28. Leveraging the Internet of Things in Shared Workspaces
Welcome to episode #28 of the Everything Coworking Podcast!
Welcome to the Everything Coworking Podcast #28! My guest, Dale Hersowitz, is the CEO of WUN Systems and HappyDesk. WUN Systems is a leading provider of cloud based voice data and Wi-Fi products for the shared space community.
What is the concept of internet of things? You take a network of physical objects/devices that are embedded with either sensors, electronics, and network activity. You enable these objects to talk to one another and exchange data via the internet.
Talk about how you see this play out in workspace: You’re seeing it in all different levels. I think what’s happening is commercial buildings are adapting to this technology and it's sort of pulling it into workspace. One of the most challenging things is if you’re workspace isn’t in a major building your challenge is to try and find parking. So you’ve seen is some of those smart parking spaces/smart parking lots where the actual spaces have sensors in the ground. When you pull up into the lot it’ll say “floor 1 has 20 spots available” or “floor 2-30 spots”. As a user that’s fantastic because you’re like “oh my gosh floor one is completely full” so I am going to drive to floor 4 versus driving around and around and around. This is not applicable to all spaces, but in spaces where you have a structured parking lot they’re realizing that they should have each en space talk to a kind of centralized platform.
You’re seeing that the door control systems are now talking to your phone. Now you can hold your phone to it and have access to the facility. What is changing is the member experience or user experience is just increasing dramatically because it is just making their lives so much easier. If you look at it from a management point of view, one of the biggest things about this IoT is bringing control and certainty.
It was interesting, I was reading an article, an Italian firm is constructing a building and talking about putting sensors on all of the water pipes that talk to the internet and talk to all the other building systems so that if there is a pressure variation in any of the pipes it will automatically send alerts to a central platform.
You and I were chatting yesterday where Cisco had that major acquisition of Jasper. Jasper is a company that is driving its concept. They built a platform for this IoT. It’s a 1.4 billion dollar acquisition. Me as a technologist that really leads me to believe that if Cisco is hedging its bets on that, this is the future of all things.
I think where the results of some of the IoT will help do for the actual shared space owners is to give them that real time intelligence and allow them to take all that data and analyze it. I’m hoping, and I see it happening, that it’s going to allow them to run better centers and be more profitable and will see further growth.
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