Philips, one of the most popular, oldest lighting brands and also the world leader in lighting has now separated its lighting business under a new name called Signify. Yes, Signify is the new company name of Philips Lighting. Signify has been established as a separate company back in May 2018 and from January 2019 it will fully functional, all Philips Lighting products will be manufactured and marketed under the Signify from next year.
Philips products, Interact connected lighting systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. With 2017 sales of EUR 7.0 billion, Signify has approximately 30,000 employees and are currently leading the lighting business in more than 70 countries around the globe.
In a recent media event hosted by the Signify, the company has launched its new Internet of Things (IoT) platform, called Interact in India, which will enable its professional customers to unlock the full potential of connected lighting for the IoT. The platform delivers new insights to help customers drive operational efficiencies and take more effective decisions. It also supports the company’s strategy to deliver new data-enabled services as value expands from lighting products and systems to services.
The company has already installed 29 million connected light points globally and plans for every new LED product it produces to be connectable by 2020. This growing number of connected light points, sensors, and devices, as well as systems, can collect large volumes of data for which Interact was designed to handle.
Launching the platform in India, Sumit Padmakar Joshi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Signify’s operations in India said, “First, we led the way in energy efficient LED lighting, then in connecting lighting to deliver operational benefits for our customers. Now that light points are smart enough to collect data on their performance and the environment around them, we are tapping into that intelligence. By analyzing the data from our connected lights, devices, and systems, our goal is to create safer cities, energy efficient buildings and industries and smarter retail stores in the country. We are confident that this platform will deliver immense value to our professional lighting customers in India”.
Interact Connected Lighting Systems:
These connected lighting systems, offering a unified user experience, feature applications that address industry-specific verticals. Available now are:
- Interact Office: enables you to turn your office into a smart sustainable workspace with software that allows you to increase building efficiency and employee productivity.
- Interact City: helps improve street lighting, safety, reduce energy consumption, improve efficiency and support your sustainability goals and beautify the urban landscape across roads.
- Interact Retail: enables customers to a group, zone, and schedule connected lighting to create stopping power in stores. It also supports in-store location-based marketing services to increase shopper engagement and indoor navigation to improve staff productivity.
- Interact Landmark: aids in managing and triggering light shows with dynamic architectural lighting to help increase tourism, regenerate downtown areas, and stimulate commerce.
- Interact Sports: aids in monitoring, managing and coordinating across all lighting infrastructure from a single dashboard from pitch lighting, entertainment light shows, hospitality areas, and exterior architectural lighting.
- Interact Pro: an intuitive cloud-based software for small and medium enterprises that automates lighting and allows management via the Interact Pro dashboard.
Another exciting product demonstration was the amazing technology called Signify LiFi, LiFi or Light Fidelity is a technology in which high quality LED lighting provides a broadband internet connection through light waves. LiFi is a two-way, high-speed wireless technology similar to WiFi but uses light waves instead of radio waves to transmit data.
Each luminaire is equipped with a built-in modem that modulates the light at speeds imperceptible to the human eye. The light is detected by a LiFi USB key/dongle since existing systems don’t have the feature to receive the data via light waves so LiFi dongle would be necessary to be plugged into the USB port of a laptop or PC.
We could expect the future laptop and other devices to have the LiFi tech inbuilt and then maybe we could skip the LiFi dongle to access the data via light waves.
The LiFi USB dongle returns data to the luminaire through an infrared link. By using the Signify LiFi-enabled luminaires, users may get the double benefit of quality, energy-efficient LED light and a highly secure, stable and robust connection as LiFi has 10,000 times the spectrum of WiFi.
