'Is there coffee? Have you seen any coffee? Do you have coffee? WHERE IS THE COFFEE?’

These questions blaze through my mind as I enter the Tower Hotel’s suite, lining up to collect my badge and T-shirt. A sea of people donning the typical programmer apparel –T-shirts, hoodies and jeans—all wait to enter the conference rooms where the first tutorials of the day will begin.

As more partners and clients approach us about more pro-active means to monitor the efficiency of buildings, let's look at how data from building management systems (BMS) can serve as the foundation for analysing buildings in deeper and more insightful ways.

Businesses and organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the need to monitor and manage their water consumption, as evidenced by the growing amount of water-consumption data that are being submitted into a global sustainability-benchmarking database that Fabriq has been assembling.

This is a continuation of a previous blog featuring a critical look on current developments in the proptech industry, sparked by a recent visit to the Future: PropTech event.

If I was ever going to shoot a futuristic movie, it would probably be called something along the lines of “Rise of the Platforms” (there goes any hope I may have ever held out for a successful movie making career, I know). The trend in the proptech industry is definitely to try to cover an increasing number of use cases and data domains, and platforms are the traditional “delivery mode” for this.

Let me just put this on record: Proptech is an exciting space. I’m saying this as someone who’s spent the past 10+ years in it, hence longer than the term proptech itself has been in existence. Previously largely used to refer to online agencies, proptech today apparently encompasses some 7,000 startups (according to CBRE’s Thomas Herr) and goes well beyond making real estate transactions more efficient.