AutomatedBuildings.com Review

Every month there is a blizzard of information contained in the emails and newsletters that cross my desk on their way to AutomatedBuildings.com. Some of this information is not in the form of any type of content we can publish but I feel I should share with you these snippets, blog bits, and url links that are about to fall off my desktop.

This year BACnet committee members, developers, implementers, installers, building owners, operators, and everyone else who has benefited from the protocol,will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of BACnet’s adoption as ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 135. It has also been a bit more than 10 years since BACnet was embraced internationally as ISO Standard 16484-5 and then as a national standard in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. The question is “How has BACnet done it?”

A Beginner’s Guide to “Intelligent Buildings" Author: Rob Murchison & Tom Shircliff, Intelligent Buildings, Inc. Intelligent, Smart, Converged, Connected, High Performance…What’s the difference? When and how should I do it? Isn't my team doing it? Who in my company cares about it? What is “it”? Defining those terms and answering those questions can become an obsession, and worse yet, a distraction to the core mission of the real estate professional.

The concept of smart building has gained popularity worldwide as home developers have started to realize that these buildings are economical in the long run. In the recent years, several technological advancements have enabled building operators to monitor the real-time activities of the buildings, which when combined with BAS helps in controlling the lighting and energy systems. The analysts forecast the global smart building market to grow at a CAGR of 11.90% over the period 2014-2019.

A chance to catch up with the ever-informative Marc Petcock, a long time building automation controls legend, at Conference Live, 2015 Realcomm|IBcon. Marc is VP Marketing at Lynxspring and a leading expert on building automation cyber security. Check out what Marc has to say.

A chance to catch up with Sky Foundry’s John Petze at the 2015 Realcomm|IBcon conference in San Antonio. Key interview take-aways are that the state of building analytics has improved significantly since 2011. As John says, “It’s impossible to monitor data and system operations manually.” Successful deployment of analytics results in increased comfort, reduced costs, and energy savings — and it’s all about the last 18″ — the distance from the computer monitor and the systems operator, and converting data into actionable information.

J2 Innovations brings home Best Intelligent Building Innovation award 09 JUNE 2015 J2 Innovations made history at our industry's most prestigious event - Realcomm/IBcom. We won two out of three awards in the BEST INTELLIGENT BUILDING TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION category with FIN 3.0, and through our OEM partner’s product KMC Commander using FIN technology, (the third winner was Tridium for their new JACE) Additionally, we also won an unprecedented two more awards in the MOST INTELLIGENT BUILDING PROJECTS category with Novo Integration's Macerich Mall and Hepta Control System's Quicken Loans Datacenter.

P-TECH. That’s the Pathways in Technology Early College High School, an innovative collaboration between New York public schools, the City University of New York, and IBM (IBM). The 18-month-old experiment has caught not only the president’s eye but the attention of companies, politicians, and educators across the nation. The Brooklyn school takes students in the ninth grade and aims to have them graduate six years later with both a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering—not to mention a likely job at IBM. As President Obama said, “We need to give every American student opportunities like this.”

The adoption of disruptive technologies can make or break your business. The effects can be positive or negative. Adopting what appears to be a disruptive technology that does not go mainstream or adopting it too early can break or significantly hurt a business. Many “experts” and vendors are loudly proclaiming that manufacturers that do not implementing disruptive technologies will be run out of business by competitors. The Internet of Things (IoT) with the idea that everyday devices will be connected to one another is one of the hottest topics in technology today. It is true that shifts in technology can bring about big changes in industry, and automation professionals should help guide their employers and the industry.

Think quantified self-health tracking devices. Think IoT and connected devices. Think wearable health trackers, mobile apps and digital health platforms that are helping consumers, patients and doctors manage myriad of chronic diseases, diagnostics and prescriptions. Think Connected Health and HealthIT.

ABEC's Academy has been launched to provide a permanent and significant improvement to the engineering pipeline in the building controls industry.

Measurement and Verification (M&V) is critical for large, multi-million dollar performance contracts, but is it worthwhile for smaller projects? Why? How is it done? In this webinar, we'll walk through the basic approaches to M&V and how you can use a commitment to M&V – either formal or informal – to get more projects approved by standing by your work. Whether you're an efficiency engineer or a sales / account professional, this webinar is for you.

NATO is seeking solutions to reduce the vulnerability of troops on fuel convoys. It is also looking for ways to cut the weight of batteries carried by soldiers to power equipment. During the exercise, the alliance will also assess how it could wind and solar power to generate energy for camps; improve insulation against heat and cold; low-energy technologies for water purification; LED lights; and small portable fuel cells for soldiers.

The line-up of smart home frameworks looks now as follows (in order of appearance):
Qualcomm AllJoin – now donated to the AllSeen Alliance
Apple Home Kit – well, Apple can afford to ignore the rest of the world
Intel IoTivity – under the umbrella of the Open Interconnect Consortium
Google Brillo – announced last week, in a Steve Jobs style performance, including an applauding audience of followers, who failed to ask what is new here and why we can’t use what is already available. At the same time as Google launched Brillo, they also announced Weave. Weave is a “smart thing application language,” comparable to ZigBee’s Cluster Library that has already existed for years and has a tremendous amount of maturity.

By installing a software agent in all the computers, we can analyze the power states data metered from them, jointly with users’ activity. Physically representing the state (ON or OFF) and the activity (active or inactive) in the office layout plan, we can grab information about the office spaces utilization. We then relate it with a few important questions that can be answered in a really simple and fast manner because of the usage of computers as sensors that are already deployed in the offices (without having to physically install new sensing devices).

5 Steps to Implement a Centralized Facility Management (CFM) Platform Author: Tom Willie, CEO, Blue Pillar There are a host of issues facing today's facility managers. The pressures to ensure that facility-based operations are managed reliably and economically are challenged by budget reductions, rising energy prices, and an aging infrastructure. In addition to aging electrical and mechanical facilities, more than 50 percent of facilities management personnel are expected to retire within the next 10 years, and their extensive knowledge base will be lost.

A five-step guide to building the business case for energy efficiency projects If you're not sure where to start with building the business case, or you just want to add some polish to your current proposals, our five-step guide will provide some helpful pointers and tips to help you get your case past your board/boss.

Building Controls are the new target for online hackers. Don't be the integrator or the building that makes the news because you didn't do what you were supposed to regarding protecting your buildings network. Don't know what to do to prevent this from happening?

Top 10 tips to ensure success with Enterprise Facilities Management (EFM) It’s a bold move to state: “EFM is not part of our company’s core skill set and we are going to outsource it.”
The decision to outsource Enterprise Facilities Management (EFM) must be deliberate and business-focused. There’s a lot riding on it, whether it’s for the first, second, third, or even eighth time around.

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