Lighting Shines in Vegas at LightShow West and Connected Tech Expo

Fifth Gen Media attended Connected Tech Expo, a trade show and conference dedicated to the world of connected technologies, in Las Vegas last week. The show was part of LightShow West and addressed the needs of smart buildings, smart cities and smart homes. Attendees at the Connected included IT managers, architects, smart home installers, city managers and urban planners, engineers, energy consultants and more. LightShow West was a show dedicated to fixtures and lights for commercial and residential real estate.
FifthGen Media CEO and publisher Rich Berliner attended the conference and moderated a panel. The panel topic was titled, “Connectivity: The key to making your building SMART.” However, the panel ended up spending most of its time discussing Power Over Ethernet (POE) and digital electricity. The panelists were Matt Guilano from Voltserver, Farukh with Sinclair Holdings and Dwight Stewart with Igor Technology.

“There is a great amount of interest in this topic,” Berliner said. “The panelists were kept after for nearly an hour, with questions from the audience that they wanted to ask, but did not have time during the panel discussion.
While much of the discussion on the floor of Lightshow West was about new LED technology and IoT was clearly on peoples minds, there was not much in the way of real products to address this topic. Rich Berliner observed “I saw many companies that had products that were ‘IoT ready’ but not much in the way of products that were fully integrated, shipable goods. Tridonic, a company from Austria that operates here in the US had some devises that allowed any LED’s to be IoT connected and Eaton Corp seemed like they were also
Showing products that were ready for prime time. Many other companies are still trying to figure out this space” he said.
The Fifth Gen Team also attended the DISRUPTOFFICE conference this week and saw short presentations from eight Proptech firms. The opportunity to see companies talk about their products and their approach to the markets they serve was a unique format that worked well.
“I was really very interested in hearing what these companies had to say” noted Rich Berliner, “these are all entrepreneurs and founders who have put their heart and souls into getting these firms up and running. It’s great to see the talent level and just the sheer force of will that propels these people.”
The companies that presented were DIRTT, Industrious,Equiem,Density,Envelope, SpaceLogic, SITU and PointGuard. All of these firms received a video of their presentations and the audience made up of some high powered Real Estate leaders seemed very focused on this crop of Proptech companies.

The eight companies discussed everything from designing space for a digital world to people tracking and corporate space utilization. Among the companies that spoke was flexible office space provider Industrious, who talked about how the office of the future is designed to fit the client’s needs, not their space requirements. Industrious competes with WeWork, Knotel, Convene and others in the field.