businessinfomag.uk magazine Time for a universal digital mailbox? The proliferation of apps and digital platforms can make it hard to keep track of essential communications across multiple inboxes and increase the risk of identity theft and fraud. How much simpler to have a universal digital mailbox that replicates the single point of entry provided by a physical letterbox. In a new policy white paper, The Case for a Universal Postal Digital Mailbox, e-Boks Group, a global provider of secure platforms and digital postboxes, warns that the shift from physical to digital mail has created a fragmented landscape that makes it more likely vital communications will be missed and which may be incompatible with rising digital identity and cybersecurity requirements. available to businesses, public sector partners and other organisations across the region, creating a potential new revenue stream for the councils from the same infrastructure investment. The network is already enabling councils to deploy multiple smart services, including footfall counters in libraries and public spaces, occupancy and damp monitoring in buildings, flood and temperature sensors, bin monitoring, carbon monoxide detection, Legionella compliance monitoring, and vehicle and people counting. Dr. Dean Al-Sened, Head of Public Sector and Enterprise at Abzorb, said: “This project is a blueprint for how IoT infrastructure should be delivered across the public sector. We believe this model works and we want every council in the UK to benefit from it. Our focus is on delivering digital transformation through shared infrastructure, intelligent design and a genuine commitment to the customer’s long-term goals.” https://www.abzorb.co.uk/ surveyed to question the trustworthiness of the messages they receive. Even so, email is the preferred channel for communications that matter, with 56% choosing it when they need to keep or refer back to information. More than one third (39%) have deliberately chosen email over another platform to create a permanent record. Jenny Herbison, SVP of Global Marketing at Exclaimer, said: “When something is important, people still turn to email because it carries a level of trust and legitimacy they don’t always associate with other channels. Part of that is the fact that email provides a lasting record of communication that people can refer back to when they need to verify information or confirm what was said. In a world of constant notifications and competing platforms, that combination of trust, accountability and permanence is becoming increasingly important.” https://exclaimer.com/blog/howpeople-really-communicate/ … Abzorb’s Essex IoT network a ‘blueprint’ for public sector Network solutions provider Abzorb has created ‘a blueprint for how IoT infrastructure should be delivered across the public sector’ by designing a resilient LoRaWAN network for the councils of Basildon, Brentwood, Castle Point, Rochford, Southend-on-Sea, Thurrock and Essex County – and delivering it £40,000 under budget. With comprehensive coverage across 98% of the region, the network gives the six councils and county a shared, regional platform for deploying Internet of Things (IoT) services quickly and cost-effectively. The councils recognised the potential of IoT technologies to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and provide better visibility of public assets and services, but realised that deploying IoT projects in isolation was hard to justify financially because each new initiative would require its own dedicated network infrastructure. By working with Abzorb to build a unified LoRaWAN network leveraging their existing dark fibre investment, the councils have created a long-term digital foundation that lowers the barrier to innovation. Designed as an open platform, the network allows councils to procure and deploy sensors from any supplier, further reducing costs and preventing vendor lock-in. The solution includes a second LoRaWAN network that can be made BULLETIN 06 continued... …continued Blenheim Palace changing how we listen to wildlife Blenheim Palace is providing schools, citizen scientists, ecologists and researchers around the world with free access to an open source wildlife monitoring platform developed by the Innovation team at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, home to the Dukes of Marlborough since 1705. The BioAcoustic Stream Engine (BASE) wildlife monitoring system can identify birdsong, the calls of bats, the hum of bees, even the sounds of life beneath the soil picked up by strategically placed microphones, feeding live data into a public dashboard that anyone can access and explore. The project is part of Blenheim Palace’s wider innovation programme, which uses the 12,000-acre estate as a testbed for technology in heritage, sustainability and land management. BASE unites several tools in a single engine that anyone can run, including BirdNET from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology; BatDetect2 from researchers at UCL; BuzzDetect; and Blenheim Palace’s own models trained on grasshopper and bush cricket recordings shared by ecology groups. David Green, Head of Innovation at Blenheim Palace, said: “We didn’t build the science from scratch; we stood on the shoulders of brilliant researchers around the world and combined their work into something anyone can run. That is exactly why it is open and free, because the most valuable thing we can do now is share it.” He added: “What excites me most is what comes next: schools turning their playing fields into living biodiversity labs, citizen scientists and ecology groups picking this up, training their own models, and together building the kind of large-scale picture of British nature that can show us how species are shifting and how the climate is reshaping the world around us.” https://blenheiminnovation.github.io/
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