3D CAD NEWS

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.

Today PTC published an open letter to CoCreate customers from CEO Richard “Dick” Harrison, welcoming them to the PTC happy family. Sifting the usual marketing drivel from the interesting stuff, the news seems to be that CoCreate will continue as a product line.

As CEO, Harrison gets first dibbs on all new acquisitions.

Harrison said PTC will:

• Maintain, enhance and further develop all CoCreate products indefinitely, including OneSpace Modeling, OneSpace Drafting, OneSpace Model Manager, OneSpace Drawing Manager, OneSpace Live! and OneSpace.net;
• Continue to offer all CoCreate solutions as stand-alone offerings.
• Integrate CoCreate solutions with complementary PTC solutions (such as the earlier acquisitions from MathCAD, ITEDO, and Arbortext, as well as existing PTC products including Windchill).
• Drop the term “dynamic modeling;” from now on, PTC will refer to CoCreate’s history-free approach as “explicit modeling.”

Also today, a note from Ulrich Mahle, VP Marketing and R&D for the CoCreate division, says that OneSpace 2008 will go to product stabilization and QA after Christmas. He promises the 2008 edition will offer a new approach to creating patterns of user-defined form features, such as sets of faces building a boss or a pocket. Once defined, a form feature can be applied to the model repeatedly. For example, Mahle says, a user could position several instances equally in a circular arrangement. It will also be possible to unshare features from the pattern for individual modifications, and a feature can also be modified and the modification used in other features shared in the pattern definition.

 

In a move that took nobody by surprise, CoCreate Software commuted the death sentence of CoCreate OneSpace Modeling Personal Edition, AKA Junior CoCreate. Instead of being executied for participating in a short-term marketing campaign, Junior will serve a life sentence of delivering history-free 3D modeling at no cost for assemblies of up to 60 parts, in English, German, Italian, and Japanese.

The clemency move was greeted by puzzled looks inside the halls of the big Four MCAD Vendors, who are still working out how to get their history untangled from their geometry without getting thrown in jail for it.

More information: http://www.cocreate.com/free

Junior CoCreate was all smiles when removed from Death Row.