Behind the explosive “little genius”, there is an Internet of Things “infrastructure” giant

Unlike the post-90s and post-00s who use their parents’ mobile phones to log on to WeChat and QQ, the post-10s wear social communication tools on their wrists. But if you want to buy an Apple Watch for your child, he is likely to say with disgust, “My classmates use little geniuses.”

In the world of children’s watches, Xiaocai is not the first one, but successfully reclassified children’s phone watches into “little genius” and “other”. The cool body that can stand up, the “touch to add friends” function and the exclusive social network make the little genius a social ticket for children. But what makes it truly out of the “toy” and become a communication necessities and a harvester for parents is its precise AI positioning, high-definition and stable video calls and other professional functions.

Perhaps few people know that many domestic mainstream children’s watch brands headed by Xiaocai all use the video call technology from the same company, that is, Shengwang’s real-time audio and video call solution.

When the issue of the underlying technology was put on the table again, we discovered that this technology company focusing on RTC real-time communication has already extended its tentacles in the field of Internet of Things.

Since 2009, Microsoft has maintained the rhythm of releasing a future vision video every two years, in the earliest one about “smart”

home” video, they show the concept of smart home and the Internet of Things. In the spring of 2015, Microsoft released a new future vision video with the theme “Ubiquitous Screens”.

From large-screen devices, office interactive walls, automotive HUD (head-up display), to small card-type mobile devices, smart glasses, and wearable bracelets, screens that can be used for display and control seem to be the next-generation IoT standard. Technology companies represented by Microsoft took the lead in launching an imagination about the “era of ten thousand screens”. The ubiquity of screens also reflects an exciting future – those items within reach may become the entrance to intelligent interaction.

Products shown in Microsoft’s vision for the future video

In the global wave of smartphones, the realization of “million screens” has revealed a little sign. The launch of the first-generation iPhone in 2007 made multi-touch technology widely known. In the next era of smartphones, the upstream industry chain has been rapidly cultivated and developed. Hardware such as touch displays, sensors, and cameras are not only rapidly iteratively upgraded, but also price reductions. to a level acceptable to most manufacturers and consumers.

However, once you leave the mobile computer, some “little things” like video calls that have been solved in the Internet age cannot be perfectly adapted to other smart hardware.

In the consumer Internet of Things such as smart homes and vehicles, adding screens to smart devices has become an industry consensus, but corresponding to the large-scale growth of market demand, it is difficult to develop high-definition audio and video communications.

Taking smart watches as an example, many smart devices with low power consumption and small size have limited battery capacity and power that can be supported, and mobile devices are likely to face a weak network environment. To maintain high-definition, stable and long-term calls in these situations requires very high technical and development requirements. In device scenarios such as smart doorbells, there are also problems such as slow output of the first frame and low video resolution.

From the Internet to the Internet of Things, some technologies and experiences have been migrated. But in the face of more complex scenarios, many things still need to be debugged and advanced, and the work of “infrastructure” needs to be done again.

The Internet of Things is an extension and expansion based on the Internet. From the perspective of usage scenarios and device types, this expansion is not a simple order of magnitude increase.

The IoT cloud platform is in the middle layer of the entire IoT industry. In the early stage of industry development, the platform played an important role in connecting technologies and application scenarios. There are various scenarios in the IoT industry, especially in the field of audio and video IoT, there are few IoT platforms that are “easy to use, easy to use for development”, which provides huge development space for various enterprises.

Many players have entered the Internet of Things. In addition to the Internet giant platforms represented by Alibaba Cloud Internet of Things and JD Zhilian Cloud, there are also equipment vendor platforms such as Huawei Cloud and Qingke Cloud, as well as entrepreneurial company platforms such as Tuya Smart.

However, the main problems solved by these platforms are mostly in the connection of data, and do not pay attention to the display of the screen and human-computer interaction.

In today’s pursuit of real-time high-definition interconnection, ultra-high-definition audio and video instant communication capabilities are gradually becoming the focus of the Internet of Things. Common smart car, smart watch, smart doorbell door lock and other equipment scenarios are inseparable from the support of real-time audio and video technology.

Hou Yunyi, product manager of the IoT industry of SoundNet, recalled the evolution of the audio and video Internet of Things. He said, “From audio-visual to the cloud, instant connection to real-time interaction anytime and anywhere, the application of real-time audio and video technology is becoming more and more important. Location.”

For many IoT practitioners, the development of audio and video modules is difficult and the cycle is long, and there is a lack of professional audio and video development platforms in the market. For some integrated IoT development platforms, audio and video are usually additional value-added functions, and the audio and video experience is not satisfactory.

On June 28, Shengwang officially released the “Ling Falcon IoT Cloud Platform”, which focuses on flexibility, ease of use, and a complete IoT development experience.

The performance parameters of LingFalcon intelligent audio and video solution

SoundNet is undoubtedly the number one player in the real-time audio and video field. Its pioneering software-defined real-time network SD-RTN™ has more than 200 nodes around the world, making it possible to process tens of millions of concurrent tasks at the same time. At the beginning of last year, Shengwang also announced the acquisition of IM cloud and customer service cloud service provider Huanxin, supplementing its capabilities in instant messaging.

In audio and video related scenarios, Shengwang has accumulated a lot of experience and data, and has also built its own technical capabilities. Before, Shengwang opened these industry-leading technologies to other participants in the industry in the form of SDK (software development kits) and APIs. Now Shengwang is ready to take the pursuit of “easy to use, easy to use for development” a step further, building A new generation of IoT platforms.

More than ten years of technology accumulation has made them more confident. Some data show that the Falcon IoT cloud platform can achieve as high as 99.7% in the device connectivity rate. 1s, the end-to-end delay is less than 400ms, the full-duplex intercom delay is less than 300ms, and the device can resist weak network, relying on the sound network SD-RTN™ to achieve 70% anti-packet loss, ensuring a smooth call experience.

Feng Xiaodong is the product manager of Shengwang IoT. He stated the original intention of the platform product launch at the press conference, “Empowering developers, allowing developers to use high-quality real-time audio and video services faster and more conveniently”.

In order to truly achieve simplicity and ease of use, Ling Falcon adopts two low-code development modes: Turnkey and custom. Among them, the Turnkey development model directly connects to mainstream and general hardware platforms, enabling rapid integration and one-stop development. The custom mode supports developers to flexibly use different modules such as audio and video, call, cloud storage, and push provided by SoundNet, so that the product can achieve rapid mass production.

End-to-end development model

The needs of developers are often diverse, and Turnkey’s model is based on this. In the development process, Shengwang takes the realization of developers’ needs as the core, and introduces partners with leading technologies in various aspects such as chip module manufacturers and visual AI capabilities.

The cooperation with Aipec verifies the rationality of the establishment of the Falcon IoT cloud platform and the efficiency of the Turnkey development model.

Aipec is an ODM and OEM company integrating production and research. It has fifteen or sixteen years of development experience in audio and video products such as consumer security cameras and smart doorbells. But their product manager Guo Liwei described the company’s problems: “Once customers want to buy your technical solutions and your hardware products, they will definitely ask how your equipment is connected to the Internet before buying.”

What customers want is a complete set of solutions, and different customers will have different IoT requirements. They have also tried to access third-party public cloud IoT platforms, but the problem is that it takes a lot of effort to do it Debugging, and finally to the application level, there will still be many new problems.

The cooperation with Shengwang is relatively smooth. Under the Turnkey development mode of the Lingfalcon cloud platform, Shengwang receives the needs of Apeco, completes the networking part, and then packs it back to the Apeco team for debugging and certification. Aipec can see the effect through demo before the implementation of the solution, and this packaged solution based on hardware requirements can also match the flexible customization of different customers to a certain extent, reducing their secondary development tasks.

Shengwang also cooperates with mainstream chip manufacturer Espressif. Their RTOS audio and video solution enables hardware devices such as USB cameras and smart video doorbells that require minimal resource consumption, allowing small systems to realize real-time audio and video calls, Full functions such as call notification, low-power keep-alive, and remote control.

Guo Liwei sighed, “Let professional people do what they are good at is the way to maximize and effectively allocate resources.”

The gradual popularization of 4G networks and smartphones has occurred in the last decade. In the past ten years, we have witnessed the rapid advancement of technology and tremendous changes in the entire society.

The distance between time and space has been eliminated, the Internet platform has moved our necessities of life to the Internet, and we are rethinking intimacy in an environment of “de-incarnation”… And now, the Internet of Things is in progress, and it will further shrink the reality The gap between the world and the virtual world creates a smarter environment around us.

In Microsoft’s Smart Home Imagination video thirteen years ago, the protagonist Robin entered the room through the eye scan of the smart door lock. After her favorite home mode was turned on, the curtains were slowly opened, the speakers played soothing music, and the husband did not come home. The message for dinner automatically rang throughout the room.

Some imagined scenarios have become reality. Companies such as Xiaomi, Huawei, JD.com, and Midea have built their own smart homes one after another, and the trend of Internet of Everything has also appeared in education, agriculture, transportation, logistics and other fields.

In 2020, the number of global IoT device connections will exceed non-IoT devices for the first time. IDC has predicted that in 2025, there will be 41.6 billion IoT devices worldwide. The limelight of smartphones has begun to fade, and the next decade may be the era when smart IoT devices take over.

Founded in 2014, Shengwang has been focusing on real-time interactive technology for several years. It integrates professional capabilities that are regarded as barriers by large manufacturers into simple SDKs and APIs to build wheels for customers. For more than ten years, those customers and partners have participated in shaping the Internet era, and Shengwang has also accumulated leading technologies in the field of real-time interaction.

This RTC giant has expanded the number of people online and interacting in real time to millions in the Internet age. To a certain extent, Shengwang is applying the accumulated Internet technology to the Internet of Things, which is still in the development and upgrading stage, to reactivate the Internet of Things industry.

The story of “accompanying” and “growing up” will continue. On the road to the Internet of Everything, Shengwang will still build “infrastructure”, and plans to build a workshop for the Internet of Things colleagues.