Smartscrapers

The other day I had an interesting conversation with a commercial real estate developer. They told me that for every building they erect, they build a cloud. This cloud is an integral part of the building. It is a virtual representation of everything that is happening inside, sucking real time data from tens of thousands sensors: occupancy, temperature, ambient light, air quality, ... Everything. My surprise was not what I heard but who told me that.

For years at Silvair we've been touting lighting networks as infrastructure networks that collect and carry real time sensory data in buildings. We've been communicating that vision to lighting companies. Big and small. And they have been slow getting it. After all, for all those years, they were making light sources that had to be provided power. And the pitch of "your lamp is a sensory data router" was not getting through.

And then I realized that what lighting companies and communication infrastructure vendors did not get, had already been obvious for landlords and property managers. Erik Ubels will tell you stories about The Edge. Like he was desperately looking around for technologies capable of connecting his building to the cloud. He was a bit unlucky in a sense he missed Bluetooth mesh, having to rely on several kludgy (and expensive) technologies.

AGL has had more luck, by being able to spend significantly less on a platform that will be rolling out smart building cloud services. What The Edge had to have hardwired at the time of construction, AGL simply achieved by upgrading their Organic Response lighting system with Silvair's Bluetooth mesh. Both are pioneer projects but reflect two different possible approaches. One is high budget that has to be implemented at construction time. The other is an economy retrofit solution that can be deployed in almost no time.

2016 is the dawn of a new era. The era of skyscrapers reaching two types of clouds. The second being a virtual one making the buildings smart.