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Consumer Electronics Daily News Sunday, January 8, 2017 4 0 CURB BRINGS SMART HOME TO CES An interview with Erik Norwood, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of CURB. CEDN: Tell our readers about CURB. EN: CURB is the answer for understand- ing how you use and generate power in your home, and is one of the first steps toward making your home a smart home. Our kit plugs directly into the breaker panel to give homeowners circuit-level insights into energy usage and production throughout your entire home. With CURB, you can see how specific appli- ances and rooms are drawing energy, and if you have solar panels, you'll get insight into your energy earn and spend. CEDN: What problem are you trying to solve? EN: CURB is focused on fundamentally changing the way we all use energy, and it all starts with awareness. You don't have to be an early adopter to find the value in CURB. The way we're billed for energy is like getting a grocery bill a month later that only shows the total. In contrast, CURB shows homeowners exactly how much all their appliances cost in real time. Getting clear data on what every room and major appliance in your home is costing you is a critical step to saving energy in a way that benefits your wallet and the environment. CEDN: Why is CURB an innovative problem solver in the smart home mar- ket? EN: There seems to be no shortage of smart home products today. However, most of these are cen- tered around controlling devices. What the market is missing is the big picture: understanding what is going on in the home. Controlling devices remotely and autonomously may be fun, but these products don't provide any action- able, long-term value or help people make decisions. That's the missing piece of the puzzle that CURB is creating. CURB is like the Fitbit or HealthKit of the home's central nervous system. By measuring and providing data on all activity flowing into and through the home's breaker panel, CURB is the only smart home product that can help you make better decisions on how you spend energy in your home. CEDN: What are you showing at CES? EN: CURB is hosting a live demo in the Smart Energy Marketplace pavilion (CP- 21) in the Central Plaza. We'll be installing our hard- ware and software on the live microgrid that powers the entire Smart Energy Marketplace section. We are also installing a CURB system on the NXP Smarter World Tour bus, which is a rolling smart home. Attendees get to see in real-time the amount of energy being consumed by appliances in the space dur- ing the show, and learn how having this level of insight will influence energy- saving behavior. For more information, visit CURB at booth #SE-5 inside CP-21 (the Smart Energy Marketplace section), call 844.629.2872, email info@energycurb.com or go to www.energycurb.com. MINGFENG A GLOBAL LEADER IN HIGH-END PACKAGING An interview with Andy Liang, Sales Manager at MingFeng Packaging. CEDN: What does your company do and what is your place in it? AL: MingFeng Packaging provides comprehensive packaging services, including design, development, pro- duction and logistics. We have profes- sional and experienced packaging designers who are able to design cus- tom packaging. Customers can bring us their ideas and we help bring them them to life. MingFeng Packaging pro- vides not only packaging that protects the product during transportation – it offers upscale display and delivers a company's message directly to targeted consumers. I am the Sales Manager of our U.S. office. Basically, I'm responsible for implementing marketing strategy, gener- ating and tracking sales orders and organ- izing U.S. events. CEDN: What brands are currently using your products in international markets? AL: We have developed an elite portfolio of customers that are leading brands, retailers and organizations. We try to extend into a number of different sectors to ensure we're not just focused on one thing. We think diversity is a great way to approach business, and the fact is our facilities are large enough to handle not only high volume runs, but also a variety of simultaneous runs of vastly different products. So, at any one time, we might be working for companies like the Swatch Group, Swarovski, L'Oreal, Beijing Tong Ren Tang, Beijing Caibai, Richemont Group, Macallan, Huawei, the China Gold Coin Incorporation, etc. We were also the proud packaging partner for the 2012 World Expo in Yeosu, the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai and both the Beijing and London Olympic Games. CEDN: What's unique about MingFeng? AL: MingFeng focuses on the high-end market and has a large production capac- ity, with over 4,000 highly trained and skilled workers in our factory. MingFeng has been tops in the luxury packaging industry for over a quarter century. We've successfully provided packaging solutions to many recognized, world- class brands. We have always been a name to call upon for international brands so they can develop their very own exquisite packaging designs. CEDN: What challenges and opportuni- ties does your firm currently consider? AL: The biggest challenge being faced is that the manufacturing industry is trans- forming in China. A lot of the costs asso- ciated with production have increased, the most representative of which is work- ers' wages. How do we plan to face these changes? By adapting to the new market land- scape. We try to embrace new technology age and are constantly bringing in new manufacturing machines and technology to increase efficiency and reduce costs. We also plan on being a lot more outward-facing. We are going to attend packaging expos and events with much more frequency. CEDN: What changes has your firm undergone over the last decade? AL: We went from being a medium- sized company dealing with mostly local or regional customers to becoming a multi-national company. We had to open up a new location at an industrial park in China, with a new printing department dedicated to producing printing products. We're actually in the midst of preparing for an IPO. For more information, visit www.mingfengus.com or stop by suite #31-331. BEYOND THE JARGON: PARSING 'NEW MOBILITY' FOR FUN & PROFIT By Andy Macleod, Director of Automotive Marketing at Mentor Graphics New mobility is becoming a catch-all for everything happening in the auto indus- try today. Like all tech jargon, the term obscures as much as it illuminates. To clarify and focus our own efforts, here at Mentor Automotive we have identified five megatrends associated with new mobility: Connected Car, Autonomous Drive, Electric Vehicles, Mobility on Demand and Smart City. One implication of these megatrends is a new automotive supply chain. The days are changing in which a carmaker sends an ECU spec to a tier 1, which then designs the hardware and software and does the integration. Vendors in the new supply chain sell everything from telco, cloud computing and big data services; network infrastructure; AI and deep learning neural networks; and of course scads of consumer tech. With incentive programs, subsides and direct invest- ments, even governments are getting in on the act. A pile of investment money is chas- ing the new automotive revenue pool, estimated by McKinsey to be $1.5 trillion of recurring additional revenue by 2030 from shared mobility and data-connectiv- ity services. And the new supply chain is already seeing an ROI. In the first quarter of 2016, a third of all new U.S. cellular subscriptions were for cars. (This is not Bluetooth-tethered, but rather embedded cellular in new cars.) Electronics and software are driv- ing the majority of the innovation, and so accordingly dictate where the investment money is going. Electrical/electronic systems are pro- jected to be 50 percent of total vehicle cost by 2030. The wiring harness, often the heaviest vehi- cle component after the engine and chassis, creates unique design challenges. Electric vehi- cles can have multiple voltage domains beyond the standard 12V, and the higher voltages need heavier gauge cables, adding weight, cost and complexity. Bringing new applications to the mass market (and across the fleet) is dif- ficult. What's the best way, for example, to productionize something that was originally introduced on a Mercedes- Benz S-Class or other luxury vehicle to a Ford Focus, where margins are tighter? No matter what they drive, all consumers expect more features with every new platform release, but also have been con- ditioned that this is standard-fare tech evolution. This means no one expects to pay significantly more as car capabilities grow. So new mobility creates not only headlines and clickbait and marketing fodder, but also a perfect storm for carmakers and their suppliers: incorporating an ever faster cadence of electronics – and soft- ware-rich technologies, dealing with the associated increase in engineering complexity – all while dealing with R&D budgets that rarely go up. This is where Mentor Automotive comes in. We find new ways to address the complexity and increase productivity of those R&D dollars either by partnering with carmakers and their traditional sup- pliers or helping those in the auto supply chain (old and new alike) adopt new design tools and production-grade refer- ence platforms to reduce development cost, eliminate design errors and speed up project cycle times to get that first- mover advantage. Sometimes we even throw in our own take on industry jargon for free. For more information, visit www .mentor.com/embedded-software or stop by booths #2530, #2903 and #2905.