympic games.

Push-to-talk

In addition to the networks, Orange will also provide a push-to-talk (PTT) communications service that will be enabled on 13,000 devices.

The PTT service operates like a traditional walkie-talkie, except over mobile devices.

The goal is for staff members, the Olympic committee, athlete teams, volunteers, health and safety, and security teams to be able to communicate easily and securely.

The PTT devices are set to be connected with priority over the public network using a “special mechanism” on the company’s 4G network.

It is the first Olympics event where a PTT service has been run over an operator’s existing mobile network instead of a TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) network. TETRA is a narrowband communications standard for two-way radio communications.

“It will be an Orange mobile network that will guarantee the availability and security of the communications,” added Rojat. “We will use mobile devices, too, which is a true innovation at the core of what Orange does.”

Under questions from journalists who joined the Orange press briefing, the French telco declined to share how much investment it had put in to upgrade its network ready for the Olympics, but putting this all together has been a “huge operation” the firm acknowledged.

Overall, a dedicated team of 1,000 staff has worked on the project and Orange began recruiting internally, from across its operations both in France and in other markets, to prepare for the opening ceremony.

“We think of the Olympics as an event with all of this tradition,” Berger explained. “But there is also a great history of innovation, some social, some in sports, and many of them technical.

“The technical innovations we have put in place are making those dreams of yesterday possible today. This, to us, is the essence of Paris 2024.”

The post Orange promises gold standard connectivity for Paris Olympics appeared first on TechInformed.

According to the deputy service manager at Refuge’s contact centre, Ellen Patterson, the charity’s network of employees and volunteers delivers 147 support sessions every day.

“Around 70% of the people we speak to are survivors of domestic abuse,” Patterson explains, “and 10% are from third parties – friends and neighbours etc and another 10% are from professionals from a variety of sectors who are usually looking to make a referral. Around 139 referrals are made to Refuge each week.”

In 2019 the UK government’s Home Office awarded Refuge the contract to run the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline as its sole provider – a role it had previously jointly run with allied charity Women’s Aid.

As well as the initial four-year £1.2m contract, Refuge secured additional funding to develop new digital and mobile resources to support survivors. This led to the introduction of a live chat service in 2020 and an improved email support service, which now sees the team make 430 supportive emails per month.

During this period, Refuge also introduced a dedicated referral line, so that women can enquire specifically about refuge vacancies, as well as a BSL interpreter line.

According to Patterson, while the extra platforms were a welcome addition, it did lead to a bolt-on approach in terms of networking infrastructure. Legacy systems included a disparate collection of separate applications which provided telephony, chat and reporting, including Horizon Collaborate and ResourceConnect.

“Just because of the capacity within our team and the funds that we had available, all of these things had been kind of tacked on as we’ve gone along,” she recalls.

“We got to a situation where all these platforms became quite difficult to manage, it was taking time to navigate each platform for each different part of our service – both from a management perspective but also for the helpline advisers,” she adds.

The time taken to manage the navigation of this set-up, remembering the different logins for different platforms etc, was also taking away from time supporting survivors and it prompted the charity to consider a contact centre solution capable of “bringing everything into one place.”

Another reason to switch to a cloud-based comms system was the need to cater for remote workers: during and after the pandemic Refuge staff and volunteers had transitioned from a central contact centre in London, to working remotely or hybrid, from anywhere in the country.

“We largely work remotely now, and it’s good to be able to draw from a wider pool of experienced people – but managing this can be challenging,” says Patterson.

“Workers need a dedicated space where no one else can hear, no one can come into the room, it’s confidential. The technology needs to be reliable in terms of sound deadening and ensure that the line is clear – it’s important that someone on the other end of the phone who is in a really difficult situation trusts that this line is secure and can hear you properly.”

Another requirement was to be able to keep the continuity of the number: 0808 2000 247, as Patterson explains. “Even when the contract changed, and Women’s Aid ceased to be involved the number has stayed the same. Some people commit it to memory so it was important that it couldn’t change.”

Cloud-based CX

Refuge selected Genesys Cloud CX platform, powered by AWS Cloud, which offers a full range of contact centre capabilities for remote and on-prem workers from a single platform.

Explaining why Genesys won the contract over other providers at the CX orchestration vendor’s London customer event Xperience last month, Patterson explained that, at first, they thought that the technology was beyond their budget.

“It was clear that we had champagne tastes on a beer budget! Fortunately for us (and for the survivors we support) Genesys made it possible for us to close that gap.”

She added that the fact Genesys made the effort to speak their language was also important. “It may not seem that significant but the difference between referring to our service users as ‘customers’, or even ‘victims’, instead of the survivors we know them to be was very important to us.”

Refuge’s internal team worked closely with the Genesys professional services team to implement the helpline on the platform, which the charity reports has been “highly configurable”, with “a minimum of software development needed.”

Patterson adds that staff training took place over a couple of weeks, with no real issues in terms of user take-up.  “Our team are incredible and do a difficult job, some of them for over 20 years. So, while it is easy to get ingrained in the process that we had and there was some anxiety around learning to use a new system, as soon as they start using it, they found it intuitive and not scary at all.”

Visibility

According to Patterson, there are several advantages to moving to a cloud-based contact centre system including the additional visibility of being able to see instantly how many callers are waiting and where they are calling in from.

“If a call drops while we’re speaking to a survivor, for whatever reason, we want to make sure that we can get the number back to call them (unless they’ve withheld their number) and that’s easier now we can see the customer journey.”

Managing the flow of calls and the type of calls better also has benefits for helpline staff and their managers too, says Patterson.

“We’re now able to create different pots of callers because the new system gives us more visibility as to who is calling and from where and how long they’ve been waiting.”

She adds that if a support service worker is on their last ten minutes it might not be the right time to take a call from a survivor calling in for the first time; but it may be long enough to take a call from a professional looking to make a referral.

“We can also now see if a member of staff has been on three days of taking phones every single day – which can be exhausting –  as a manager I can now make that decision to give them a break by moving them onto one of our written platforms,” she adds.

The system is also better able to deal with language barriers. The previous system did not allow Refuge to take three-way calls, and non-English-speaking survivors were referred to an interpreter service. “We would have to give them the survivors’ number – but that function now sits with us. And we hold all the data ourselves,” Patterson explains.

The system has been live now for just over a month and Patterson says that it is on track to increase the number of interactions it has with service users by as much as 30 to 40%. “That’s 300 or 400 more survivors a week being supported as a result,” she adds.

An eye on AI

Now Patteson says that the Refuge team is firmly focussed on consolidating its implementation although it is looking at a range of future AI-enabled possibilities, that it hopes to embrace eventually.

In the US,  the National Domestic Violence Hotline – another Genesys Cloud user – is using selective, survivor-centric AI support to keep pace with a threefold increase in daily calls, chats and text.

Survivors phoning in have the option of providing a voice bot with non-identifiable demographic data and the outcomes they want to get out of the conversation, taking care to use their words and language. That information is then presented on screen when the call is routed to help prepare the support worker.

For Patterson, these sorts of applications are a little further down Refuge’s roadmap  “We’re a little bit nervous about using AI – the inherent biases of those who write the data, build on that and learn. But when we first started talking to Genesys and the things it has on the roadmap for the future – then to not consider AI would be a disservice to our users

“It’s a big thing to pick up the phone, for instance, and speak to someone about something so personal and it may be that AI can help them get a little bit of info first to understand what their options and avenues are before they feel ready to speak to a person. We never want AI to replace that human interaction, but I can see a place for it.”

The post Refuge’s contact centre moves to the cloud appeared first on TechInformed.

The club first announced its preference to build on the Bramley-Moore Dock site in Liverpool in 2017 and confirmed plans to build the new 52,000-seater the following year, with main contractor Laing O’Rourke beginning work in July 2021.

For Everton’s director of technology Phil Davies, a new stadium offered an opportunity to provide fans and staff with the best matchday experience possible by freeing the club from some of the restraints inherent in operating from a century-old building.

“Retro-fitting modern technology on stadiums built hundreds of years ago is a challenge,” he tells TI. “They were built at a certain point in time, so they don’t really have the necessary infrastructure to support modern systems that require an enormous amount of space and power.”

In the modern world of events, connectivity is “no longer just a nice-to-have” he adds.

For Everton, the new venue is not solely about football – though that remains the primary function – with plans to hold other events, such as music gigs, once the stadium is live.

“It is about football. It is about concerts. It is about opening up the stadium for restaurants and premium bar experiences, or for stadium tours and immersive experiences,” explains Davies.

“Moving into a new stadium, the club wants to get people in earlier, to spend more, and to have a completely different matchday experience.”

Everton worked closely with user groups, including carrying out several surveys, to build a modern stadium that could cater for the matchday experience demanded by the modern fan.

According to Davies, connectivity was high on the list. “Fans want to be able to interact socially with the game. You have traditional fans who maybe won’t use their phones during a match, but for younger fans expect that ability to interact and connect while inside the venue.”

Getting key stakeholders on board early was also important. Everton set up a risk committee for the stadium project to look at the risks and challenges not just on matchday, but also during other events, and how these could be overcome.

“We mapped the potential pain points out and then mapped the technology against each of these,” he explains. “What are the expectations of the fans, the players, the media, the stewards and police? We mapped them into different user groups and journeys and built the technology around that.

“We got all the stakeholders in a room and looked at what we wanted to deliver and worked with them to develop strategic pillars, before we went into the design phase. And that is where HPE Aruba forms quite a central piece.”

Link-up play

Last month, Everton announced that enterprise network infrastructure provider HPE Aruba would become the club’s official connectivity supplier, contracted to supply a secure and intelligent networking infrastructure solution across the footprint of the Blues’ new home.

The new network will include switches, access points, Wi-Fi and wired network management and security software, as well as network design, management and monitoring services.

The contract isn’t just limited to the Bramley-Moore Dock site, with HPE also set to work with Everton on its six other locations.

Speaking with TI about the agreement, HPE Aruba Networking CTO UK and Ireland Simon Wilson called the agreement a “great feather in our cap”.

It isn’t the firm’s first stadium gig, having fitted out Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium with connectivity when it went live in 2019. Aruba also recently announced an agreement to support Barcelona’s new renovated Camp Nou stadium, scheduled for completion in 2026.

Wilson believes that Tottenham’s new stadium is a flagship example of one that has been future proofed, with everything driven through the network.

“What that means is you can innovate in every area of the stadium and encourage fans to spend more time there both before and after the game. They can make a full day of it.”

Retrofitted and older stadiums often take an overhead approach, with antennas located above the fans among the stadium’s rafters. But this, adds Wilson, leads to a lot of reflections, especially when using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi – which only has three channels available.

This leads more fans to connect to the 5GHz band, but this has limited spectrum, meaning not every fan gets a good experience.

“Wi-Fi 6 will help with this,” Wilson explains. “The big advantage of a newly built stadium is you can future proof it. You can plan the technology and how it might develop in future while you’re designing the stadium.”

For this reason – as well as ease of access – Everton and HPE opted to use under seat access points (APs)  instead of the downward facing ones found in other stadiums.

There will be one AP for every 75 seats in the stadium long with several above ensure the connectivity is as reliable and accessible as possible.

“We’ve proven in pretty much every environment that the under-seat model is optimal,” explains Wilson.

“You get a higher density of access points, you get less interference, and it makes implementation and upgrading much easier than having to climb into a gantry. Also, it is more aesthetically pleasing than putting them above your head.”

Key to future proofing the technology – and linking it with Everton’s other sites – is building a cloud-native infrastructure that can be managed remotely.

The solution will be built on HPE’s Greenlake platform, which allows users to deploy and manage resources across private and public clouds while retaining control of their data and over how they consume and manage services, HPE claims.

“This will offer a lot of flexibility for Everton, but it also can help the team identify opportunities for improvement or to fix problems quickly,” says Wilson.

“It comes with built in telemetry which we can then compare with other sites, which can all be managed from Aruba Central,” he adds.

Game on

Everton selected HPE after an open tender process, which saw several major tech firms whittled down to just two frontrunners. This was carried out during Covid, with all the concurring concerns around supply chains.

“We worked out our key goals and put out an RFI [request for information],” explains Everton’s Phil Davies.

So, what does an organisation like Everton put into an RFI of this scale?

“Key was the connectivity element, and security was also a big concern for us,” Davies explains. “Visibility over the network was also really important, and making sure the infrastructure sits in the cloud, so we can see what is happening across all sites at all times, but especially during the matchday window.”

Davies needed to be able to centrally manage the network from Everton’s head office, located in the century-old Royal Liver Building on Liverpool’s historic waterfront.

“It’s not just the stadium – we are spread over 10 sites. We need to centralise our network because we run a small team but we need to be able to see what is happening across the entire network.”

Besides the new stadium, and traditional home Goodison Park, Davies and his team looks after networking in other sites including the club’s Finch Farm training ground, the Liver Building HQ, several community campuses across Merseyside, and even a school the club runs, located next to Goodison.

Sustainability was also a key consideration. On matchday, Everton will see over 50,000 data points flock to the new stadium, as well as managing activities going on at the other sites.

With music gigs,  this number could be higher. Yet for the other six days in a week, there will be less people in the ground, meaning the network needs to be scalable and flexible, and power sensitive for those times where it is less busy.

“We were really impressed with HPE and their approach to scalability, as it is really hands on. The company  invited us to see the technology in similar arenas and they will act much more like a partner.”

The Everton Stadium is due to open for the 2025-26 Premier League season and will be one of the UK’s host venues during the UEFA Euro 2028 championships.

For Davies, establishing the network and testing it before the season’s end—when Everton will host several trial events with fans—is a pressing yet thrilling deadline. His team will be handed the stadium in December, and then the implementation begins.

“We are on schedule – in fact, maybe a little bit ahead,” he smiles. “We are transitioning from the old network to the new cloud-based one across all of our sites, and we are already working on the operational plans for kick-off.”

With the new stadium will come an updated Everton app which aims to boost the experience of fans attending games. It is part of a wider digital overhaul at the club.

“It is important we get the experience right from day one,” he concludes. “It is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. With everything we are putting in place, we think fans will be surprised, but they will also really enjoy the experience.

“You want your home stadium to be a fortress and I’ve been into the new ground a lot, and at pitch level, it is quite intimidating – that is nice. If we can bring that experience for the fans, then from an atmosphere perspective, it will really meet expectations.”

The post Everton FC’s tech director reports on team’s new “future proof fortress” appeared first on TechInformed.

But the sector is undergoing a revolution, thanks to the growth of streaming services, which have allowed those at the forefront to capture real-time data around viewing figures and patterns which can be used to guide investment decisions.

Data in this sector isn’t a new thing – traditional cinemas have heavily relied on data to thrive. But what kind of data do they collect now, and how can analytics help enhance their operations?

At Qlik Connect in Florida, TechInformed caught up with Nordic entertainment company Nordisk Film to hear how it used Qlik’s data analytics engine to boost productivity and achieve significant cost savings.

Big data in Little Denmark

One of the oldest movie production companies still in operation, Nordisk Film has been a cornerstone of the Nordic entertainment industry since its founding in Copenhagen in 1906.

Now owned by the Egmont Group, Nordisk Film has expanded its operations across Scandinavia and beyond, encompassing movie production, distribution, and even the largest cinema chain in Denmark and Norway.

Additionally, Nordisk Film is the official distributor of Sony PlayStation consoles in Scandinavia, produces computer games and operates a significant gift card business.

As a diverse portfolio company, Nordisk Film collects data from various business ventures. According to Mikkel Hecht Hansen, head of business intelligence at Nordisk Film, the company gathers in-house data such as cost and revenue analysis.

“We also collect external data from content that is publicly available on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or other platforms. We manage the interactions, likes, and comments on our content on social platforms. But also, how much our movies are talked about in public areas and public groups,” he said.

But collecting so much unstructured data comes with its own set of challenges.

Houston, we have a (data) problem!

Previously, Nordisk Film faced several challenges in managing and utilising its vast amounts of data. The company needed to ensure that its creative processes were informed by data-driven insights, from understanding movie performance to optimising cinema operations.

However, the unstructured nature of much of its data, particularly opinion and sentiment analysis from social media and public reviews, posed significant hurdles, especially for gamers.

“Gamers are very talkative, and they’re very emotionally connected to the computer games they like. But the biggest problem we have on the gaming side is that people use a lot of irony,” he explained. This made it difficult to gauge genuine sentiment in gaming reviews.

According to Hansen, the sheer volume of cinema reviews was also overwhelming: “Each time people buy a movie ticket, we send out a survey. People are actually quite good at responding, but that’s too much information to get a handle on. There could be 50,000 reviews, each with a lot of information.”

Recognising the need for a robust data analytics solution, Nordisk Film embarked on a journey to find the right tool to address these issues.

Eureka!

Enter Qlik, a data analytics platform that Nordisk Film chose after a strategic vendor selection process in 2018. According to the entertainment company, the platform’s flexibility and existing competencies within Nordisk Film made it an ideal choice.

Nordisk claimed that another deciding factor was Qlik’s ‘enterprise-ready setup,’ which allowed for complete control over data sharing and access.

“We have six different business units. Some of them are in open competition with other companies, and we need to ensure to the authorities that they don’t gain any unfair access to data that they shouldn’t have access to,” says Hansen.

The implementation of Qlik transformed Nordisk Film’s data processes. By centralising data ingestion and analytics, the company was able to provide daily operational dashboards to a large user base, enabling informed decision-making across various business units.

One notable success was reducing cinema energy consumption, achieved through a detailed analysis of energy usage patterns.

“We can see the energy consumption on all our different sites, and we use that analysis for our ESG so we can find how much carbon we’re actually consuming. But it was the analysis and dashboards we created in Qlik that enabled us to find out we were turning on the lights in cinema screens hours before the screens were actually utilised,” he adds.

By fine-tuning when it turned on the power in cinema screens, Nordisk Film was able to save 10-15% on energy consumption. As such, it is now working on using the same strategy to decide when to cool and heat its different sites.

Cloudy, with a chance of migration

Moreover, Qlik’s cloud migration further streamlined operations, allowing Nordisk Film to maintain a small but efficient team to manage the platform. This shift also facilitated remote access to data, enhancing collaboration across different regions. Hansen explains:

“We are three people maintaining this entire platform for six different business areas with 600 users. We have over 300 different apps and solutions on the platform. So, we need to minimise the time we spend on maintenance service and stuff like that — none of which is a problem in the cloud.”

At the same time, with people located across Scandinavia, migrating everything to the cloud makes it much easier for their team to access data. “As long as they can connect to the internet, they have access to our systems.”

Hansen explains that maintaining a data warehouse platform on an internal system makes little sense when almost all of the systems his team interact with are migrating to the cloud.

“We’re actually sort of like a hybrid setup because we have a lot of our production systems still onsite. But at the same time, I see almost all of the internal Nordisk Film systems we work with are either on the way to the cloud, in the cloud, or being changed to SAS or PAS solutions. I need to follow the trend and the trend is every interaction surrounding my ecosystem is migrating in some way to the cloud.”

Mission impossible?

Egmont’s strategy to focus on users meant pivoting the types of data they collected. But for Hansen, the most difficult challenge with Nordisk’s transformation was convincing everyone to come along for the ride.

“We must know how the consumption of our users is actually changing because we’re moving into a digital world; they’re changing from magazines and books to streaming,” he says.

“We had to fight the “We’ve done this before; we know our consumers” sentiment that was very strong within our organisation. We had to prove the need to be data-driven because, from a strategic point of view, things are changing very rapidly. We need to understand why.”

Hansen’s biggest challenge was to gain the organisation’s trust and demonstrate the value of the new processes. His team achieved this by creating organic use cases in areas they knew people were interested in or had the skillset to work with and showcasing them internally — but that wasn’t enough.

“It was like a two-front war; we had to find it from both sides. We started looking for the best possible use cases that we could produce for them. Slowly but surely, people started building solutions and assets on the platform. In half a year, it changed from us trying to push things to being overwhelmed by demand.”

Hansen explains that although many people are initially resistant to change, worried about their jobs being replaced, frustrated with changes to their workflow, or feeling as though they are losing ownership of their work, they eventually become ambassadors once they can tangibly see its value.

He suggests that without the Qlik software, the change would have been slower and less exponential. Indeed, it would have been harder to fight for it to happen at all.

“I think that without a central platform, different parts of the business would have attempted to create their own solutions, but they would have been small in scale. Without a centralised platform, implementing Power BI in these small pockets would have been time-consuming and less successful.”

Whilst at Qlik Connect, we also caught up with another Qlik customer, Centrica’s director of data and engineering, for a coffee.

Back to the future

According to Hansen, Nordisk Film is well-positioned for future growth with Qlik’s data analytics capabilities. The platform has enabled the company to build a more stable analytical framework, particularly for complex areas like its gift card business, where fraud detection has been significantly improved.

As the entertainment industry evolves, Nordisk Film is prepared to leverage data analytics to stay ahead of trends and make informed production and distribution decisions.

In addition to optimising operational efficiency and driving down costs, Nordisk Film’s ability to understand and predict audience preferences has enabled it to remain competitive.

“Otherwise, the audience will consume some of the other entertainment products out there. We’re competing for time, and it’s getting harder and harder to convince people that the great content you have is actually something that they should spend time on,” Hansen explains.

That’s a wrap!

Nordisk Film’s journey with Qlik offers valuable lessons for the wider entertainment and film industry. Hansen’s key takeaway is the importance of a strong data foundation and the need for effective change management to drive cultural shifts towards data-driven decision-making.

“You need to either read up on or get help with change management. Because this is not really a technical process. It’s a people process,” he says.

By embracing advanced analytics, companies can gain a competitive edge, optimise operations, and better understand their audiences. But Hansen explains it all amounts to nothing if the data is good to begin with.

He adds that despite the advances in AI across all sectors, none of the advanced analytics that people would benefit from could be achieved if time and energy aren’t invested in building a strong data foundation: “You can’t do any of the fancy stuff if you don’t have complete control over the boring bits.”

“It’s a cultural thing we need to work on continuously. Otherwise, it will never be part of business. It will be a white elephant project that people spend enormous amounts of time and energy on, but when you look at the data, no one is utilising it, still using all the small Excel sheets that they did before.”

Read about what else TechInformed learnt this year at Qlik Connect here.

The post How Nordisk Film’s data strategy drives box office success appeared first on TechInformed.

The wider charity was founded in the US in 1980, but Make-A-Wish UK was launched in 1986. It relies on the time and efforts of internal staff and, perhaps even more so, a network of volunteers and charitable partners to deliver its wishes. Make-A-Wish UK granted more than 1200 wishes in its last published financial year.

However, behind this success was an ageing technology stack that relied on on-premises IT and outdated tools that couldn’t meet the demands of a post-COVID era.

For UK technology and workplace lead Oliver Wilson, technology was at the heart of how Make-A-Wish could continue bringing joy to its families at similar scales despite those challenges — but that meant changing the legacy infrastructure.

“We wanted to implement a bring-your-own-device strategy to empower our amazing volunteers, but we knew we needed a better day-to-day performance from our IT infrastructure; Microsoft Cloud provided that.”

In the middle of the pandemic, in August 2021, Wilson joined the charity, tasked with overhauling its legacy IT systems infrastructure to make it more scalable and manageable.

“We still had boxes in cupboards doing a lot of our compute functions, managing our legacy donor management and finance systems, and these were all held on-prem,” he explains.

“It was operating a dated Hypervisor virtual system in Reading, UK, which had been sufficient leading into the pandemic but couldn’t provide the scalability needed to support staff now working remotely.”

The charity had also used managed services providers in the past that hadn’t delivered what Make-A-Wish needed to support its network of staff, volunteers, and wish-makers.

This, he adds, was one of the biggest challenges for any partners who came on board: supporting a fluctuating set of volunteers who play such a vital role in all the charity’s operations. In the wake of Covid, this need was amplified.

“Many of the children we are dealing with have really complex needs,” adds Wilson. “So, we couldn’t go to houses as easily, which required a massive pivot so we could continue delivering wishes.”

Head in the cloud

The charity partnered with UK-based managed service provider Foundation IT to build out its cloud infrastructure and guide its digital strategy. Make-A-Wish picked Microsoft 365, and Microsoft’s cloud VDI service, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), was also selected to enable remote work and provision virtual workspaces for volunteers.”

For Wilson, the combination of the Microsoft cloud solution with Nerdio’s Manager for Enterprise platform provided the ideal management platform for Azure Virtual Desktop due to its automation capabilities and scalability of virtual machines.

“Carrying out a project like this at a charity isn’t like doing it at a giant corporation,” he explains. “You can’t just pick a platform and roll it out — you have to go through several phases of vendor selection.”

He acknowledges that one key consideration was cost. Every penny spent on things like upgrading IT systems is a penny that, in a sense, could have been spent granting a wish. So, for Wilson and his partners at Foundation, getting the most out of any vendor partner was vital.

“We could have gone for an all-singing, all-dancing platform from a massive organisation,” he says. “But a lot of them were too big for what we needed, and they wouldn’t give us the scalability, flexibility or the cost savings that Nerdio does.

“The big question was, can one of my team go in there and easily spin up new resources within the Azure infrastructure when needed? With the legacy infrastructure, that wasn’t possible.”

Cloud computing is infamously expensive, something Wilson agrees with. But for Make-A-Wish, that just meant being very careful about managing cloud costs, achieved by tailoring the infrastructure to the use case at the time.

“We could have a fairly entry-level system in the cloud, but knowing that, if all of a sudden our staff hit that limit, it is going to scale with the use case and workload in the moment was vital.”

Nerd is the word

It was Foundation IT, the charity’s managed infrastructure services partner, who first introduced Wilson to Nerdio.

So, who is Nerdio? Managed services provider Adar Inc. launched the Chicago-based Microsoft partner as one of its products. However, it spun it off into its own entity in 2020 when the parent company was acquired by private equity.

Nerdio partners with MSPs and enterprises to deploy, manage and optimise Microsoft services, including products like Microsoft 365, Azure, and Intune.

Speaking to TI, Nerdio SVP customer and partner success Susie Driscoll said the company has found that as more and more enterprises shift to the cloud, they are also looking to develop their infrastructure to be more flexible and compatible.

“Our tool allows for a lot of those efficiencies,” she adds, “not only from a cost-savings perspective but also from a time-saving element that benefits a lot of our customers enormously.”

Nerdio boasts an extensive partner ecosystem that includes over 1000 channel partners and more than three million users spread across more than 50 countries, and this opens a lot of opportunities for the vendor to come on board with these renewal projects. The size of the customer can range from those with less than ten users to those with thousands.

Of Make-A-Wish, she adds: “These are the kind of stories that feel really good because you can see how this tooling drives efficiencies and how this can directly impact the children and those who need more help.”

Prior to this project, Nerdio had worked with a few other charitable organisations, but the kind of scaling needed by Make-A-Wish gave the vendor a clear business goal.

“We really wanted to focus on understanding what that business goal meant,” adds Driscoll. “Then we could say, based on that, here are the key features we really want to home in on that will help resolve those challenges. Then we start to work closely with the client and their tech partner to build that out.”

This meant leveraging Nerdio Manager to spin up VMs in Azure and adding Nerdio’s Unified Application Management tool to further improve efficiency in providing volunteers with the resources they need to deliver wishes.

UAM allows IT to automatically pre-install applications on a machine rather than relying on the first user login to cue a group policy. In doing so, Wilson can equip a volunteer’s designated desktop with the exact tools they need — ranging from Chrome to Creative Cloud and everything in between.

Partnerships

“We wouldn’t be able to deliver the change that we have without our partners like Foundation or Nerdio,” chips in Wilson. “Ultimately relying on a lot of goodwill, potentially getting access to software support that might have otherwise been a chargeable benefit. We have to run quite a lean team, and so some of the bigger solutions on the market weren’t tenable for us.”

One of Wilson’s biggest challenges was operating on the tightest budget while still trying to bring the best user experience to Make-A-Wish’s army of staff and volunteers. He recognises that creating complex systems or additional application portals is an additional obstacle to delivering wishes — something no one at the Foundation wants.

“Nerdio just hides in the background — our users don’t even know it exists,” he explains. “And if there are any issues, we contact Foundation first, who will triage the process. The amount of support they give us out of scope makes it the kind of relationship we value so much.”

For Nerdio’s part, the company had invested heavily in its customer success team around 18 months ago. Driscoll, who leads this team, adds: “We try to find synergies with our customers and focus on our support team to make sure they have the responses that customers need to guide them.”

Wilson says there was a “massive hearts and minds piece” during the shift to the cloud, and the adoption of Azure and Nerdio’s platform aimed at convincing those who had been burned by previous, less successful attempts to upgrade the tech stack.

“You also have your super users who are always looking for the next change, and those are vital to that journey, acting as ambassadors for the tech brand.

“What has been really positive is seeing how our volunteers are engaging with the tech more than ever. Of course, we have users who are from a less technical background, but we now have solutions which are easy to access, and we have in-house support, which is easy to access, so we can always provide them help to understand the tools.”

Granting wishes

So, what has this meant for the charity overall? Put simply, they are seeing less downtime from users, allowing them to fulfil more wishes than ever before.

In total, Nerdio Manager for Enterprise has helped Make-A-Wish UK remove the burden of costly hardware and reduce its Azure bill by 40% each month via Nerdio’s Auto-scaling. It has also helped decrease energy consumption.

The light-touch tools now provisioned to volunteers are two-thirds more energy efficient than physical desktops and massive laptops, generating even more savings.

There are over 63,000 children in the UK currently eligible for a wish because they have a life-limiting or life-threatening condition. Though it is impossible to measure exactly how the move to the cloud has boosted wishes granted, the numbers are up year-on-year, from around 1,000 average in the last decade to over 1,200 in the 2022/23 financial year, with the charity on track to reach as many as 1,800 in the last financial year.

“This is what I always bring it down to,” says Wilson. “It isn’t about how frustrating an issue is to resolve, but that we get the problem solved, so the team member or volunteer in question is able to go out there and deliver on what Make-A-Wish should be doing, which is delivering life-changing wishes to children with life-limiting or changing conditions.”

The post Wish upon a cloud: how a charity’s cloud strategy transformed volunteering appeared first on TechInformed.

Panama-based Towerbank is a fifty-four-year-old family-run institution serving a largely Latin American customer base in a region that is experiencing a higher than average inflation rate.

It’s a conservative organisation, according to Gabriel Campa – the commercial bank’s head of digital assets – and one that prides itself in being free of money laundering scandals.

Nonetheless, Towerbank’s president and CEO recognised that the bank needed to reboot its business model: all banks were offering the same products and services, and it was getting harder to compete with bigger players.

During an analysis of customer activity was carried out as part of the bank’s next ten-year plan, Campa noticed that more were buying cryptocurrency on their credit cards.

“Initially this was a risk for us, because we had no idea where the money was coming from,” he recalls. “We want to serve our customers – but we needed transparency.”

So, Tower started asking its clients what they were doing with the crypto and how the bank could help. It transpired that most uses were similar to regular bank services. Customers were using crypto to buy, to sell, for custody (secure storage), loans and overdrafts – ”All the normal standard banking products, but in the crypto space,” Campa observes.

While this might not seem like a radical use of crypto, in Latin American markets where inflation is still high (Venezuela’s inflation rate hit nearly 190% last year; Argentina’s hit 287% this March), people are turning to cryptocurrencies to protect their economic security.

To investigate further how the bank could help its customers who were buying crypto, Campa invited forty of them into the bank to find out more about what their clients needed.

The vision

Following its initial research, Tower kept the proposal simple to begin with, but broadly crypto friendly. If customers were transparent about their uses of crypto and its origins, it was willing to accept fiat currency that had initially come from crypto, so long as the crypto wallet it came from could be verified by [blockchain data platform] Chainanalysis.

At this point, the bank also got the regulators involved as well as other banks and informed them of its intentions to work with crypto. For Campa, this was about building trust.

“They know we are going to do things right. We are going to report what we find. That trust has allowed us to work behind the scenes without making much noise,” he says.

The next step was to enable crypto-to-fiat transfers. Campa says that one of the first transfers Towerbank received in crypto was from a client who had funds in the ill-fated cryptocurrency exchange FTX – just at the point where it was collapsing.

“He had to make payments in Panama. He called us and said, ‘I have $10K I need to make payments I have no way of sending my money’. We had the basic model in place by this point. So, we’d receive $10K in fiat currency and we’d ask them to show us the crypto wallet where that $10K came from. Which was verified by Chainanalysis.

“We gave him a deposit address he sent us his money in crypto we exchanged it into fiat in four hours,” Campa recalls.

While it was possible to handle this new service for 40 or so clients, it was still a time-consuming process. To scale, the bank needed to create an app-controlled crypto wallet that operates as a bank account, and to automate as much of this process as possible.

Campa’s vision was for this app to do all the things a bank offers – ACH transfer, SWIFT payments etc, but one which also handle clients’ crypto so that they can buy and sell in one place.

“The only policy we’ve established in the bank is that we don’t buy or sell or take custody of crypto,” Campa adds. “ We are not an exchange, and we don’t believe that banks should have crypto on the books. That’s too risky.”

To separate digital from fiat the bank set up its own trust to handle its clients’ crypto.  Campa explains: “That way if something were to happen to the bank the crypto is safe. Or let’s say crypto goes to zero – it’s the client’s crypto. We don’t put our any of our customers’ funds at risk.”

The bank plans to make its money on conversion fees rather than charging for the bank account. In terms of the type of crypto, Tower will accept Bitcoin, ether (ETH) and US dollar backed stablecoins Tether (USDT)and USD Coin (USDC). The plan is to allow more over time, Campa adds.

The tech

To achieve Campa’s vision of offering a hybrid banking service “that acts as the bridge between the fiat and the crypto ecosystem” Towerbank needed to build a scalable and flexible model. And one that was capable of handling two entirely different worlds – the crypto users who view traditional banks as “way too complicated” (in Campa’s words) and the traditional banking community.

Initially, Tower started building a model in AWS Cloud, but soon realised it needed a more robust solution. After attending Amazon’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, he was introduced to low-code no-code platform Appian.

Campa explains that this platform has enabled the bank to automate many of the process (96% in total, he claims) that were taking its team hours to do manually.

“Appian runs our entire onboarding process. It opens a bank account and a crypto account at the same time all in one shop. Before it would take our team around seven hours per client: one hour with the client and then six in the background doing paperwork. Now it’s 10 minutes with the client,  and an hour and a half of paperwork. We are feeling the impact immediately,” he says.

Appian also handles the crypto backend – as well as the transfers and execution of ACH and SWIFT, debit card processing and due diligence and compliance.

Campa adds that another advantage of using the process management system, is its ability to connect the bank’s other partners via APIs, which include its cloud banking platform provider Mambu;  payment gateway provider, Frame Banking and verification tool Chainanalysis.

In the background the Appian system also collates data and sends it to the bank’s data lake to enable deeper analytics in the future, to create more products and services to support these clients.

Another key tech provider was the crypto wallet, ikigii, which claims to be the only crypto wallet that is also a US dollar bank account.

Campa enthuses: “There’s nothing like it. It’s the only wallet where you can put both currencies into one place to allow payments for conversion to send and received; for P2P; custody and digital finance space loan and overdraft. International wires and payments.”

The results

According to Campa, the bank has already managed to on board around 700 clients with this system – and that’s before the app‘s official launch, which is scheduled for next month.

He estimates that the bank handled about US$30m in transactions from crypto clients last year: “We might have US$2m to US$3m in deposits. We have around 2,000 new clients with around 200 to 300 of these constantly transferring fiat to crypto, crypto to fiat.”

Campa maintains that if clients send over their crypto today, they will receive the cash in their accounts “within 50 seconds”. The bank is forecasting 2x growth this year and is hoping to enhance its hybrid platform with blockchain and generative AI technology, launching new products that include asset tokenisation and e-commerce with crypto.

While there are other means of converting crypto, Campa concludes that, even in the decentralised world of crypto and blockchain, banks can have a key role in acting as a trusted intermediary. This is especially true, he adds, in territories where crypto scams are so common that many banks won’t touch the currencies – leading to a great vulnerability among users and investors and a rise in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) crypto scams.

“There are lots of P2P scams that involve the seller accepting crypto and then ringing up the buyer’s bank and trying to get the money back. With a transparent relationship at the bank, a relationship with the regulators and corresponding banks, Tower can verify transactions and push back against refunds knowing that it was a legitimate transaction.

“We’ve got to this point because our clients trust us and are willing to tell us they are using crypto,” says Campa.

The post Towerbank builds hybrid crypto-fiat platform for LatAm clients appeared first on TechInformed.

However, its overall contribution to climate change could be significantly higher because plane emissions significantly impact the concentration of other atmospheric gases and pollutants. Some scientists estimate aviation could be responsible for as much as 4% of the global temperature rise since pre-industrial times alone.

Rather than being grounded by the negatives, the sector has turned to new technology, one of which is Firefly, to propel itself to a greener future.

Some people say they often do their best thinking on the toilet. But Firefly Green Fuels has found a way to make those most sacred moments on the porcelain throne even more productive — by turning poop into petrol.

It’s not quite a flight of fancy; the Bristol-based company plans to turn sewage sludge into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and, in doing so, reduce carbon emissions to over 90% lower than standard fossil jet fuel.

What is SAF?

According to the IATA, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) refers to fuels used in aviation that are not derived from fossil fuels. These fuels are sometimes called sustainable alternative jet fuel, renewable jet fuel or bio-jet fuel.

Initially, the term ‘biofuels’ was used for fuels made from biological materials such as plants or animals. However, technological advancements make it possible to produce fuel from non-biological and alternative sources. As a result, the terminology has evolved to emphasise the sustainability aspect of these fuels.

For SAF to be considered sustainable, it must meet strict criteria, including reducing lifecycle carbon emissions, not competing with food production, avoiding deforestation, and ensuring its production is environmentally responsible.

Crude oil

The heart of Firefly’s project is a process known as hydrothermal liquefaction. Think of it as a pressure cooker for excrement.

Simon Black, head of circular economy at Anglian Water (which will supply the sewage, or ‘biosolids feedstock’), explains that the journey begins with wastewater from households and various businesses. “It then goes through the collection network, miles and miles of pipework and pumping stations, to bring it to water recycling centres.

“They then separate the solids from the water to effectively clean the water and put it back into the environment.” The separated solids, rich in organic matter, will eventually be converted into fuel.

The separated solids undergo anaerobic digestion, a biological process in large tanks maintained at around 37°C.

Unlike chemical processes, this stage relies on the activity of microbes to break down the organic matter.

The result of this digestion is the production of biogas, which can be harvested for energy, and a by-product known as bio-sludge or biosolids. This material, comparable to manure, has traditionally been used as a fertiliser in agriculture.

Firefly’s innovative approach utilises hydrothermal liquefaction to emulate the natural geological processes that produce crude oil but at a much faster rate.

Applying high temperature and pressure converts the bio-sludge into bio-crude oil, transforming the solid waste into a liquid form that can then be refined into SAF.

Why sewage sludge?

Black explains that this process’s ability to guarantee the consistency of the sludge is crucial for any subsequent conversion processes, like turning the sludge into SAF.

“The benefit of using sewage sludge is that it has been through a very advanced form of anaerobic digestion and leaves the final material very consistent because it’s so highly treated, unlike livestock waste,” he says.

One of the main problems with producing SAF using conventional feedstocks, such as cooking oil and animal fats, is that they are costly and limited in availability.

While plant by-products can also be an alternative, the excessive use of agricultural land and forests to obtain large amounts of biomass can negatively impact ecosystems and biodiversity.

Paul Hilditch, co-founder of Firefly, explains that Firefly’s SAF technique is more affordable and scalable: “There’s enough biosolids in the UK to produce more than 200,000 tonnes of SAF. That’s enough to satisfy about half of the mandated SAF demand in 2030.

“We need the other routes to SAF, too,” Hilditch adds. “However, this new route has the potential to move the needle and make a significant contribution to UK SAF production. And not just the UK. Anywhere in the world where there are people, there is poo.”

According to Hilditch, scientists estimate the average human produces 30kg of dry-weight waste per year, which could produce over 14 billion litres of SAF.

Another by-product of this process is Biochar, a charcoal-like substance that can be used for carbon sequestration and could be used in construction or agriculture.

Firefly’s venture facilitates a circular economy where waste is not simply discarded but becomes a valuable resource. They say this model promotes efficient resource use, minimises waste, and stimulates economic growth by creating new industries and job opportunities related to SAF production.

By converting sewage sludge, a by-product of human activity that poses a disposal challenge, into clean fuel, they claim to address aviation’s carbon emissions and contribute to a broader sustainability agenda.

Air support

The first facility, set to break ground at the Harwich (Essex), UK site, will use existing infrastructure previously used for traditional crude oil and gas refining, saving production time, costs, and emissions.

It is poised to produce 100,000 tonnes of sustainable fuel per year. It’s backed by significant investments from key industry players, including Wizz Air, which recently committed to fuelling 10% of its flights with sustainable fuel by 2030.

Yvonne Moynihan, corporate & ESG officer at Wizz Air, described the partnership with Firefly as “a marriage of low costs.” This refers to how Firefly’s SAF, “the cheapest and most abundant feedstock,” is a perfect match for an airline focused on low costs and fares.

The Hungarian airline has ordered up to 525,000 tonnes of Firefly’s fuel over the next 15 years, potentially worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Other partners include Petrofac, which will construct the SAF production facility; Haltermann Carless, which owns the site in Essex; Chevron Lummus Global, which will license its hydro-processing technology to Firefly; and Anglian Water.

Becoming bog-standard

Indeed, aviation is a notoriously tricky sector to address concerning carbon emissions, so Firefly’s innovative approach couldn’t come at a better time.

In 2022, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN agency overseeing civil aviation worldwide, set the target of achieving net-zero CO2 emissions from international aviation by 2050.

This ambitious goal underscores the urgent need for innovation and investment, estimated at up to $5 trillion in clean aircraft and fuels.

The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) Aviation Vision 2050 report outlines the technologies and policies essential for reaching net zero within that timeframe.

It highlights sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), zero-emission planes (ZEPs) powered by hydrogen or electricity, and efficiency measures as critical levers.

Europe is leading the charge with legally binding SAF requirements, setting a precedent for 2% global SAF uptake by 2030.

Turbulence ahead

However, electric aircraft development has encountered obstacles, and Airbus’s decision to “start small” with its deployment of hydrogen-powered aircraft signals a recalibration of expectations.

Wizz Air, named Europe’s most sustainable airline, has pivoted its efforts from hydrogen power to SAF: “We see things progressing very slowly [with hydrogen] — there’s a lot of investment in infrastructure and regulatory framework to be put in place. So, we’ve really shifted our focus to sustainable aviation fuel as the future,” said Moynihan.

The post-COVID rebound in traffic, forecasted to exceed 2019 levels in the first quarter of 2024, adds another layer of complexity to reducing the industry’s carbon footprint.

Meanwhile, the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) stands as a lone but critical mechanism for carbon pricing, covering a significant portion of passenger aviation CO2 emissions and supporting SAF deployment.

Wizz Air has noted that more needs to be done for them to reach their targets: “We call on policymakers to address barriers to SAF deployment at scale by incentivising production, providing price support, and embracing additional sustainable feedstocks for biofuel production,” said Moynihan.

In this context, Firefly’s initiative represents a beacon of hope and innovation.

By turning sewage sludge into SAF, Firefly contributes to the diversification of sustainable fuel sources and displays the creative thinking needed to overcome aviation’s environmental challenges.

The post Turning sewage into fuel: Firefly and Wizz Air to glide into net zero appeared first on TechInformed.

According Nic Granger, NSTA’s chief financial officer and director of corporate, data is a key enabler in achieving this objective.

”People are using our data to understand the subsurface, the rocks, the geology under UK waters so that they can do things for the benefit of the energy transition,” she says.

“So, if you wanted to get a carbon storage license to inject carbon into an old piece of infrastructure you need to understand the geology around that to be able to use it.

“The data that we hold enables people to take that data, analyse it and achieve that understanding,” she explains.

NSTA offers two types of data – open data, public data which anyone can use for any purpose by pulling the data using an API onto their own platform.

The regulator also offers separate data sets which are available but not on an open licence. Granger explains “You can use it for your own personal, mainly business purposes. But you can’t commercially resell data to someone else.”

Data via regulation

While the organisation holds its own data dating back to the 1960s, much of the industry’s data has come through regulation created by NSTA in 2015.

According to Granger, regulation was necessary to ensure that external parties were providing the right information.

“Those powers mean that the industry is required to report certain data to us. And then, after limited confidentiality periods, we can make that data publicly available,” she explains.

The industry has been broadly supportive about the new rules because they felt it was good to understand how the data could be used and add value, Granger claims.

Last year the NSTA also received powers in the 2023 Energy Act to collect carbon storage data from industry, so that when this nascent industry starts to hit the ground running the regulator will be prepared to collect the data.

With the right foundations in place, the next stage for the NSTA was to create a digital platform that would enable industry, government, academia and other parties to access all this data.

National Data Repository

When Granger joined the NSTA in 2017, she led a team that launched the National Data Repository (NDR), the first of its kind in the UK, which provides open data to encourage the use of innovative technologies to enable the search for carbon storage sites as well as supporting offshore windfarm priorities.

The NDR operates on a bespoke, cloud-based platform that now holds around a petabyte of information, reported to NSTA by petroleum licensees and operators of offshore infrastructure.

Considered a national asset, some of the publicly available industry data – oil well data for instance – dates to the 1960s. Granger explains the significance of the repository to past and future energy innovators:

“If you wanted to use AI or ML to understand the basins it would be difficult to do this on a small data set. But on a large data set going back to the 1960s you can use the tech or AI on that data.

According to Granger, the repository is also used to help industry understand cost profiles better where it relates to decommissioned infrastructure.

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The NSTA analytics team used open data from the NDR to create dashboards that enable the industry generate cost profiles and to look at these areas and look at how they can do things better.

The data team has also developed benchmarking tools to ensure that the data the NSTA holds is being used to add more value in the UK and to ensure that learnings are shared across the sector.

“We might bring in CEOs from the top 20 companies working in the sector together for a meeting, for instance, and discuss these benchmarks. We then ask those at the top of the benchmark how they achieved whatever the metric might be, and we ask the others to learn from that,” Granger explains.

Learnings from Norway

To ensure best practice and share learnings, Granger adds that the organisation also meets with its Norwegian counterparts across the water, the Norwegian Offshore Directorate, every six months.

“We have the NDR, but the Norwegians have 15 petabytes, so they have much more than us because they started collecting it earlier.

“However, we’re more advanced in terms of our benchmarking and analysis approach. So, while there’s not much overlap in terms of daily business, there’s huge overlap in terms of learnings,” she says.

GIS App

The NSTA often works with other stakeholders. For instance, while the regulator doesn’t cover offshore wind farms, it still has a mission to see how it can integrate different energy type across the basin.

“You can’t do that without a map, to be able to spatially plan, so the North Sea and in other areas of UK sea, we needed to understand the users of those areas better,” says Granger.

The NSTA’s data team worked with Crown Estates and Crown Estates Scotland (responsible for the UK’s offshore wind strategy and licensing) to come up with a geographic information system app, which integrates these elements into one place.

Says Granger: “What this means is that if you are working in the energy planning space you can look at these maps and see where the potential for carbon storage lies; where the existing oil and gas and existing carbon storage licences are and it enables you to work together without the data being duplicated across platforms –  this is all interoperable data .

“Just having this map has started conversations around how our future energy sources could work.”

Results and benefits

Granger notes that the work her organisation has done with windfarm stakeholders can be measured by the number of offshore wind bids.

“What we’ve seen is companies taking that data, re-processing it, and then using it for offshore wind bids. We feel that a big chunk of that success is because companies can access the data. So, it’s about taking data, using it to understand the sub-surface rocks and the geology, and applying it in a different way.”

NSTA’s data is also being used to support carbon storage licencing. Data has been packaged up and made available through NSTA’s Open Data Site. This process allows interested parties to understand subsets of information and to consider which licences to apply for.

According to Granger the NSTA saw its data downloads go up 20-fold on the week of issuing the carbon storage licencing round.

“We think that 60% of the UK’s carbon abatement can be made through carbon storage. And those licences give us the ability, as a country, to store up to 10% of the carbon. Data isn’t the only thing that enables that process. But if people didn’t understand the subsurface, they wouldn’t be able to apply for the licences,” she says.

Other parties that plug into the data including academia, which is using the information for research. “There are about 180 universities or academic organisations accessing our data from every continent. Research is a huge chunk of what we do, especially in the area of carbon storage,” Granger adds.

 Current projects

The next step for the NSTA, according to Granger, is to create a Digital Energy Platform encompassing the organisation’s offerings on a modern tech stack.

The platform will include the NDR as one app, the Open Data site with GIS as another with the third comprising of an Energy Portal – which Granger explains is a transactional system between itself, the industry and other government departments.

Another big piece of work in the pipeline is the creation of a cohesive digital data strategy for the industry, which Granger is chairing a taskforce to work towards.

The first part of this strategy, on data principles that will support the industry in the context of energy transition, was published last week.

Granger explains: “We prefer to talk about data principles more than data standards. So, we’ve got some basic guidance to give when legislation calls up industry for its data.”

“It’s very difficult to argue with high quality complete data sets. In terms of what standard might be met, we’ve been less stringent on that.”

Other aspects of this strategy involve work on a common data toolkit so that data isn’t duplicated or trapped in pockets or silos, while a third area involves looking at softer but equally important elements such as data skills and training across the sector as well as cyber security best practice.

One AI on the future

Surprisingly throughout Granger’s presentation at State of Open Con 24, and afterwards when we meet for an interview, there was little mention of AI.

Long term, Granger says its use is definitely on the cards, and will support what the data team does, “but we’re not there yet” she adds, implying that the data still needs tidying up to make sure that the quality is there.

She adds: “We’re looking at using AI as productivity tool right now as copilot in house, but our focus is on making sure that the conditions are there in terms of the data for people to be able to access.

“So, creating the new NDR account-based platform where people can access data in their browsers without having to do huge downloads, this will enable the potential for AI in the future,” she adds.

And Granger’s parting advice for those working on open data projects is a simple but often overlooked point. Nail what your outcomes are before you start collecting data.

“You can’t just collect a load of data, there has to be a clear purpose for it. And then focus on the quality of that data as opposed to the technology, because the technology is the easier part of it.”

The post How the UK is accelerating net zero energy transition with open data appeared first on TechInformed.