This week’s Smart IT roundup features a $1.4M round of funding for a smart office software, a fresh take on product integration for sales automation, and a test lab for smart offices.

Robin secures $1.4M seed funding

Soon, booking office space for meetings will be as simple as walking into a room or using your Google Calendar, thanks to Robin, a smart office software that automates the booking process. Supporting the vision, Robin secured $1.4 million in a seed funding from Atlas Venture, Deep Fork Capital, Boldstart Ventures, and Space Pirates.  With Robin, gone are the days of double-booked rooms, or forgetting to book a room for that very important meeting scheduled weeks ago.

So how does Robin work?  It utilizes Apple’s iBeacon technology, which means your presence in a room triggers actions such as automatically booking it for a meeting. It comes with apps for office use that lets you know scheduled activities in each room, if there are any rooms available, and makes your information available to anyone in the room.  This makes sharing contact information easy, plus, you get to define which information to share to business contacts.

Robin will be launching in select offices in the coming weeks as part of its “Rockin’ Robin Alliance” beta program, but the product will officially launch in the fall.

TinderBox’s new integration for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

TinderBox, the company that provides sales automation software, announced a new take on product integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to enable customers to build a seamless and efficient sales process.

Though TinderBox can operate independently of Microsoft Dynamics, the integration will give thousands of businesses in the Microsoft Dynamics marketplace a fresh solution, automating the most repetitive and tedious aspects of  document generation, sales workflow, and transaction processes.

The integration also delivers other features such as accepting or declining documents electronically, options where salespeople can track who views and shares documents, the ability for users to access content from anywhere, and control settings for access to content and documents.

FLEXLAB tests smart office solutions

It is expected that more smart solutions will be placed in offices around the world as we aim to consume less energy or utilize renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.  The question is, will these smart solutions be suitable for your office space?

Four square, blue buildings called testbeds are sitting on the hills of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  These testbeds are part of the $16 million Facility for Low Energy Experiments or FLEXLAB.  The testbeds are made to look like office spaces and where smart solutions will be tested to know how it will work in different settings. Using the testbeds, scientists, architects, and engineers can mimic the conditions inside and outside almost any building on the planet such as temperature, sun exposure, and human body heat inside the room.

One of the four testbeds is able to rotate 270 degrees, tracking the sun to mimic the light exposure a building would get at different latitudes or seasons.  It doesn’t rotate a full 360 degrees, as the other testbeds are located on the east side of this rotating building.

FLEXLAB aims to target those in the construction business and its first user is Webcor Builders, a commercial construction contractor, who is building 250,000-square foot space for Genentech, a biotechnology corporation.

photo credit: WarzauWynn via photopin cc