Sensor & Control Networks: A Landlord Learns From His Son
By JAMES BARRON | NY Times | October 19, 2010
In his father’s house are many rooms. Roberto Fata has put sensors in a lot of them: Water sensors that warn when toilets are backing up. Temperature sensors that showed “we were baking the tenants,” he said — the average living-room temperature in one building was 96 degrees in the winter of 2004, when he installed the first ones. Oil-tank sensors that provide the evidence when a delivery is 200 gallons short.
Mr. Fata, 42, remembers the moment when his father said, “This is a good thing.”
The father, Gene Fata, 80, remembers some moments before that. “All this was not without pain,” he said. But he said his son had made him a believer in things he did not really understand. Like sensors. And computers.
“I had trepidation,” said Gene, a landlord whose 11 properties include two buildings at Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street. “I always asked him, ‘How much will the cost be?’ He would say, ‘You have to spend money to make money.’ ”
Screaming matches? “We had plenty of those,” Roberto Fata said before describing the Web-based system he developed around the sensors.
“It tells you what you need to know, when you need to know it,” he said.
He named it DiMi, Italian for “tell me.” It uses instant messaging to warn building managers of the kinds of problems that landlords hate — and that tenants say landlords hate to deal with.
Cont.: nytimes.com
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fac: hat tip to Johna Till Johnson, who cited this story in a recent Network World column, The two flavors of M2M: sensor and control nets, at: bit.ly
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