AutomatedBuildings.com - Editorial Comments July 2008

If you flashback 10 years with us - We have selected this article to be in our first launch issue because we think it sends us all a wake up call as to how significant the internet is going to be in the future.

Your Building.com? - The concept of a large building as an internet identity with its own web address is now the latest step in presenting and managing your Automated Buildings. Well I just about got it right...... 10 years later the identity still exists but the .com changed to a .net but ten years ago at our start up we were in the dot com boom. Also the concept of selling ISP services rapidly evolved to provide access to any internet services and the intranet rapid evolved to secure internet. The 199 Fremont project property management group has done a great job of growing the web site and adding other internet features as they evolve. It is ironical that not all buildings today have this web identity and connections 10 years later. Why?

An article I wrote in May of this year brings us closer to our evolution of today Brilliant Buildings.

It has been an unbelievable 10 years for Jane and I. What started as a retirement project to keep us from killing each other while providing resources to a few about the web evolution in our industry has turned into a Global Online Magazine with 3500 to 5000 visits daily. My surprise was expressed in "A Year of Rapid Change" or The Metamorphosis of a Digital Dinosaur which provides insight into who we are plus a quick review of our first year.

Our editorial staff and industry authors are the core of our magazine which, coupled with the fact that we never delete anything, provides a 10 year legacy of an industry growing up and is all accessible with a Google on site search.

In July 1999 Tom Hartman wrote our first article Network Control: A New Paradigm for HVAC which has evolved to be one of our advertisers http://www.optimumenergyco.com/
September 2000 saw Jack McGowan of Energy Control Inc join us as a contributing editor.
Anto Budiardjo, wrote his first article in November 2001 while still the Marketing Director at TAC Americas and joined as contributing editor March 2003. In December 2003 Paul Ehrlich the then Business Development Leader with Trane's Global Controls business unit joined us. Jim Sinopoli, Principal, Sinopoli and Associates, and author of the book "Smart Buildings" joined us in December 2006.

We have since added columnists Steve - Steven R. Calabrese Project Manager Automated Logic Chicago and Toby - Toby Considine Systems Specialist, Facility Services, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and have had the good fortune to have several hundred articles and interviews written by industry leaders. See The most read articles of the Last Ten Years

Our newest columnist just starting this month is Andy McMillan President and CEO Teletrol Systems Inc.& President BACnet International with The BACnet Puzzle

Our editorial staff provides a great response to our first 10 years so be sure to read every article, column, review, and interview.

Our about tab and mission statement had not been changed for 10 years and, although not wrong, a lot of changes have occurred and we hope the following better states who we now are. We are still committed to our original intent and have left that statement in our mission statement.

AutomatedBuildings.com has entered its tenth year as an on line magazine and web resource. We provide the news and connection to the community of change agents that are creating our present definition of smart, intelligent, integrated, connected, green, and converged large buildings. Our virtual magazine and web resource provides a searchable platform for discussion and exchange while creating opportunities for B2B for all new and existing stakeholders.

Our first ten years was focused on the impact of the internet and open protocols. Our next few years will be spent breaking down the past silos of which we were all part of. We will embrace the online convergence of humanity and define new business models with self realization and publication of how we can contribute.

AutomatedBuildings.com is committed to the continuance of our existing work plus the creation and nurturing of a community of change agents, to lead those who will accept change and convince those who resist. To quote Maslow's theory and restate "What we can be, we must be”

We have a long, long way to go to move out of the deeply rooted vendor centric unconnected world of traditional marketing of our products and services. We need to define the services and recognize the transaction and the performance we can deliver. We need to "Give our customers the ability to do something new, that they couldn't do before, but would have wanted to do; if only they knew they had the ability to do it."

Imagine every single possible bit of information at your fingertips, perfectly contextualized, and perfectly personalized. This may never be realized, but the journey to find perfection will be the change we seek.

Our community of change agents needs to continue to educate customers and especially those who have never been our customers, with all types of events and in all forms of media. We need to explore new initiatives like Open Source, which is not vendor or hardware dependent so we can become the enablers. The Open Protocol work is mostly done but we need to build on the flat line created by the data pushers and find an elegant entrance to the browser and the IT world. We need virtual space in which will occur the creativity of the change we seek. We are the people that will give the kids a place to build applications quickly and easily. We are the people that will create Building 2.0, the version that still has not yet been defined.

Interoperability becomes the driver when economical. The overwhelming operational requirement to have all buildings connected to smart grid is a great example. The technology is here, we just need to create ways for our industry to be the ones that figure out how to use technology to sell solutions.

Jane and I just returned from an extremely successful ConnectivityWeek in Santa Clara, California, called “Empowering the Energy Revolution”. The previews in our May issue “Convergence in Action” came alive at this event and the overwhelming takeaway message was ”We must be the change we seek!”

Several years ago at one of the first BuilConns, Anto’s keynote discussed the vision he had and how it was more than a vision it was an hallucination. Hallucinations are the "perception of a nonexistent event". I believe that this was the event that contained the substance of his hallucination. Thanks Anto for creating this event; it was truly the cross over that achieved its goal of “Empowering the Energy Revolution”. As a result of Anto's success with this event he simply calls for a bigger boat!

I summarize my thoughts of the event in My 10 Takeaways. We were extremely pleased that Keith Gipson received the Buildy Vision Award. Keith then nominated his wife Reta as the best supporting actress in the non fiction roll of his life; a great tribute to this couple's contribution to our industry. Congratulation Keith and Reta.

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Lots of chatter at the event about Open Source for our industry and Anno Scholten, NovusEdge and I do an interview about Open Source for Open Systems – Follow up to ConnectivityWeek, in which he talks about how he would like to bring several open source initiatives together to discuss how we can all collaborate on a common goal for our industry. Anno's last month Open Source Article received the most reads so there is still clearly a lot of interest from the industry. Thanks Anno for showing us how to be the change.

I am extremely impressed with the BAS course that Ken Kolkebeck has put together please read my review of this great resource for our industry ISA - BAS Training Course

Be sure to check our event calendar to see the number events we have in our future.

We have added a new Blog tab to our navigation menu which links to related industry blogs of interest. We created an Industry online Forum many years before blogging was conceived and have combined these.

Of course the news just keeps flowing thru our web site and RSS feeds daily, and of course the only way to truly find what you are looking for in the vast quantity of information on our site is with our site search engine http://www.automatedbuildings.com/search/sitesearch.htm

Tell our sponsors you saw their ad on the AutomatedBuildings.com web site and thank them for supporting your free access to evolving Automated Building Industry information. Click on their ads and view their valuable products and services. Please review all Our Sponsors.

As I always say, it is a great time to be in the news business for our industry.

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