Frank Bennardo, president of Engineering Express, which specializes in product evaluations, is on a mission to help speed product approval information. He thinks ApprovalZoom.com can help users get information faster.ApprovalZoom is compiling a collective registry of all building products. “We accept all building products that have some sort of approval rating,” he says.The objective, according to Bennardo, is to deliver powerful search engine results that sift through mountains of building products (more than 90,000 and counting) and group them by each approval standard they match, or fail to match.The site is now expanding to become the largest online collection of
Photo courtesy of Optech Inc. A mobile mapper equipped with a lidar kit can scan infrastructure at highway speeds. Image courtesy of HNTB Corp. A lidar point-cloud diagram shows engineers where roads, bridges and all the surrounding "street furniture" is located. Related Links: At FIATECH, Mapping Tool for Buried Utilities Generates View From Three Sensors (requires login) Surveying roads and bridges used to take weeks of on-the-ground work, but now it is as easy as going for a drive."We can do in a matter of hours or a day what would take months with traditional survey," says Paul DiGiacobbe, associate
Is it too early to start thinking about the 2012 IT Budget? The summer months are a good time to update the three- or five-year IT strategy. For many businesses and CIOs, the “quieter” summer months are the best and often the only chance to schedule longer-term planning and thinking.We’ve seen some major shifts in technologies over the last few years. Some of these are general technology trends like cloud computing, which has driven down the time and cost of implementing new infrastructure and has given new options for scaling infrastructure “on demand.” There’s the emergence of lower cost tablet
Graphic courtesy of Junta42 Have you ever picked up a company's brochure or flyer? Watched an infomercial or a shopping channel on television? Ordered a product DVD explaining the benefits of a new mattress or a vacation destination? Leafed through a company newsletter?These are just a few of the ways companies use content to market their products and services to customers.Content marketing is nothing new. Companies having been creating and distributing content for many years, both to attract new business and to retain existing customers. However, unlike traditional forms of marketing and advertising, using content to sell isn’t selling or
Three recent app releases aim to raise the bar on roof-estimating tools. Two of them are free and modest in function, although one reaches for the stars. The other is pricey and complex by app standards. Photo by Tom Sawyer PITCH PERFECT Pitch Gauge 2.0 has a calculator that converts measurements into estimates of materials. One roofing contractor calls it a must-have. At the modest end of the spectrum is a roof-pitch-measuring app called Pitch Gauge 2.0, which came out this month for Android smart phones. The app, also available for the iPhone, uses the smart phone's gyroscope to read
A first-of-its-kind automatic, multisensor system for finding the safest escape routes in buildings is slated for installation in three Iowa campus structures this fall.
Inspired by the need to prevent employees who are working on far-flung project teams from entering inaccurate time and deficient information, the developer of a punch-clock application has linked its newest version to an evolving security feature. “The biometric fingerprint technology is our most important update. It adds the security of knowing an employee must be present to log their own hours,” says Michael Fullerton, president of CyberMatrix Corp., Vernon, British Columbia, Canada. “A lot of mobile tablets already have this fingerprint hardware built into the device.”The seventh version of CyberMatrix's Employee Project Clock, which has been out for two
Of all professional groups, architects and engineering and construction firms spend the least on marketing (3.1 percent), according to a 2008 study by Hinge, a marketing services firm. While the building professions are loathe to print brochures, nearly all have websites. And nearly all operate on a local or regional level. Given how easy and inexpensive it is to optimize a website for local search to help prospective clients find you, it's hard to understand why engineers and builders wouldn't take advantage of local search engine optimization. As far back as 2004, local search accounted for up to 25 percent of
In the last (and first) issue of ENR’s FutureTech newsletter (which went out June 14), I discussed key pricing and compatibility issues to consider when buying new design software. But there are other issues to consider, which can include the usability of your drawings. Related Links: Before You Upgrade CAD: Questions to Ask (Pt. 1 of 2) A key test is a simple one: print out a detailed set of drawings for a job, in different sizes, on paper and in PDF or other format you might use for portable tablets and laptops. Is everything there? In the second half
Engineers who need to integrate river-flow analysis data with 3D civil design models recently got a boost with the release of a new extension that ties them together. Until the end of the year, Autodesk Labs is offering Project River Analysis Extension software for free as a sort of trial balloon. The software integrates with AutoCAD Civil 3D and AutoCAD Map 3D for 2012. Photo courtesy of Autodesk, Inc. A screen shot of Autodesk's new River Analysis Extension, which is on Autodesk Labs' site and free until the end of this year. The latest extension can overlay one-dimensional data from