Episode 104 – The Human-Centric Tech Revolution: Reimagining Indoor Environments With Bubblynet

Indoor Environment Tech: In this episode, Bill Brock sits down with Fabio Zaniboni, founder and chief vision officer of BubblyNet. They explore the transformative potential of IoT technology in creating intelligent, adaptive indoor environments. With indoor environment tech, Zaniboni shares the fascinating journey of BubblyNet. He shared their story from its origins in yacht lighting control to becoming a pioneering force in commercial and industrial space management.

The conversation delves deep into how Bluetooth mesh technology has enabled BubblyNet to develop sophisticated solutions that go far beyond simple lighting controls. Fabio discusses how their technology can create personalized “bubbles” of environmental comfort, addressing factors like lighting spectrum, sound masking, and even biological responses to different light frequencies.

Key highlights include:
The company’s focus on sustainability.
Workplace productivity, and human well-being.
How IoT can help companies achieve net-zero goals, improve office return strategies, and even impact human health through intelligent lighting systems that mimic natural circadian rhythms.

About the Show

“Over the Air” is a podcast that features unfiltered conversations with executives about their IoT journeys. The mistakes they made, the lessons they learned, and what they wished they’d known when they started. In each episode, our expert guests make bold predictions, reveal unpopular opinions, and share stories you won’t hear anywhere else.

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Transcript

Well, hello, everybody.

My name is Bill Brock, CEO of Peridio, and welcome to today’s Over the Air podcast. We have a fantastic show for you today. Fabio Zanaboni, founder and chief vision officer at BublyNet.

Fabio, thank you for joining us. I’m so happy to be here. Well, before we get into it too deep, why don’t you tell me a little bit more about BublyNet? Well, BublyNet started after a series of PoE projects that became more and more challenging as there were requirements of getting more data points and more devices and more sophistication.

We realized that we had to go wireless. There was no way that cable within a building space would be able to support the flexibility and the amount of data that we needed. And so we went through different technologies from Zigbee, Z-Wave, and then in 2016, we came across Bluetooth mesh.

So the same nonprofit organization that is behind the BLE that you have on your airports and so on realized that after, well, BLE is like 2011, and they realized, well, if we are going to go industrial, if we are going to connect thousands or tens of thousands of devices, we need to go to a next standard. And they started developing what became Bluetooth mesh. And when I saw what they were doing, and it was going to be an open standard, and I come from Europe, there is a lot of open standards, as you probably know, coming over there.

There is really this culture of if we all work together, we end up by getting something great, and even if we’re going to get a little slice of the pie, it’s going to be of a great pie. And it’s all about delivering value to the client, and then you can enjoy a section of that value. So we jumped on Bluetooth mesh on this project, and then in 2018, we were one of the seven companies in the world at Light and Build in Frankfurt presenting this new technology.

Along the way, we realized, I’ve been working also on the lighting company, and a well-being company, and we realized that with this technology, we could do way more than just turning on and off lights, or opening and closing shades, or controlling HVAC, but we could also address certain parameters that would have an impact on the guests, or the employees, or the patients inside buildings, beyond what we’re used to. And I mean, well-being in terms of better sleep, better recovery after surgery. And there is parameters like, of course, CO2 levels, or certain frequencies within the lighting spectrum, that can trigger hormones, and metabolism, and so on.

So we came to the idea of, well, we want really to create kind of a bubble around each one of us when we’re inside the building, where you could have your ideal environment. And that means, I want to focus, I’m going to have my sound masking, I’m going to have the proper lighting in terms of intensity of lighting, but also color temperature, and so on, or I want to have fun, and so on and so forth. So the technology allowed us to start spanning on many more applications than where the original application intended, that was mainly controlling settings of mechanical devices within a building space.

So did you start in lighting, and then grew outward from there? Yes, yes. So I started with lighting, turning of 2005, and moving from Europe here, and we started with yachting. And yachting, of course, it was the very beginning of LEDs, it was very difficult to dim them, to control them, and so on.

So we had to develop controls for LED. And because we were in a yachting environment, it’s not like on a residence. On a residence, you press a button, the lights doesn’t turn on, you know that the lighting doesn’t turn on.

But on a yacht, you intend to have a pump activated, well, if that pump doesn’t get activated, you have a big problem. So we started with controlling lighting, controlling shades, and from there we realized, well, we need to go to something better, we were using a protocol called Modbus to have a two-way communication, so we could check back if the action, if the command was positive or not. So I went from there, then moved them to land, we do amazing projects from hotels, residential towers, office space, convention centers, museums, and so on.

And of course, the question and the demand from the market was, well, can you also help us out controlling? We had clients say, well, just having a switch in the world is not enough. Can we start having lighting transitioning from a static kind of tool to a dynamic kind of tool? Give an example, a museum that we did, you get close to an artwork, now the light on the artwork becomes brighter. Or can change the shape of the beam so that you can focus on certain details of that artwork.

We’ve been doing interactive applications. And it’s very interesting because now with this technology, you start merging what is architectural lighting with entertainment. IoT gives you so many more possibilities, where now all these different disciplines that in the past were kind of silos, now you can merge them, and by merging them and combining them together, and you can come up with experiences that were impossible five or 10 years ago.

And so what is your physical product? Is it a gateway? Is it a management service? Or do you actually manufacture the lights themselves as well? Okay, so our core product is the software. So we have edge computing software, so at device level, that creates a mesh, so you coordinate all the activities of different devices. And then yes, we have the software that goes on a gateway.

And then we have a cloud that then is able to absorb this quantity of data, typically is already reduced because we are already processing data at edge level. And then we further clean up, let’s say, the data at the gateway level, so that your cloud is not getting overburdened with a lot of information that you don’t need. And so we have these three layers, mainly, let’s say, software.

We go to market with a full solution. So we have the hardware. We have a little device that is about half an inch in diameter by two inches, is a little cylinder.

And that little device has a Nordic chip. You put it on any lumina, and that lumina, like that device has motion sensor, so the lights automatically turn off, it has nobody in the room, has a daylight sensor, so that if you already have a natural light coming into the room, the light is going to be dimming down or mixed with your natural light. And then inside, you have your schedules, you have your transitions, and you have many, many more functionalities.

So that hardware, typically, we have some manufacturers here in the US. So if you need to be VA compliant, we can have VA compliant solutions. And if you want to be most cost effective, we have overseas solutions.

So hardware coming from overseas. All the hardware is co-designed with us. And typically, these hardware suppliers, they are ready into the IoT space.

So they know how to embed intelligence on hardware. Cool. And what did you learn going from boating to commercial applications? So it feels like with the yacht, you have a very controlled ecosystem.

Maybe there’s more players than I would imagine, but a yacht is a very fixed dimension. You’re not going to go outside of the boat. But then when you’re looking at interfacing with maybe a hotel chain or restaurants, what has that go-to-market been like for you? Yes.

Yachting, well, let me be specific. We were targeting yachts from, let’s say, 100 feet up to 500 feet. So we’re not talking, you know, use more marina boat.

We’re talking about large yachts. So you already have a certain level of sophistication. Consider that then you have clients that can be very, very demanding in terms of the user experience that they’re expecting, the reliability they’re expecting, and so on.

By 2011, 2012, we had already about 75% of the market. And we achieved that with a wide globe service. And our service was superb.

To give you anecdotes, I will have situations where no other representatives will call me and say, hey, you know, I need you to be at GPR next week. And they say, okay, it’s Friday, when? No, can you be there on Tuesday? Say, okay, cool. No, send me the address.

And then you get a text and you look at the address and say, is this a Hong Kong? Say, yeah, sure. Well, you know, in two days, you need to be on Hong Kong. And you just need to give that service.

They’re not going to talk with one of my engineers. They want me, you know, and, you know, you drop everything you need to drop and you take your first flight and you get there. So by having that level of service, we captured the mean amount of like, it was the vast majority of the market.

Once you go, you know, 40%, 50%, 60% market share, everybody’s on you. It’s very, very challenging to sustain that level of market share, unless you have a very strong preparatory proposition, unless you have, you know, very strong IP protection, it’s going to be challenging because people trying not to get kicked out of the market. They’re going to do whatever they’re going to go below cost just to keep a foothold in the US market because, you know, it’s still a very important market.

But it was like yachting of that size is still a small market. So the transition was 500 foot boats out there. Exactly.

Exactly. So the transition was, you know, you always aspire for more, you know, you always aspire for a bigger game. And the next more natural transition was, well, you know, instead of doing a yacht, well, we did some cruise ships.

So that was a nice transition. Unfortunately, you know, most of the cruise ships are built in Europe or Asia. There’s now really, there’s some maintenance done between the US and the Bahamas, but not much.

So we did that a little bit. We realized that we were not ready to have a stronghold in Europe to be able to control that kind of business. And we say, well, you know, let’s just go and do a hotel.

And since then, we’ve been doing airports, you know, convention centers, you know, very large office projects and kind of residencies, you know, small restaurants. So we do it. We have a vast array of applications and it’s super fun because every time you get into a niche, there is those very specific needs and they can be needs in terms of connectivity because now you have concrete and rebar all over the place.

And now, you know, you’re trying or hoping to bounce your message, you know, around those kinds of obstacles, or you can have situations where hospitality projects where you need to have color changing lights and animations and circadian lighting and super cool sophistication. So there is a lot of different aspects where you need to push the limits of the technology and that is super fun. What have been the requirements for you guys out of interfacing with existing building management systems? Is that something that you see in these high-end, like, hospitality scenarios? Like, what’s the, is it BACnet? Are you required to do that? Are you outside of that? Absolutely.

I would say that BACnet is one of your primary vectors of integration because most of HVAC and most of the mechanical side of the building can talk BACnet. There is also property management systems like Oracle or others that are cloud-based. And so you need to have, you need to have a local connectivity, BACnet is one, RS-45 is another, and you can have local APIs.

But then you need also to have a cloud APIs where you are able to fully integrate, you know, cloud to cloud. So we will have BABnet cloud integrating with the PMS, VMS cloud. And to answer your question, yes, those are pretty strong requirements.

And how has Blue Jays mesh been for you? It seems like, I mean, that was the beginning of this story. It seems that some of these protocols take a while to gain traction and gain hold, but this was a very important formative decision for you. Have you been happy with Bluetooth mesh? Is this a protocol that has really unlocked this world for you? Or is it still lacking in some areas? I think it’s a, okay.

So the positive, I think it’s the best mesh solution. I still prefer Bluetooth mesh to matter because of certain limitations the matter has and the flexibility and how powerful is Bluetooth mesh. Of course, having the big guys contributing to these standards, I’m talking about Google, Ericsson, Intel, you know, Silicon Labs and so on.

Now having an open community, it’s fundamental. It will be impossible even to the number one player in this space to develop something totally proprietary and have the capabilities that we have on an open something like Bluetooth mesh. So that is the positive.

Last year, Bluetooth released an update to Bluetooth mesh that is called Bluetooth NLC. NLC stands for network lighting controls. The challenge is how you make a standard and how you police a standard.

So when third parties are saying, well, I’m Bluetooth mesh, now you have a certainty of full transparent integration. So I think that has been one of the top challenges. We’re talking about back then before is like, if I say that I’m, I talk back then, and then there is an HVAC system that does magnet, you’re expecting to have that fully working.

But most of the time you need to have an integrator, you know, fine tuning the system. The challenge for a system like Bluetooth mesh is your standard is so well designed that you don’t need to have an integrator. And we had success on different projects where the specifier will recommend certain devices for us.

And then we’ll use some other devices from another company. And both we were Bluetooth mesh, and there was no work at all from our side, on the other side or an integrator side in terms to have the devices talking to each other because the protocol is the same. And so that is, I think is pretty unique.

I was talking to another mesh protocol like Zigbee. Over the years, there have been a lot of challenges, because there were a lot of different variations of Zigbee and integration was often not as smooth and clean as what we experienced with Bluetooth mesh. That’s very cool.

For these companies and working with the existing, like your focus is mostly on the hospitality side or are you looking to go to other commercial applications as well? Yes, there is a few vectors of growth that we’re pursuing. One definitely is the return to office, kind of trying how you can get your people back in the office, how you can get back and have that mixing ball or that interaction that builds culture that allows for cross pollination and so on. And the way we can address acoustic distractions, the way we can address circadian lighting, the way we can address quality.

There is studies from Harvard to Berkeley where you can increase by 10%, 15%, 20% the productivity of your people just by addressing those different factors. And those are factors that typically when you work from home, you don’t have. It’s difficult to work from home and having your total isolation and total focus on what you’re trying to do and having your maximum productivity for a certain amount of time.

And I can give you an example. I’m talking from Florida. I had a developer about six months ago.

It was spring and he comes to the office and said, oh, I’m so exhausted. And we start talking and everybody in the family is exhausted and say, well, did you take one of our CO2 sensors and check out the level at home? And I said, no, I didn’t talk about this. Well, we are in this business.

Just take one, leave it a couple of days and let me know. And anyway, story short, the wife was what happened with Paulins. Now we have a lot of Paulins here in the spring.

So all of those were clothes family of five in a house, three kids, like three teenagers, they burn oxygen. His CO2 level was through the roof. Are you kidding? Just too many kids inside? Yeah, but this is what happened in those classrooms.

There is studies where kids fall asleep in the classroom. It’s not that they have a problem. It’s just that you put 25 kids in a classroom, you’re going to run out of oxygen, particularly in certain areas where you don’t have a recirculation and people typically don’t open the windows even if it’s too cold, it’s too hot.

So back to what are our applications, like office space, big deal. Just to give you an idea, we work a lot. So talking about application sustainability is a big vector for us.

So how we can improve or help companies achieve the net zero 2030 goals. There is more and more local code requirements typically in cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, where you start getting your limits on how much energy you can use per square feet. And IoT is your perfect solution because you’re not going to re-glass 20-story building to improve your insulation.

That would be extraordinary expensive. You’re going to have a return of investment in 20 years. But if I spend like a dollar square foot and I start embedding sense all over the place and reducing and removing the temperature, like having the HVAC going to a set back temperature when nobody’s in the room, having lights turning off, and doing a series of things to reduce energy.

Well, the return of investment is less than a year for this kind of solution. So that is office. Of course, hospitality, we’re doing quite a bit of hospitality.

But we start doing more and more, for instance, educational. We are right now on a very important lab in California about school districts where they are starting addressing that. They’re starting, of course, in California, as you probably know, you have demand response.

So when you are getting close to a burnout, you need to reduce your energy consumption. If you don’t reduce your energy consumption, the grid is going to go in blackout. So you need to be able to act upon your load based on these signals.

So you already need to start putting IoT in your space. And as you’re putting IoT in your space, you can say, well, what about if we start using secondary lighting? And instead of bashing kids with blue spectrum in the afternoon, that means that the kids are not going to sleep well in the evening. You have a nice, exciting, bright light in the morning.

But then in the late afternoon, you start getting warmer colors. So you’re transitioning the kid towards an evening where he’s going to go back at home, chill out, relax, and so on. And we were talking earlier about oxygen.

So the moment you start putting a mesh into a space, now you have a highway where you’re going to get plenty of data going through that highway. And you are opening the door to much, much more value that you originally anticipated just by saying, oh, I need to shed some load because of code. So I’m picking up on this.

The trends here and the themes of this conversation feel very experiential to me and that you’re looking to, or maybe some driving factors could be around improving the environment, improving the situation. And it’s like starting with a yachting-based application seems like a great background for providing just richer experiences for folks in different scenarios. So I’m curious, does that connect with you? What are some of the driving motivations for you and this industry? Well, Bill, probably one of our most common drivers is we’re trying to leave this planet in a better shape that we got it.

I’ve been very, very fortunate in my life. I’ve been traveling the world, doing business everywhere, meeting amazing people. And as you do business and as you leave them, you realize, well, everybody should be shoulder to shoulder to get these in a better position.

And using my love for technology for transitioning technology into biology, into human experience, into, at the end of the day, even happiness. Because believe me, I’m gonna give you just, if I may, an anecdote. We were playing with special frequencies on lighting and I had a project manager and we arranged here a small room.

We call it the energy room. So three or four o’clock, usually I get my down and I would go to the room and work from the room and I was getting excited and back in shape. What do you do? What’s the energy room? How do you make a room, an energy room? What does this look like? It’s a room that has lighting.

So there is a specific frequency on the sun that we call melanopic frequency that inhibits melatonin and increases metabolism. You don’t really see it because in the energy room, the light is white. But it’s just, we are mixing it, having more of that kind of CN spectrum and then putting the opposite spectrum so you don’t recognize that we change the frequency.

But anyway, so I was in the room and I felt the technology was working and then I talked to VPM and say, what about if it’s a placebo effect? This is our toy. This is our baby. Of course it works.

And the guy says, well, you know what, at night, typically I spend 40, 45 minutes reading something away from my iPad before going to bed. I’m going to change my reading light with one of these lights to see what happens. And the guy is 28 years old, you know, goes to the gym, super beefy, you know, super healthy, never seek.

Like the guy is like the perfect body, you know, the perfect specimen for this kind of experience. First day he comes back and says, well, you know, I didn’t feel really at ease, but we’re good. I say, oh, it doesn’t work.

So the following night, the next day after the second night, he says, well, Fabio, I couldn’t sleep at all. And you start seeing some gray and the eyes. And they say, okay, let’s try a third night.

Third night passes. Come the morning, he doesn’t show up in the office. He’s sick.

So can you imagine? So you just change spectrum. So what we were doing probably should have been wiring him up. Exactly.

Exactly. He’s wiring him up. You know, the message, the biological messages is daytime run, you know, because those messages are coming from the cave days.

You know, in those days, either you are running after something or something was running after you. So you better have your metabolism at the top, you know. And we were sending that message with the light.

And the guy then, of course, couldn’t sleep. And after three nights that you’re not sleeping, of course you get sick because, you know, all your system is down and is open to any kind of attack. So can you imagine how interesting, you know, using, I don’t know, the IOT to determine these kind of effects on the human bodies.

For me, it’s fascinating. Yeah. And we can have these immersive light experiences where we spend all of our time indoors, whether it’s a hospital, hospital setting or classroom or, you know, a club.

And, you know, really start to provide a much richer experience given just the lighting that we’re providing. Yeah. 90% of our life is indoor in the US.

So indoor is very important. Yeah. What do you, what are you most excited for next? Where are you guys headed next? The next phase is, of course, everybody talks about machine learning and AI and so on.

I really believe that as we’re getting more and more data points and we get them to the cloud and then we are able to properly digest them, we’re going to be able to see patterns that were not possible to be experienced or evaluated before. And based on that, now you could say, well, let’s say that you own multiple buildings in New York City, you could decide, well, there’s something wrong on this building because I have a different load factor on this building compared to another one. Or you get all these kind of informations where if you have five chillers on a building and there is one that is consuming more energy, now you start getting into preventive maintenance and so on.

So now that we are almost done with what is your local network, your edge computing, I think that extracting information and make the information valuable and actionable is going to be the next phase. And all the tools that have been developed in the last few years will allow us to do it in a very efficient way and deliver to the client information that he can act upon. And that can be from guest experience.

If you connect that to a PMS and you connect that to your scores or whatever the guests are saying, like, to give you an example in your hospitality, 80% of bad scores are because of poor quality of sleep. And the hotel spends a fortune in pillows and mattresses and sheets and so on. But sometimes, you know, you could spend a fifth or a tenth of that cost, put some masking so that people, when there’s people walking through the corridor, are not going to wake up the guests.

It’s very important, like your refreshing experience of the very regenerative effect of sleep has to do with certain areas, like, for instance, the deep sleep of your night. If you are not on the sleep and you are on REM and you are in other areas of sleep, technically, you are at sleep, but you are not on a range where you’re going to be able to, you know, build up tissues and organs. Sure, not actually restful, not valuable sleep.

Exactly, exactly. So, yes, so the next step is, now that we have all this information, now that we are getting more and more into the biology and the well-being and the different aspects of the connection building to guests, employee, patient, teacher, student, now, let’s get this information out, process it so that we can deliver a path to an improved building. Are you a big wearable guy? Are you into the sensors? Do you wear a whoop? Do you have an R-ring, anything like that? Do you have biometric tracking interests to you? Yeah, I have, yes.

I have a Garmin, you know, anytime that, you know, I’m six years old. I love extreme sports, you know, I love to push the limit. You need to do it that stupid.

So, you know, my Garmin always follows me and as soon as I’m going a bit too hard, I have a responsibility towards my family and ventrally also towards myself. And so wearables is a big part of, you know, keeping the machine going, you know. Yeah, our ability to measure and track and improve is unbelievable now and all the data that you can incorporate.

It’s just, I started wearing the Aura ring this year and really enjoy just seeing the sleep and like being able to calibrate on a daily basis of how I’m feeling like. Is this like, just am I in the mood or is it like my sleep? Or it really is nice to have all that data now. Yeah, and it gives you an amazing feedback because it trains you to listen to your body.

Like when I was tracking my sleep, I was able to double my deep sleep just because after a while you realize, oh, you know, I used to love to eat something before going to sleep. And yeah, I love it. But yeah, if you stop doing it and you get another 20 minutes or 30 minutes of this sleep, well, at the end of the day, this sleep is more important than just to have that kind of, I just love that thing, you know.

It is a mistake. Exactly. No, I thought it was not sick.

It was typically sugars and carbs, you know, I’m Italian, so my pastries and so on. And so you learn to know yourself and exactly. So the same feedback that you are getting from your wearables, that’s what we want to do on a larger space for an airport or a museum or a school so that then we are able to deliver recommendations to improve the quality of education, improve the quality of healthcare and so on.

Very cool. Well, I think that’s a great note to end on. Thank you very much for coming on the show today.

I hope you enjoyed it. And yeah, we look forward to having you again in the future. Thank you, Bill.

It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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