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

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

Bug Labs and Charter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vodafone DE, FlyNex and Dimetor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dimetor and the DroNet API

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

Vodafone DE and DroNet Connect

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

FlyNex.io and the DroNet Hub

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

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