Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare (Part 1)

We discuss IoT use cases in commercial real estate and the open opportunities thereof.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Tim Panagos: I’m the Founder and CTO of Microshare. We’re the market-leading wireless IoT platform built for commercial real estate.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on that and talk about how IoT features in real estate.

Tim Panagos: IoT is a very big umbrella of technologies. What we have done is focus on the idea that you can deploy sensors at scale, generally battery-operated, and quite small and self-contained. The intent is to be able to report on all of the physical dimensions that would allow someone to measure and manage a large commercial real estate portfolio. That’s the IoT area we’re specializing in.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on use cases.

Tim Panagos: There’re a couple that come to mind. Number one is people are looking at how to optimize the space that they are maintaining. They might be leasing. They might be owning commercial real estate. How well does that space match their needs as a business? If it’s an office space, how many people are coming to work every day? What are the patterns of usage? Do people want more conference rooms? Do they want more offices? That’s a big question for a lot of employers and a lot of space leasers.

Sramana Mitra: How does your technology address that?

Tim Panagos: A key element to that is looking at how do you measure the way people move through a space, where they linger, and where they congregate. We put things like motion detectors and people-counting technologies throughout a space. We’ll take that information back from the IoT sensors and create that usage pattern overlay on top of that space.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers are using your technology for this use case? What are the dynamics of that customer base? Is there a particular vertical where these customers come from? What sector of the industry is adopting this behavior?

Tim Panagos: In the end, all of our customers are using occupancy and usage as a key dynamic. One of our strategies is any of the things that we’re measuring about the commercial spaces come down to how is that space being measured in the context of its human use.

Sramana Mitra: Who are the customers adopting this technology? How many customers? What is the penetration?

Tim Panagos: There are probably hundreds of customers using this use case. There isn’t a particular industrial focus. We have people who are using this in manufacturing, healthcare, and office spaces. Air quality is another use case. Like space, air quality is one dimension of physical space, but we always measure it in the context of human usage. When we look at air quality, its occupancy, and air quality, we don’t care if there’s a closet that no one uses with bad air. What we want to know is whether the air quality reacts well to human occupation. Post-quarantine, air quality has gotten a lot of attention. We probably have about 10 who are using this data already to turn their systems and change the way they configure their space and the way they guide their staff to use the space in order to reduce those riskier, bad air quality scenarios.

Sramana Mitra: What do you measure?

Tim Panagos: Air quality is a fairly large range. There are different sensors from different vendors that have different specialties. The simple things are temperature, and humidity. Some sensors can measure CO2 levels, VOCs, and particulates like dust or mold. We deploy a variety of sensors depending on what the business owner wants to measure. Ultimately, you can look at CO2 as a general indicator of occupancy and the ability of a given space to clear out the detrimental accumulation of gases and compounds. You can start with simple technologies that just measure CO2.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare
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