Smart Industry 1/2019

Smart People Behind the scenes
Behind the Scenes
Smart people
All over the world, brilliant individuals are hard at work creating the technologies and
solutions that will one day make the Internet of Things come alive. We visited a few
of them and listened to their fascinating stories.
Niall Murphy, founder and
CEO of Evrything
Winning the
Counterfeit Wars
Niall Murphy is a man on a mission.
“Machine learning is changing how
consumer product brands fight back
against the $1.2-plus trillion in revenues
lost to counterfeit and supply
chain integrity issues each year,” he
explains – and he wants to be in the
thick of the fray.
Born in South Africa, Murphy founded
Evrything to provide a digital
identity for billions of consumer
products on the web. This wasn’t his
first start-up venture: he cofounded
a pan-European Wi-Fi network,
called The Cloud, with technology
entrepreneur George Polk, ultimately
selling it to BSkyB in 2010. He also
founded one of the first ISPs in South
Africa in a joint venture with Sprint
and three digital media businesses.
Long before that, in 1994, he teamed
with Daniel Erasmus, a leading futurist,
to establish the Digital Thinking
Digital identity
systems generate
real-time
data and capture
everything
that happens to
every product
throughout its
entire life cycle.
Niall Murphy
Network, billed as a “scenario thinking
consultancy.”
In 2018, the first app from Evrything
was launched at Carrefour supermarkets
in Spain. Called Reciclaya, it allows
customers to determine how to
recycle individual products by simply
scanning the barcodes on supermarket
receipts. The app separates the
products into virtual recycling bins
so that customers can deposit them
in the closest corresponding containers.
Consumers can earn rewards by
registering where they are recycling
by scanning or tapping identity tags
on recycling units.
“For the first time, consumers can receive
detailed information on how to
recycle all products and packaging
using a single app – and be rewarded
for their participation,” Murphy
says. “It’s convenient and simple and,
through a gamified experience, it
drives a new style of behavior.”
Murphy has his sights set on bigger
game: counterfeiters. “Counterfeit
products and gray-market imports
prey on the quality, goodwill, and
trust that brands have spent years
and billions of dollars building, sucking
profits and impacting consumer
trust,” he maintains.
The problem is not a new one: “A
running battle has been fought for
decades between brands and fraudsters,”
Murphy says, moving on to describe
an ongoing “arms race” where
brands invest in special labelling
designs, invisible inks, and complex
packaging materials in an attempt
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