M2M Making Farmville A Reality

When it comes to online games, Facebook definitely has a number to choose from, and Farmville is arguably one of the most popular games that belong to its Hall of Fame, if there ever was one. People love Farmville because it's fun, interactive, and it's addictive. And for most, it provides the satisfaction of growing crops, farm animals and making sure they are well taken care of, even just virtually. However, in real life farming isn't as easy as pushing a few buttons and clicking the mouse a few times. Farming requires a lot of hard work and surely, farmers and farmland owners alike wish there was a way of doing things more convenient. With the consistent emergence of smart technology products, connecting devices into the Internet of Things through M2Mcommunication, servicing various sectors in the society and various industries, it is not quite possible that Farmville could become a reality soon.

Orange Business Services, a global Integrator of communication solutions, revealed that they will deliver a scalable infrastructure for communication and M2M devices to Dacom, a firm based in the Netherlands that develops information and communication technologies as well as sensor solutions for farms around the world. This will enable them to connect to Dacom's thousands of connected devices from agricultural customers globally, including weather stations and soil moisture sensors. The data collected will be combined with internet and scientific knowledge and fed into smart modules for analysis and reporting. This will allow farmers and growers to optimize and anticipate the use of supplies and raw materials, as well as give him an upper hand in fine tuning specific production processes during the growing season. With this system, information is easily available and can be shared to immediate partners.

According to Janneke Hadders, Managing Director, Dacom, M2M is key to Dacom's go-to-market strategy as the customers are requiring global support and connectivity, and their partnership has the potential to support them with managed services for Dacom's platform, not only today, but also in the future.

The agricultural industry can also benefit from other smart technologies such as an automated monitoring system for animals and herds lactation cycles. This was an M2M collaboration between the Device Cloud Network and Anemon. Based on their report, roughly 50% of insemination times are due to inaccuracy in monitoring these animals. This telemetry based solution is expected to increase the detection rate to 90% on efficiency.

Another smart technology product introduced is called Pocket Farms. It is a suite of applications available both with iOs and Android platforms, that farmers can use for data entry, data manipulation and data retrieval. These apps enable farmers to input data offline using their phones while doing other farm work, and allows them to retrieve the information later on for processing and analysis. This is helpful in keeping tab of each cow individual history, which will be quite handy during mating seasons.

Dave Williams, CEO of Device Cloud Network, said that M2M connectivity is increasing rapidly throughout the world, across a variety of industries including agriculture and farming. The collaboration demonstrates how the Internet of Things is becoming a reality and how M2M applications can dramatically transform existing industries in exciting new ways.