Near-field communication is a set of communication protocols that enable two electronic devices, one of which is usually a portable device such as a smartphone, to establish communication by bringing them within 4 cm of each other.

Online Travel Agencies or OTAs are online companies whose websites allow consumers to book various travel related services directly via the Internet.
They are 3rd party agents reselling trips, hotels, cars, flights, vacation packages, etc. provided/organised by others.

Offsite construction refers to the planning, design, fabrication, and assembly of building elements at a location other than their final installed location to support the rapid and efficient construction of a permanent structure.

Data that is freely available for everyone to use without copyright, patent or other restrictions.

The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase is the time and place where a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice for the customer, and indicates the options for the customer to make payment

Photovoltaics is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect, a phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and electrochemistry.

A category of cloud computing services that provides a platform to facilitate the development and management of digital applications.

The use of statistical techniques such as predictive modeling, machine learning, and data mining to analyze data and make predictions about the future.

Private equity is an alternative investment class and consists of capital that is not listed on a public exchange. Private equity is composed of funds and investors that directly invest in private companies, or that engage in buyouts of public companies, resulting in the delisting of public equity

Private equity real estate is a professionally managed fund that invests in real estate. Unlike REITs, private equity real estate investing requires a substantial amount of capital and may only be available to high-net-worth or accredited investors.

A service or an item that is offered for sale. It may have different forms: virtual, cyber or physical.

A process of creating a new product or modification of an existing product. Refers to all of the stages involved in bringing a product from concept or idea, through market release and beyond.

Product Lifecycle stands for the period from the moment the product enters the market and ends with its withdrawal from the market. Product lifecycle stages are Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline.

An organizational function that guides every step of a product lifecycle within a company and manages all the activities related to the development, marketing and selling a product.

A professional who is responsible for a strategy, roadmap and feature definition of the product or a product line. A product manager is in charge of the development of a product through the whole product lifecycle.

Quantitative measurements that help product managers and marketers evaluate the success of their product. Product Metrics allow to ensure whether the product meets business goals and the product strategy is working.

A document with a set of requirements that provides product teams with the critical defining information they need to build out new features or functionality.

Outlines the end-to-end vision of the product and what the product will become — the foundation of a product life cycle composed of various consistent processes to achieve the concept effectively.

Property technology (PropTech) is the use of information technology (IT) concerning information provision, transactions, management and related to all types of real estate including residential, commercial, hotel, logistics and land. It is designed to streamline and connect processes for participants in all stages of the real estate market involving buyers, sellers, brokers, lenders and landlords.

a machine-readable code consisting of an array of black and white squares, typically used for storing URLs or other information for reading by the camera on a smartphone.

REIT or real estate investment trust is a company that owns, and in most cases operates, income-producing real estate. REITs own many types of commercial real estate, ranging from office and apartment buildings to warehouses, hospitals, shopping centers, hotels and commercial forests.

is a company that owns, operates, or finances income-producing real estate.

The value chain, a fundamental conceptual building block of strategic management, offers a means to consider how value is added at each significant point of the process by which business enterprises create goods and services. The real estate value chain comprises of 5 levels: Development, Finance, Construction, Transaction, Use.

Relative market share indexes a firm’s or a brand’s market share against that of its leading competitor. Market concentration, a related metric, measures the degree to which a comparatively small number of firms accounts for a large proportion of the market. These metrics are useful in comparing a firm’s or a brand’s relative position across different markets and in evaluating the type and degree of competition in those markets.

Residential real estate is property made up of land and the buildings on it. It can be houses, condominiums, and townhouses. The structures may be single-family or multi-family dwellings and may be owner-occupied or rental properties.

SDLC stands for the Software Development Life Cycle. A process that produces software with the highest quality and lowest cost in the shortest time. It defines tasks performed at each step in the software development process.

An agile framework for managing complex (software) projects. A team works for a short time (a ‘sprint’ or ‘iteration’) and then demonstrates tangible things that matter to the end-product at the end of each sprint. Emphasises team self-management and flexibility (change requests can be created and approved at any time during the project).

A mortgage that has a lien position subordinate to the first mortgage.

The buying and selling of existing mortgages, usually as part of a “pool” of mortgages.

A loan that is backed by collateral.

The property that will be pledged as collateral for a loan

The Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act 2015 states that self-build and custom housebuilding are where an individual, an association of individuals, or persons working with or for individuals or associations of individuals, build or complete houses to be occupied by homes by those individuals.

An agreement in which the owner of a property provides financing, often in combination with an assumable mortgage.

An electronic component, module or subsystem used to detect events, triggers or changes in the surrounding environment.

is an umbrella term used to describe economic and social activity involving online transactions. In practice, consumers serve each other directly rather than being served by companies and pay for the use or access to goods and services rather than own them. Technology advancements, consumption and lifestyle patterns, along with societal factors, are driving the rapid growth of the sharing economy.

In short: awareness of the surrounding environment; the perception of environmental elements and events and understanding of their meaning. For example autonomous vehicles have situational awareness.

Small data refers to highly specific fragments of data collected by a large population of sensors. The data, such as air quality measurements, are small in size but very precise in terms of time and place (see “hyperlocal data”).

is a city that implements information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the quality and performance of urban services such as energy, transportation and utilities in order to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs.

Smart bins  are an intelligent waste management system. They have wireless ultrasonic fill-level sensors embedded inside which detect how full the container is and then, through the IoT, this data is sent to a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform

is any structure that uses automated processes to automatically control the building’s operations including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, security and other systems. This infrastructure helps owners, operators and facility managers improve asset reliability and performance, which reduces energy use, optimizes how space is used and minimizes the environmental impact of buildings.

A type of smart city technology or system that has a specific function: such as smart street lighting, smart bins or smart drains.

Drains equipped with sensors that send alerts when they are in danger of over-silting or overflowing, and collect fill rate data that can be used for highly efficient predictive cleaning operations.

An enhanced electrical grid that uses analog or digital technology to gather and act on information such as supplier or consumer behavior to automatically improve the efficiency and sustainability of electricity distribution.

A smart home is a residence that uses internet-connected devices to enable remote monitoring and management go appliances and systems, such as lighting and heating.

The integration of smart technologies into the fundamental systems that serve a city or municipal area.

A smart meter, in the context of a Smart Grid, is your home’s connection between your electricity needs and the rest of the grid.

A network that contains built-in diagnostics, management, fault tolerance and other capabilities to prevent downtime and maintain efficient performance.

A system that helps drivers find vacant parking spaces using sensors and communications networks.

Street lights that can be controlled wirelessly to save energy and reduce maintenance costs. The wireless network controlling street lighting can also be expanded to connect sensors that gather data on weather conditions, air pollution and more.

Waste receptacles, such as city litter bins and commercial waste bins, equipped with connected sensors that collect and share data on, for example, the need for and frequency of waste collections.

is a distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the internet.

A set period of time during which a particular task should be completed and prepared for review.

A client, investor, sometimes a user of the product or all of them. Stakeholders are interested in the final version of the product; they can influence product development and management, participate in decision-making processes.

Any mortgage or lien that has a priority that is lower than that of the first mortgage.

A drawing or map showing the precise legal boundaries of a property, the location of improvements, easements, rights of way, encroachments, and other physical features.

The maintenance and betterment of the ecological, social and economic health of a city.

The Transport Security Administration (TSA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that has authority over the security of the travelling public in the United States. It was created as a response to the September 11 attacks.

The term tender proposal is used in the procurement field to describe the response from potential suppliers to a request for proposal (RFP). There are three aspects to every tenderproposal: company overview, response to specifications, and pricing. Tender proposals are legally binding responses in a procurement process. The format of a tender proposal varies widely by industry, but all have the same basic requirements. The most important part of any tender response is the deadlines.

A process by which a lender uses another party to completely or partially originate, process, underwrite, close, fund, or package the mortgages it plans to deliver to the secondary mortgage market.

Time-of-use metering is a method of measuring and charging a utility customer’s energy consumption based on when the energy is used.

A legal document evidencing a person’s right to or ownership of a property

TAM or Total Addressable Market is defined as the existing revenue opportunity available for a product or service and it’s often calculated by taking the existing top-down market size and whittling down segments of the market that are not addressable.

With this type of smart street lighting, the brightness of the street lighting varies automatically based on real-time traffic flow data.

A type of LPWAN pioneered by Telensa to connect smart city sensors and controls at low cost for the rapid integration of smart city applications.

A hyper-connected smart city: all information systems working in the city are linked and virtually everything is connected to a cohesive city platform.

Information that lacks a pre-defined data model for interpretation or analysis.

Provides a cohesive digital environment for the aggregation of data across multiple geographic areas or civic functions of the city. Think a single platform for collecting and sharing city-data.

Someone who uses some product, service or machine.

Venture capital (VC) is a type of private equity, a form of financing that is provided by firms or funds to small, early-stage, emerging firms that are deemed to have high growth potential, or which have demonstrated high growth (in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, or both).

Lighting that can be controlled wirelessly. See smart street lighting.

A measure of the viability of a smart city application relating to economic competitiveness and productivity.

Zigbee is an IEEE 802.15.4-based specification for a suite of high-level communication protocols used to create personal area networks with small, low-power digital radios, such as for home automation, medical device data collection, and other low-power low-bandwidth needs, designed for small scale projects which need wireless connection. Hence, Zigbee is a low-power, low data rate, and close proximity (i.e., personal area) wireless ad hoc network.