Oulu-based CyberLightning Visualizes Big Data for Mobile Devices

When it comes to IT, “the world of tomorrow” seems to be the Internet of Things. Shortly, with the IoT pretty much any object, be it household or industrial, will be connected into an online network. Good examples could be hardware flavored smart-home apps such as Viva or smart lighting systems, like the one visioned by Sensinode.

Other than having a rather cool company name, Oulu-based CyberLightning can be classified under the category of Industrial and corporation IoT developers. Their product, CyberVille, is a platform which combines the processing of Big Data with 3D visualization to create a tangible end-to-end management system accessible through mobile devices.

Imagine having a huge grid of devices which are all under the management of one mutual body. In fact, many companies don’t need to imagine this scenery, as they’re very much experiencing it right now. Question is, how do they deal with it?

It’s a tricky, but doable job. However, the resulting system can put even hardened professional engineers in a state of confusion.

Let’s think about an energy production facility: they have thousands of nodes collecting crucial information which is sent in a steady flow to the central computers. Commonly this data is displayed on a multitude of screens simultaneously and two dimensionally. As you might guess, this is a rather complicated display system and whoever is monitoring those screens has to be very attentive as in not to miss any signs of malfunction.

Ville Mickelsson, CEO of CyberLightning, says “The complexity of these types of networks will grow exponentially in the Internet of Things era. With CyberVille, we are presenting the first solution built from the ground up to address the challenges of systems management in incredibly complex network environments.”

In other words, coming years will complicate management systems, as more and more devices will be integrated into the common network, greatly increasing the amount of data to be taken into account.

CyberLightning’s CyberVille platform is quite a simple idea really: instead of having a 2D grid displayed on several screens, CyberVille creates a virtual, geographical map in which all devices and nodes under surveillance are placed according to their real world locations. This map can be maneuvered to observe any wanted location and the data outputs situated in those places by using mobile devices, such as iPads and smart phones. How it looks like in action (in this case with a heating system) can be seen in the short video below:

CyberVille has been architected around several components. The CyberVille Mind, which basically translates all the incoming data into something end-devices using CyberVille can actually read, incorporates the Data Control, the Collection Engine and a suite of modules for different industry segments, such as energy, building automation, traffic management, and so on.

A core data processing module supports the diverse APIs of machine/sensor networks and manages data flow. An organization’s proprietary data, as well as public data such as weather conditions, are readily integrated and presented within the various visualization views.

Basically, this is all good news for Management and control of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks who will benefit from a visually-based (versus text field) interface with detailed imagery and real-time data feeds.

All types of client side tablet and smartphone browsers are supported, including Android, Tizen, iOS, Firefox, Chrome, as well as traditional operating systems (Windows, Linux, OSX, etc.).

CyberLightning’s efforts and the impressive final product have been noted, both nationally and internationally. Bootstrapped since establishment, the company has received a good deal of public funding from EU, TEKES and ELY-keskus, totaling to roughly €1.5 million. Since the launch of CyberVille about a week ago, Mickelsson told us the company has been contacted by a couple of major analyst firms.

Currently, CyberLightning is working on a massive virtualization project for the EU and the future direction will be towards a growth capital raise.

It’s good to see Finland is fertile ground for engineers. The IoT will be knocking all of our doors soon, and we better be prepared for it!