Nine Four Insights

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Photogrammetry: Keeping Insurance “Open for Business” | Nine Four Ventures

“Last month, I wrote a blog post titled, “Photogrammetry: Keeping Construction ‘Open for Business’ with Virtual Inspections” where I talked about the power of photogrammetry and its ability to keep the construction industry “open” with virtual inspections to minimize human interaction. However, construction isn’t the only real estate vertical being positively impacted by photogrammetry. Insurance is too! In this post I build upon my previous blog and discuss how the insurance industry can benefit from photogrammetry, computer vision technology.”

Can You Trust Your Data? | Built

“It’s time to talk about data. If you read the news, you surely have seen the many promises of Big Data to solve business problems and make our lives easier. Yet, for many companies so far, the results have been few. Legacy processes and systems have sometimes been slow to keep up with advancements in technology. And many times, technology has been slow to keep up with everything that’s promised, as data of all sorts are collected but not really applied in an effective way.”

Bay Area construction opens to new set of rules and guidance | Construction Dive

“We’ve seen the biggest transformation in the way the industry has embraced the use of technology. We are seeing owners across the state using updated electronic bidding platforms, virtual inspections and online permitting.

Throughout the pandemic, the construction industry has already started to embrace new technologies and systems, and we expect this to continue even after this is over.”

What’s Next For Construction And Contech After Covid-19? | Forbes

“Tech is the clear winner in terms of the long-term changes to the construction process that will emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic. 90% of organizations surveyed carried on working from home, so perhaps it is unsurprising that 75% of respondents believe that from now on there will be increased use of collaboration technology.”

Don’t Stand So Close to Me: AI Cameras Police Social Distancing at Work | WSJ

“Traditional occupancy sensors and motion detectors, made by larger firms including Honeywell International Inc. HON -2.01% and Texas Instruments Inc., TXN -3.51% often use infrared technology. Startups populate the newer field of cameras using computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence, to count how many people are in a room and measure how far apart they are. The technology can identify moving bodies or objects but not faces, and the low-resolution images aren’t made available to clients, who instead see data turned into numbers and charts.”

Zillow survey forecasts suburban boom as remote workers flee pricey cities in search of bigger homes | GeekWire

“On the heels of Twitter announcing that some employees will be allowed to work from home forever, Bloomberg also reported Thursday on how Silicon Valley tech workers are looking to escape sky-high rents for more affordable options away from San Francisco.

Zillow found that people aren’t just looking to take advantage of the ability to do their job from anywhere, they want to be more comfortable while doing it. Of those surveyed with WFH as an option, 31 percent would consider moving in order to live in a home with a dedicated office space, to live in a larger home (30 percent), and to live in a home with more rooms (29 percent).”

Coronavirus Is Going to Create New Real Estate Winners | Bloomberg

“A shift to work from home helps to lift the constraint of physical proximity for workers with certain kinds of jobs, allowing them to consider a wider range of places to live than when they had to be in the office five days a week. This has benefits both at the individual and the collective level. In a region such as the San Francisco Bay Area, with lots of tech jobs but expensive and limited housing, the average commute time is 32 minutes. If a person there worked from home one day a week, that’s an hour a week not spent commuting. If these practices are adopted by most white-collar employers, that would take a lot of vehicles off the road during peak commuting times, reducing congestion and shortening drive times for everyone else.”

Returning to Office Survey | Branch

The team at Branch is running a survey of employee sentiment toward reopening the workplace. Take a few minutes and share your point of view!

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