The Data Surge App Showcase during this year’s Better Buildings Summit was filled with excitement as attendees were given the opportunity to vote in real-time for their favorite apps. Several innovative SEED Platform Collaborative Technical Allies presented software instances developed to harness data collected through the SEED Platform™ to create new insights for policy makers and the real estate community, with the ultimate goal of informing transformational development of benchmarking policy, as well as data utilization to improve energy performance within building portfolios.

Of the three apps developed by SEED Technical Allies, Maalka™ was crowned the crowd favorite based on its creation of an intuitive, user-friendly interface that redefines how large building portfolios are managed, and enables iterative energy performance improvement. The interface’s combination of powerful data visualization and analytics component provides a scalable and flexible solution that minimizes the barriers associated with the management of large data sets, while contributing to SEED’s goal of reshaping the data landscape within the buildings sector. The innovative app also provides communications and data sharing capabilities to owners, service providers, partners and additional stakeholders to ensure that building and portfolio performance is in line with expectations; this feature facilitates a collaborative environment necessary to track trends and identify potentially corrective actions necessary to the successful performance of a building or portfolio.

Two additional applications were developed by Performance Systems Development Consulting (PSD) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). PSD demonstrated an efficient connection between three core tools: SEED, Portfolio Manager, and Salesforce. These connections effectively enable a new ecosystem of software services to be accessed by SEED Partners and other platform users.

CMU took an approach to the contest that stayed true to the communication of building science and building performance. Rather than managing a portfolio, CMU created a platform that showed operational efficiency in buildings both in terms of energy consumption (energy use intensity, kBtu, etc.) and financial efficiency (energy spend, net operating income, etc.).

The Platform continues to fill a major market need for data-driven energy efficiency program design and implantation by helping users easily combine data from multiple sources, clean and validate it, and share information with others. Providing users with the ability to access this data through an app readily available on their mobile devices will encourage engagement among those with a vested interest in transforming the buildings sector to be more data driven.

For more information about the SEED Platform Collaborative or to get involved, please visit our website.