Related Links: Contractors See Gains, Gaps With Growth of Mobility Tools To Rent or Buy AEC Software Tools? Vendors Add More Choices Bentley Press Release UK Government Strategy, BIM Mandate Latest Bentley App Brings Geospatial Data to the Field Bentley Picks Up Ivaras Asset Performance Management Tools Data integration with building-information-modeling tools and cloud services is accelerating across the United Kingdom, thanks to the government's mandate that all public projects use BIM, including handover data for asset management, by 2016.For Bentley Systems, which counts some 36% of its annual revenue from its customers in the European, Middle East and African
Related Links: Information Mobility Research Press Release Information Mobility Construction Market Research & Intelligence Mobility tools such as tablets and cloud services are yielding investment benefits for contractors and specialty contractors, according to a new research study by McGraw Hill Construction. But for many of the 300 contractors surveyed for the report—58% general contractors, 42% specialty contractors—significant gaps need to be addressed to leverage the tools for a better return on investment.Despite the rapid growth in the adoption of building-information-modeling tools among contractors, integration of BIM with mobile apps is still in its infancy, said Harvey M. Bernstein, vice president
Any sports fan can name players who, in one magnificent game or season, put their teams on their backs and carried them to victory. For many years, an analogous phenomenon has been played out in the construction industry. Very capable MEP contractors were often asked to assume the prime responsibility for a project by spearheading the traditional spatial coordination process, carrying less experienced and less competent project members through project completion. In this role of ad-hoc project coordinator, those MEP contractors saved many projects and spared the owners a great deal of expense and risk.Even so, the traditional methods and
Related Links: FPDetective Whitepaper Tor Software to Fight Privacy Invasion Belgian researchers are slated to release a free software framework to the public in November that is designed to identify "fingerprinting," a browser-based method of tracing users by tracking features of a specific device, creating a unique ID.In a recent study at the University of Leuven, Belgium, researchers used the framework, called FPDetective, to crawl many popular sites. Results found that more sites use fingerprinting techniques than previously was believed.A device fingerprint is a set of system attributes with a combination of values that are highly likely to be unique
PHOTO Courtesy of TurboCAD TurboSite's Geolocation feature allows users to tag photos and video to site plans and then share the info as a PDF. Related Links: TurboSite The GPS Device that Utility Workers Love TurboSite, an iOS app that leverages a smart device into a field reporting tool, has rolled out a new plug-in that turbocharges the app for Autodesk Revit users.The plug-in for TurboSite uses a device's built-in GPS and gyroscope to collect a user's geographic location and orientation within a structure and tie it to the multimedia collected on an iPad or iPhone."TurboSite was cost-effective and was
Pictures, notes and video are captured in a social network-type of news-feed format that can push alerts to select workers. Related Links: Textura IPO Turns Up the Heat on Construction Tech Startups FieldLens The most important elements of social networking sites are their ability to share media, post comments and store all that data and more as a permanent web record. The same can be said for web tools that manage a construction site. The new web application FieldLens aims to become the Facebook of project management services."I tried using Facebook on a project two years ago," says Todd Wynne,
Related Links: Fluid Contract Manager's YouTube Channel Collaboration Apps Top ENR Survey Results A web-based construction-management platform optimized for an iPhone's screen size and mobile ergonomics is coming out on Nov. 1."It was born out of complete and utter frustration," says Don Speedie, president of Sparks, Nev.-based Fluid Contract Manager, about what provoked him to create his iPhone-inspired design. When he came up with the idea, Speedie was working as a construction manager, a position he occupied for more than 14 years."I built it from the ground up with the iPhone in mind," says Speedie.The design's fluidity was such a
PHOTO courtesy of white clouds Autodesk's redesign of Hyperloop requires specialized equipment to weave transit tubes out of carbon-fiber composite materials while maintaining the tubes' original 7-ft, 4-in. diameter. PHOTO courtesy of white clouds The proposed new design for Hyperloop's transit tubes weaves them out of one ring of carbon fiber and then pinches it into a figure 8, forming two independent tubes. Related Links: Video of Autodesk's Design Oak Ridge National Labs A design software leader is rethinking the construction methods and materials for Hyperloop Alpha, the high-speed mass-transit proposal that shoots passenger-filled capsules suspended on air cushions through
Elon Musk’s recent Hyperloop proposal resurrects discussion in the U.S. about the advantages of true high-speed ground transportation. The country desperately needs a national consensus as to what constitutes fast and cost-effective HSGT before a single track or guideway is laid, but as of yet the conversation has failed to develop the required consensus for true high-speed ground transportation. Mr. Musk’s proposal gets the discussion going again.But as to his proposal, while Mr. Musk correctly criticizes the California high-speed rail proposal for being too slow and too expensive to build and maintain, his own Hyperloop technology is only a concept. U.S.
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