This month’s unveiling of the Iridium 9603, the company’s latest data module, has set the bar spectacularly high for all devices designed for embedding into M2M solutions. The significantly reduced profile of the 9603 breaks down design barriers, being the world’s smallest two-way satellite data transceiver, and ensures its place in the hand-held and similar sized devices market.

The ‘smaller-than-a-matchbook device’ offers new ways for people and assets to make necessary, two-way connections reliably, in near real-time. Personnel tracking, mobile field monitoring, defence, research, search and rescue, remote sensing and even U.S. forces around the world are only some of the 9603 application areas.

This type of technology is already being actively incorporated into products, with speculative launch dates being considered as early as June of this year, and we can understand this anticipation. Joel Thompson, vice president of product management at Iridium stated that with this device, “Iridium is disrupting the global M2M market […] through our innovative approaches to reduce the size of our data and voice/data modules.” We do not hesitate to agree and will be keeping a watchful eye on the progress of this and other devices in the near future.

A new report from Berg Insight has just been published which points to a massive forecast rise  in the real-time container tracking market. Real-time container tracking is a subset of the asset tracking market, aimed at providing security and efficiency savings to the global freight and shipping industry.

Real-time container tracking is a market that Wireless Innovation have been active in for some time as it fits our skill set quite neatly. Global container tracking requires ubiquitous online connectivity and the ability to support both mobile and satellite technologies in the same application so it’s naturally a market where we have had a lot of experience.

Berg Insight suggests that the market for shipping container tracking is about to enter a period of sustained growth, with the number of tracking systems (GPRS and Satellite) growing by an annual 66.9% CAGR over the next 5 years. This is great news for everyone involved in the container tracking market and should help to open up all sorts of new value add and aftermarket opportunities.