3D CAD NEWS

As has been written elsewhere, the “news” from SolidWorks World last week can be easily summed up: 4,500 SolidWorks users had a nice party. Oh, and engineers who blog find some sort of deep mystery in the use of semi-colons. (Follow the link; I guess to one SolidWorks blogger, semi-colons are to CAD journalists what opposable thumbs are to mammals.)

Historic meeting of blogger (left) and CAD journalist at SolidWorks World. It seems bloggers have opposable thumbs; they just have not figured out how to write semi-colons with them.

But I digress. Sometimes the interesting stuff to be learned at such conferences isn’t said in front of a crowd. I learned from a conversation with a Dassault Systemes employee (out on the patio of the San Diego Convention Center) that the recent acquisition of Seemage was preceeded by an ugly bidding war between Dassault and Autodesk. Not ugly, obviously, to anyone who owned a piece of Seemage. Perhaps unseemly would be the better phrase. But all’s well that ends well, and now Dassault can continue to pursue its vision of proprietary 3D for all.

What’s that you say? What about the contest? Oh, yes. I’ll get to that in another post. I was waiting for one of those semi-colon-less bloggers to send me a photo. Moi is a writer, not a photog.

Aras Corporation today announced that its Open Source PLM software is one of the first 10 products to ever achieve Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 certification.

It appears that gaining this certification is no mean feat. As explained in the press release, “Windows Server 2008 Certification comprises approximately 100 test cases that independently confirm an application’s compliance with best practices for reliability, security, availability, and compatibility on the new Microsoft platform.”

Or as Aras Marketing VP Marc Lind said to our editor-in-chief, Randall Newton today. “Having gone through the process of becoming certified, and knowing what it requires, I would be surprised if any of the other PLM providers will ever achieve this certification.”

Aras’ PLM software is the only Open Source PLM software that we are aware of, and is used by some surprising customers including Motorola, Rolls-Royce, Freudenberg, Lockheed Martin, Ingersoll Rand and ACCO Brands. Why surprising? Because I still have some inborn snobbery towards Open Source software, which apparently is unmerited and inappropriate. I will have to keep trying to rethink my position on this. Congrats to Aras while I do that.

At SolidWorks World 2008, one of the presenters was Dean Kamen, he of the Segway fame. One of Kamen’s passions is the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) program for high school kids. During his presentation he noted that FIRST is in need of volunteers, as pointed out by Joel Orr at the COFES blog.

During a recent Autodesk event, I got the pleasure of talking directly to a bunch of FIRST teams in Oregon, and their mentors. As the kids, age 14-18 explained how the robot they made works, I found my admiration for them going sky-high. As a 15 year old explained to me how he programmed the controller chips to make the mechanism work, so my belief in FIRST went through the roof. Allow me to explain it this way: at the ripe old age of 40, I could never fathom creating programming code for a processor. But maybe I could have if someone had opened the door for me when I was a teenager. No one did, so it remains a mystery. The key to this understanding, however, is down to the mentors. This particular team in Oregon had an Intel employee as one of the mentors, who then started to explain, enthusiastically to me how he teaches the kids programming. Even I started to get enthusiastic! It was very cool!

And now FIRST needs more people like him. Mechanical engineers, programmers, control and signals technicians and more. The reward? Watch these kids simply fly.

For more information click here: https://my.usfirst.org/vims/logon.lasso?page=logon

Bruno didn’t make the final cut.

He put himself through an Ivy League graduate education doing stand-up comedy.

Two clues this time, actually.

He has done “bringer shows.”

On January 10th, 2008, Autodesk invited a bunch of customers, and a couple of press, to watch the official opening of its newest Customer Briefing center in Lake Oswego, OR. The 3DCN team was there, finding out what was making Autodesk’s Buzz Cross so proud of his 5th floor set up.

It is located in the new offices of Autodesk’s Manufacturing Division, headed by Buzz Cross and Richard Jones, and supported by some 200 employees on site. As you leave the elevator, so you see an array of products created using Autodesk software including some guitars from RKS,  a novel geared wheelchair that prevents  wheelchairs from rolling backwards by Magic Wheels, and a whole bunch more. Even better, you are actually allowed to touch the guitars, take them off the stands and pretend to be a rock star. (Image: Jason Medal-Katz, senior manager of the Customer Briefing Center, has a moment of ‘what if’ with an RKS guitar.)

The banks of touch-screen monitors, created using flat glass and projectors with light sensitive cameras in them make for a pleasing display. And behind a large panel of frosted glass, which switches to clear at the touch of a remote control, are 2 RP systems, happily grinding away, or adding materials to some Autodesk Inventor Models. (PIcture 2: an image of a car designed using autodesk inventor and the Autodesk Alias products, displayed on the touch-screen monitors in the center.)

You will see a longer expose on this center in next week’s CCNtv broadcast, where we get in depth about some of the products on display. However, it was an excellent evening, with short and friendly presentations by Buzz Cross and a gentleman from the local Chamber of Commerce who, we think, was getting paid every time he said ‘Lake Oswego.’

But do check it out in-depth at CADCAMNETtv on January 21 2008.

3DCN team

Here is the next clue for those of you trying to guess the mystery celebrity keynote speaker at next week’s SolidWorks World conference:

He is still wondering if being called “sweet britches” is a compliment or a put-down.

For the past 36 hours I have been getting emails and phone calls asking if I know about layoffs at SpaceClaim, the venture-funded 3D CAD upstart.  It seems this company is really under the industry microscope — one of the calls was from a well-placed veteran at a SpaceClaim competitor. I’ve made a few phone calls, and can now separate fact from fiction.

SpaceClaim co-founder and CEO Michael Payne confirmed that at the end of 2007 there was some “tweaking” of the employee rolls, but did not want to give a specific number. The layoffs were “not insignificant if you were one of the people” involved, he said, but otherwise characterized the reduction in force as “a minor adjustment” that came after a series of year-end meetings between management and the venture capital companies funding SpaceClaim. Some employees were provided an opportunity to become contractors, a move not uncommon among start-ups.

The one high-profile departure is former chief operating officer Michael McGuinness, hired March 2007. He is no longer listed on the company’s web site with the other executives — as he was the last time the Internet Archives took a peek at the page in May 2007. The last public mention of him seem to be in a company press release dated November 27, 2007. It is not uncommon for executive-level employees to come and go during a company’s early phases, especially one with so much venture capital behind it. McGuiness had been a CEO at two other software companies and did 10 years of hard time at PTC earlier in his career. Maybe the chemistry between McGuinness and Payne wasn’t right.

This news overshadows what SpaceClaim would like us to be talking about today, the release of a new version of the product with a “more targeted” feature set. SpaceClaim LT and SpaceClaim LTX are aimed at the occasional CAD user (likely at smaller companies) who may have both 2D and 3D files to edit. By comparison, SpaceClaim Professional is aimed at those who must edit 3D files from the likes of CATIA, NX, SolidWorks, or Pro/ENGINEER. The main differences between SpaceClaim’s products are import and export capabilities, as well as some options and services that are available with SpaceClaim Professional 2007+. SpaceClaim LT provides import of STEP, IGES, DXF, DWG, BMP, JPG and PNG file formats and export of DXF, DWG, XAML, STL, VRML, BMP, JPG and PNG file formats. SpaceClaim LTX provides these capabilities as well as export of STEP and IGES files for other 3D systems.

These new versions of SpaceClaim could well be the SketchUp on steriods many CAD users in manufacturing and product design have been asking for. We’ll cover these products in more detail next week at CADCAMNet.