I recently joined a PropTech WhatsApp group and asked what events they recommended and why, some of which I have included above along with others I have been to and have been recommended to me. I am not advocating any of them although I did moderate a panel as the Smart Buildings Show this year. I have highlighted them because of an observation I made in the WhatsApp group about how much ground PropTech covers including if and how lines blur with related areas like WorkTech, as well as if some are sub-sets, e.g. ConTech and Smart Buildings technologies.

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I think one of the first Smart Building events I attended was at Cisco’s Bedfont Lakes HQ. It wasn’t that long ago and I remember the buildings there being more sparsely occupied compared to those shown in presentations by the hosts. Since then I have seen a fair few more from them including at events I have curated (see here and here), at Smart Buildings Show and elsewhere. Personally, I have found them way too salesy and to paraphrase:

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Following my recent post on Accrediting Smart Building Solutions? I am bookmarking this diagram from a post by James Dice from Nexus Labs on LinkedIn (see here). It is not exactly the kind of ‘map’ I am talking about (see here), but I think he does at least explain the problem he thinks his market place helps solve, i.e. the gap between buyers and sellers of smart building technology that he discussed in a follow post (see here). There is another one that Matthew Marson pointed out in this column for Smart Buildings Magazine back in September when he asked Do we have an honesty problem? That’s about vendors over claiming the capabilities of their solutions and/or overstating their contribution to the deployment of smart assets. What is not clear about the Nexus Labs market place is how that ‘promise gap’ is evaluated/verified/etc. Having co-written 2 books about modern marketing and judged a number of content marketing awards, I would also say there is a bigger problem and that is how badly vendors communicate who they are, what they do and why it matters. Check out this previous post on Better and more strategic marketing communications? where header graphic probably better describes most of the marcoms I see in smart buildings space.

The folks at independent PropTech consultants Trustek posted the above graphic today on LinkedIn (see here), as part of promoting their Verified Market Place. Their former head of strategy, innovation and ESG Katie Whipp participated in one of the panel sessions I curated and moderated as part of Simmtronic Lighting Control Summer Series of events to celebrate their 30th Anniversary (see here). She’s recently moved to head up partnerships at BMS optimisation specialists REsustain but will remain a non-exec of Trustek. I mention this because I have spoken to Trustek team about their Market Place because I am fascinated to know if they have a matrix or framework that the technologies they verified get plotted on to. I don’t mean a rating framework not the kind of ranking that Unissu have done (see here), but more along the lines of what problems they think solutions help solve (i.e. jobs-to-be-done) and/or how they see the technology sliced and diced along the lines of what Scott Brinker has been doing in MarTech (see more here).

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This framework for ‘New Construction Whole Life Cycle Carbon’ was presented by Rishika Shroff and Hesham Ahmad at sustainability consultancy Eight Versa in their article on The Rebuild vs. Refurbish Conundrum. As they point out, 85% of building stock in the UK was constructed before 1990s and a large number of these fall short on current energy performance standards. And that leaves the two choices they highlight:

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Another day, another protech map. This time of the New Zealand market by Sam Stewart behind proptechmap.io and you can see what’s new and the full list that’s also tagged in the comments of his post on LinkedIn (see here). It’s another one I’m bookmarking for being along similar lines of what I think is needed for the smart building technology landscape (see more here).

This post is more of a bookmark because the interactive PropTech Europe 2023: Top 100 infographic by BUILTWORLD in collaboration with PwC is along the lines I have be talking about with regard to how the smart buildings technology landscape might get sliced and diced. And that being akin to what Scott Brinker is doing in the MarTech world of my previous career as an entrepreneur (see more here). It was mentioned by the team at Metrikus who have kindly participated in some of the smart buildings event I have curated and moderated (see here and here). They have been selected as one the top 20 PropTech companies in the ‘building operations and FM tech’!’ category. The irony is not lost given comments by Gary Cottle and Michael Grant there in response to my post on LinkedIn suggesting the need for this kind of infographic in the smart building technology space (see here).

I do have a computer science MSc having studied IT as joint major as an undergraduate, but it was human-centred design orientated so I find diagrams a great way of understanding technology architecture – particularly as a system or ecosystem even. I mention this because Matthew Parris at GE Appliances has provided feedback on my LinkedIn announcement about the reboot of this blog (see here). It was in response to my earlier post about ‘interoperability’ that featured his diagram (see here). Short version is his feedback pointed out the limitations of traditional stacked or tiered hour-glass architecture (see here and here), and that ‘Unified Namespace’ is a more scalable and modern way of architecting industrial data system:

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I saw this diagram on a LinkedIn post from the folks at PropTech consultants Trustek today. Katie Whip who heads up Innovation, Strategy & ESG there participated in the first Simmtronic Summer Series of events I helped curate and moderate earlier this year, so I knew about their Verified Marketplace of solutions.

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I had a great chat with Brian Coogan at Ethos Engineering recently. We have been connected on LinkedIn for some time now, but finally met in person at the Smart Buildings Show this year. I mentioned I was looking at facilitating a collaboration to look at how the technology landscape might be sliced/diced, although prompting one might be more accurate description given my resources.

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