The Yield, the Australian sensing, IoT and predictive analytics startup for aquaculture and agriculture, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding from three global corporations; hardware giant Bosch, consultancy group KPMG, and online investment platform AgFunder.

The startup will use the funding to expand beyond aquaculture, its first target market in Australia, and into the US where it will focus on customers on the West Coast growing intensive, irrigated crops.

The Yield focuses on monitoring microclimates to give farmers granular and predictive insights about what’s happening at multiple points on their farm using artificial intelligence and predictive modelling.

In aquaculture, the ability to measure small changes in the environment can save hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Yield has specifically focused on oyster production until now, which is a $76 million market in Australia.

As filter feeders, oysters are particularly susceptible to pollution, so regulators conservatively shut down harvesting when heavy rains might wash contaminants into bays. The decision to open or close bays has typically been done by monitoring rain gauges from public weather stations that could be hundreds of miles away. The impact of these closures is significant. In New South Wales alone in 2015, closures resulted in 161 days of lost productivity. Farmers can lose between $20k-$100k a day during a closure, depending on the time of the year. The Yield collects real-time data from sensors that sit in oyster leases and analyze water. This information is ingested into the cloud, where artificial intelligence and advanced analytics make data-based predictions on the impact of weather events on the quality of the water. These data are shared with growers and regulators to prevent the closure of bays at unnecessary times.

Measuring microclimate changes is important for crop growers too. Speaking at The Forbes Mixing Bowl conference in New York recently, Tom Am Rhein, VP at berry producer Naturipe Growers, complained that existing technologies didn’t account for all the microclimates across his land.

Petra Doust, crop production manager at Houston’s Farms in Australia, agrees.

“At the moment, we make most of our critical decisions about timing and harvest by just manually looking at the crop or sampling the soil or plants and waiting a couple of days for the results. There’s a time lag, and often that means we miss the best opportunity to rectify the problem, which then affects the quality and shelf life of our bagged salad mixes,” she said.

Houston’s Farms, which is one of Australia’s largest lettuce operations, loses about 200 tons of lettuce each year to water-related issues, and the producer is hopeful predictive sensing technologies like The Yield will take the guesswork out of farming.

A key differentiator of The Yield compared to other sensing & IoT companies is that it doesn’t sell its sensors; they are provided to customers as part of an end-to-end subscription package including hardware, apps, and the data analytics platform. All the responsibility of maintaining, servicing, and calibrating them sits with The Yield, answering some pain points expressed by growers and retailers using sensors in the past.

In a digitally-enabled world, technology is embedded in its core. Companies will harness their best potential to provide rich digital services to consumers. For example, the introduction of the first-ever touch screen smartphone in China in 2003 led to a paradigm shift in the ease of using such phones. These technologies are poised to bring a revolution in the marketplace, where consumers are continuously adapting to new innovations and eagerly awaiting something new every time. People have actually become addicted to the terminology “everything on demand”. Consequently, telecom manufacturing companies are always striving to fulfil the wishes of consumers.

Besides this, there are other trends and challenges that one needs to be aware of to meet market expectations. IoT (Internet of Things) will be a major focus for all technology companies because consumers are already experimenting and using different apps and new technologically-advanced devices that have made their lives most comfortable. Therefore, mainly to ensure them utmost satisfaction, rigorous research is underway about how devices can always remain well connected to each other, with the entire control being in human hands only.

Ubiquitous IoT

Basically, one is making devices talk to each other in a virtual world and processing this information to perform the desired task. In reality, IoT will impart a physical meaning to all objects. This will become possible via MQTT or Message Queuing Telemetry Transport. A lightweight messaging protocol, MQTT will permit network clients with resource constraints to use simple means to distribute telemetry information. Deploying a communication pattern termed publish/subscribe, the protocol can be utilised for M2M (machine-to-machine) communications, thereby playing a pivotal role in IoT (Internet of Things).

IoT will soon be ubiquitous, with each object able to think and talk to one another, resulting in reduced human efforts to perform any task. Obviously, the initial start of IoT can be achieved with the development of smartphones that almost everyone generally carries these days. Therefore, smartphones have become an integral part of our lives. This is the gadget that will usher a revolution in the world of connected devices.

In the absence of Internet or Wi-Fi connectivity, however, will these gadgets still work? That is where BLE comes into the picture. Also known as Bluetooth Smart or BLE (Bluetooth with Low Energy), this is considered the fulcrum for wireless connectivity. Thanks to BLE, developers can create tiny sensors running on minuscule coin-cell batteries for months, or years, on end. Given this incredible energy source, billions of devices today come with Bluetooth technology – an underlying basis for the IoT revolution.

Meanwhile, people have begun thoroughly enjoying Augmented and Virtual Reality items. This was evident in the market mania when Pokémon Go was launched. It indicates people are welcoming these innovative technologies, which ensures much space to the R&D sector to think out-of-the-box and produce something totally different. This is an era in which people prefer 3D, 4D and 5D, where they can feel and sense the virtual object. But soon, an era of 7D or 8D will arise, when people will also smell and touch the virtual thing, much like a real thing.

The major change will come about when these technologies are embedded as normal features in consumers’ smartphones, whereby they can make any virtual thing on their own and experience it in a real way. In fact, perhaps in the near future, consumers will own a solar smartphone where the problem of repetitive charges will vanish. Consumers will simply use their smartphones throughout the day without worrying about battery consumption.

Security via Biometrics

Fingerprint sensors in smartphones are already in the market. Soon, retina-scan sensors in smartphones will be a major technology trend. Authentication with Biometrics involves accessing a product or service via identification by deploying biometric data such as fingerprints, eye scans, voice or facial recognition. Biometric identification uses a unique identifier.

For instance, a fingerprint scan can identify a unique fingerprint, while voice recognition does the same with a person’s voice. In the case of eyes, an iris or retina scan could include recognising the blood vessels in the eye. The latter is effective because blood vessels in a person’s eye never change over time and are recognisable even through glasses as well as contact lenses.

This form of biometric identification even works with a tablet camera or smartphone. After the tablet or smartphone has mapped the user’s blood vessels, an encryption key is created that is akin to a complex 50-character password. This information is then scrambled and encrypted on the device, ensuring it cannot be intercepted. Using blood vessels in the eyes as biometric identification to access services is a secure option. Hackers can’t copy the blood vessels in a person’s eyes and it doesn’t take expensive hardware to implement the solution.

Biometric identification can be used in tandem with passwords for two-factor authentication or multifactor authentication. When a person accesses an online service, such as a bank or email account, biometric authentication can capture the account holder’s eye image after the password has been entered. Biometric information is an excellent security mechanism because cyber criminals cannot access this unique data.

Privacy and Control

Limitless data is being transferred between all devices, allowing access to practically infinite information worldwide. With billions of new devices and technologies emerging, cloud computing will be the sole domain to store and analyse such massive data. In other words, as cloud computing is vital to IoT, these technologies will need to be extremely well synchronised with future smart gadgets of all kinds in order to attract the interest of consumers.

In this scenario, the main challenge will be the tremendous outflow of personal data to the outside world, making everyone’s lives an open book and breaching the personal security layer. Therefore, cyber security will become a major concern for everyone to protect personal information. Indeed, people are already enjoying and living in a virtual world, which is making everyone akin to robots.

Against this backdrop, the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings new advances to the fore. As AI scales new levels, humans are being beaten in many fields traditionally considered the sole preserve of human intelligence, including chess and Go. The latter is a Chinese game considered more complex than chess. Robots with AI are even programmed to mimic human facial emotions.

As things stand, AI is poised to take over human work. While this will definitely speed up the pace of work, there are seen and unforeseen perils in AI. The framework of AI is such that humans will be imparting machines the ability to think. This can be constructive as well as destructive. The latter is truly frightening because machines could think and perform tasks as per their cold calculations and comfort levels, while human ‘masters’ remain mere spectators in everything with little power to stop any negative initiative or outcome.

Is this a safe scenario? Not at all! With AI and other technological advancements, it is imperative we decide extremely carefully about the extent humans can permit technology to rule their lives. We should ensure that not only do we enjoy innovative technologies but also do so safely in future.

Such a safe scenario may only be possible if AI is perpetually programmed to operate under human command only with an auto-stop or self-destruct mechanism that prevents machines from turning upon humans. The wellbeing of the human race could depend upon it.

By Mr Leon Zhang, Marketing Head, South Asia, Meizu