Every Wednesday, we send out "the single best resource on technology for buildings", Nexus' Founder Note. Each issue includes a note from Nexus Labs Founder, James Dice, along with a podcast, featured speaker, an event list, and more. Sign up today.
We just launched the NexusCon 2025 website and released 75 early bird tickets. This is the lowest price they’ll ever be, so leverage what’s left of that budget and get in on those early bird prizes (more on that below)!
For our first Category Roundup, we focused the conversation on Maintenance Management (CMMS) and Digital Asset Registers. We heard from dozens of building owners at NexusCon who were interested in purchasing these technologies to support their operational efficiency
When Harris Capital sought to make Gate 8, a new home to the Harris family office, they made an intentional investment in smart building technologies with confidence that they would see a return in the form of satisfied occupants and seamless operation.
As part of our recent mini-series on the ways that both buyers and vendors in the smart buildings industry self-sabotage projects and hold us back from new tech adoption, we asked you, our community, to chime in with your own terms. And chime in you did!
For our first Nexus Pro Gathering since NexusCon, we were excited to welcome Christopher Tjiattas, Program Manager at District Control Systems, back to the (virtual) stage to once again give his award-winning case study presentation.
In this case study, we sat down with Laura Towsley of RYCOM and Leon Wurfel of Bueno to hear the story of using data-driven tools, like FDD, to guide a smart building service provider through the Digital Revolution, leading to more efficient and valuable services to their customers.
Have you ever heard someone mutter “...and we can put a man on the moon” under their breath? It’s a great way to express the frustration of seeing incredible technological advancements all around us (like the moon landings) yet being stifled by archaic syste
A few weeks ago, there were two conferences in Denver for people who feel misunderstood. One was for people who believe aliens live amongst us. The other was NexusCon, for people who feel like aliens amongst the rest of the real estate and construction industries.
We recently performed one of our free vendor selection services for a pair of property development companies looking to find the latest in the access controls category for multifamily properties. For those of you who have been following along with our most recent whitepaper, Navigating the Marketplace,
The Nexus Marketplace started two years ago as a big ass spreadsheet. We began organizing technology companies into a huge database to sort through everything we knew about them. One of the first things we realized is how difficult it can be to tell what a company actually sells or does. Along the way, we began manually helping buyers with
Nexus Labs is thrilled to announce our partnership with Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2), co-administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to accelerate the transition to digitized and decarbonized buildings.
Hey Friends, James is out this week, celebrating his birthday and his love for the outdoors in an undisclosed location deep within the Rocky Mountains…In the meantime, we thought we would share
Hey friends, Over the past month, we've been supporting a large commercial real estate owner in a vendor shortlisting for Space Utilization solutions. With multiple tenants renewing leases, ending leases, and changing space requirements, it's a full-time job for a real estate owner to forecast the future demands of their tenants and optimize usage.
In early 2024, Atrius joined Nexus Labs on the panel for the Buyer’s Guide to Energy Management, ESG Reporting, and Carbon Accounting, where they showcased their application layer solutions. Today, we sat down with Simran Kalir, Director of Marketing at Atrius, to find out what they’ve accomplished and where they’re heading.
Hey friends, Have you listened to our latest podcast? It’s the first episode in a new series we’re creating called Buyer Roundups. Within Buyer Roundups, we “round up” buyers of smart building technology from a specific building-vertical type and ask them to share their experiences.
Back in 2021, ACE IoT Solutions’ co-founder Andrew Rodgers sat down with us in a podcast to chat about what open source really means and the vision ACE IoT had for the future of open source. They’ve been hard at work for three years in bringing that vision to life. Today, we sat down with the other co-founder, Bill Maguire, to get a pulse on what’s occurred in the last year.
Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace.
Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace.
Episode 162 features Ryan Knudson from Macerich and Jon Schoenfeld from Buildings IOT. This conversation explores how Macerich has incorporated Buildings IOT technology into their shopping centers. Enjoy!
It seems like just yesterday we were sitting down with industry experts like Shaun Cooley, CEO of Mapped, in our debate over the promise of the independent data layer (Change My Mind: The Independent Data Layer). But, in reality, that conversation is almost a year old now, and in that year companies like Mapped were in the early days of product-to-market fit. We took a moment to dive into what’s new at Mapped over the last year.
Hey friends, Before we shut down Nexus Labs’ consulting practice in early 2022, we had the opportunity to support one last building in Manhattan. This building had more submeters per square foot, per floor, per system, and per tenant than any building I've ever seen. AND, perhaps predictably, all that data was barely being used.
In 2023, Nexus Labs hosted the Buyer’s Guide to Advanced Supervisory Control, where Exergenics took the stage to showcase the strides they are making in the central utility plant (CUP) optimization. We caught up with Exergenics to see what’s new in 2024.
Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace
Hey friends, Nexus Labs is quickly becoming the go-to place for building owners to learn about and engage with vendors. To support buyers, we’re announcing a new (free) service! One unfortunate truth holding back the smart buildings industry is that buying technology
Hey friends, Nexus Labs is becoming the go-to place for building owners to learn about and engage with vendors. To support them, one offering is our free monthly buyer’s guide webinars—a monthly series doing a deep dive into one tech category at a time.
Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace.
KIPP Schools is a network of public charter schools throughout the United States that is open to all students. KIPP stands for Knowledge is Power Program, a program with a proven track record of academic excellence.
Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series
QuadReal Property Group is a global real estate investor and operator with over $73 billion in real estate assets and counting. In 2019, Thano Lambrinos joined the QuadReal team. Amid the building industry's transition to digitizing everything, Lambrinos and the QuadReal team were eager to embrace new technologies to differentiate themselves from competitors.
Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the vendor swamp, AKA the smart buildings marketplace, less murky. We’ve been tracking the marketplace for many years and sharing insights with the Nexus Pro Community.
Limbach Holdings provides mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and control (MEP+C) contracting services to building owners throughout the United States. The Limbach team struggled with consistently gathering the data and insights they needed from different building equipment in a standardized fashion to provide efficient and data-driven services to those buildings.
Hey friends, Smart buildings are created by long-term programs, not individual technologies or projects. But in our interviews with 50+ smart buildings technology buyers, we uncovered an inconvenient insight that is holding back our industry:
University of California, Irvine (UCI) is a 36,000-student, 224-degree public university in Irvine, California. UCI has partnered with Altura Associates, an engineering advisor and trusted master systems integrator (MSI). Since 2016, these two entities have been collaborating on a campus-wide project to bring the campus facilities technology to the forefront of the industry.
Hey friends, Thank you for all the feedback on last week’s first-of-its-kind newsletter. In case you missed it, we helped two different Buyers narrow the vast occupancy counting marketplace down to a shortlist of the 2-3 best vendors for them.
Episode 160 features Nathan Morris from KIPP, Stephen Dawson from Normal Software, and Terry Herr from Intellimation. This conversation explores KIPPs partnerships between Normal Software and Intellimation to better manage school facilities and increase savings to bring money back into the classrooms. Enjoy!
Building owners have many opportunities to decarbonize their own buildings to meet their carbon targets, but sometimes their money can be better spent decarbonizing other people’s buildings. That’s WattCarbon’s thesis, and one we believe in too. So much so that we (along with dozens of you) invested in their seed round last year.
The software operating commercial buildings hasn't changed much since before I was born. The first Building Automation Systems came about in the 1980s, with the ability to schedule equipment operation, create setpoints, and program sequences of operations. They could also store data (“trends”), display that data on a graphic, and alert operators to alarming readings (“alarms”).
Episode 159 features Thano Lambrinos from Quadreal and Wayne Kim from Andorix. This conversation explores the partnership between Quadreal and Andorix and how the implementation of a new network has made an impact on Quadreal. Enjoy!
Episode 158 features Richard Davis from Limbach Holdings. This conversation explores how Limbach Holdings is integrating FDD and energy management softwares into their HVAC and plumbing services. Enjoy!
The Nexus Pro community manager, Eric Larsen, posed a compelling prompt to our 600-member community: “Many of us agree that “Use Cases” are the building blocks of a Smart Building. However, I haven’t heard a single, significant, concise definition. How can that be if they’re so important?!”
Episode 157 features McGee Young from WattCarbon, Alan Greenberg, and DR Richardson from Elephant Energy and is our 7th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. This conversation explores how WattCarbon can bridge the gap for property owners and vendors, while simultaneously validating their decarbonization efforts. Enjoy!
The filterable Nexus Labs content library on our website tells me that since 2020, we’ve published 21 podcasts, 16 newsletters, and 10 members-only events on the independent data layer, building operating systems, digital twins, or single “pains” of glass. What do all these buzzwords topics have in common? They’re all used to describe the technologies at the data layer of the smart buildings stack. They’re all used to bring data from multiple silos together so it can be leveraged in software applications for better outcomes.
Episode 156 features Mary de Guzman from Sleep Country and Omar Tabba from BrainBox AI and is our 6th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. Mary and Omar discuss the benefits of installing AI enabled thermostats in several hundred retail stores. Enjoy!
Last week, we summarized the ‘Category First’ buyer—the ones who start the buying process by assessing an entire category of technology vendors. Only after validating that the category moves the needle do they engage the marketplace in a serious way.
We’re back with another installment of our Marketplace series of newsletters. In the smart buildings technology marketplace, there’s a type of buyer I call “Category First” buyers. They start the buying process by assessing a category of technology vendor. And only after validating that the category moves the needle do they engage the marketplace.
Episode 155 features Dana Schneider from Empire State Realty Trust and Etrit Demaj from KODE Labs and is our 5th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. These are not marketing fluff stories, these are lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs. Dana dives into their systematic approach to building retrofits, leading with The Empire State Building, and why they publish what they do. Enjoy!
Welcome to the Nexus Pro member digest… a collection of recent highlights you shouldn’t miss. These digests are designed to save you time and allow you to catch up on the whole month. Then you can dive deeper wherever you’d like.
We’re back with another installment of our Marketplace series of newsletters. One of the unfortunate truths holding back the smart buildings industry is that buying technology takes so much work that it could be a full-time job. For each new technology added to the program, here are the steps it takes:
Episode 154 features Joseph Fleshman from University of California, Irvine and Jim Meacham from Altura Associates and is our fourth episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. Joe and Jim talk in depth about the systematic overhaul of University of California Irvine’s building automation system, operational technology networking, and deploying fault detection and diagnostics software. Enjoy!
Episode 153 features Ben Cooper from BGO (BentallGreenOak) and is our third episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. Ben talks about the asset type due diligence and rate of adoption for their new infrastructure platform, the overall efficiencies created, and the future proofing abilities with a cloud connection application layer. Enjoy!
Buyers: This new ‘Marketplace’ newsletter series is written just for you. Being a Buyer in the smart building technology market requires you to start thinking in categories. The Nexus Marketplace currently has 47 different categories—and counting!
Welcome to the Nexus Pro member digest… a collection of recent highlights you shouldn’t miss. These digests are designed to save you time and allow you to catch up on the whole month. Then you can dive deeper wherever you’d like.
Episode 152 is the second episode in our new workforce series, In The Field. In The Field features people working boots on the ground in the built environment, giving real-life perspectives on their roles, backgrounds, and aspirations. Episode 152 features Stacks+Joules graduate and senior controls technician Nathanseth Cruz of Dual Fuel and Stacks+Joules Founder and Executive Director Michael Conway.
Episode 151 dives into what James and Rosy do at Nexus Labs beyond the podcast. From the pro membership community, to the courses platform, partnerships, and the marketplace, this episode brings you up to speed on all things Nexus Labs.
Edge cloud has the promise of both the benefits of full cloud, and all the benefits of staying on-premise. This is the middle ground—that Goldilocks sweet spot of not too big, not too small. Not too flat, not too on-prem.
Today, I want to tell you a quick story about my career.This will help explain the changes I made 6 years ago that I credit for helping me make an impact in smart buildings industry—changes that might help others trying to find their feet as the industry blazes forward.
The 150th Nexus Podcast Episode! Episode 150 features LONG Building Technologies and is our second episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies.
Welcome to the Nexus Pro member digest… a collection of recent highlights you shouldn’t miss. These digests are designed to save you time and allow you to catch up on the whole month. Then you can dive deeper wherever you’d like.
Cybersecurity is critical to protect the confidentiality and integrity in the data from both our IT and OT systems. Mike MacMahon from Newcomb & Boyd tells us everything we need to know and where to find out more.
Mahmoud Shouman from JB&B gives an insightful presentation about how to integrate smart building technology and data into the design and construction process and why it makes perfect sense.
Head over to Nexus Connect and see what’s new in the community. Don’t forget to check out the latest member-only events.
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