Photo by Tom Sawyer / ENR Autodesk CEO Carl Bass tells users he wants a to bridge the gap between real and virtual. Related Links: Autodesk Software for Education Autodesk A360 Responding to an industry changing "more radically than at any time since the Industrial Revolution," Autodesk CEO Carl Bass says that, in the coming months, the company will roll out new offerings to improve software availability, collaboration, fabrication, production and—through free distribution of design software to students, teachers and academic institutions worldwide—workforce development, as well.In an address and in comments to media during Autodesk University in Las Vegas in
Related Links: Water-Mapping Tool May Lead to More Informed Design Decisions Online Options Abound for Electronic File Sharing Yau Lee Group Hong Kong Housing Authority Center for Integrated Facility Engineering Trimble Vico RIB iTwo 5D software Bluescape interactive displays NVIDIA graphical processing units Nasuni storage as a service Panzura cloud storage system Supercharging Structural Design & Construction Productivity Design and construction professionals are seeing a rapid expansion in the hardware, software and services available for collecting and sharing information with distributed teams. The market has exploded with a wide range of effective tools and systems for gathering digital data, exchanging
Related Links: http://kodakpixpro.com/Americas/# http://www.thermal.com/see_the_unseen.html http://www.vsnmobil.com/wearables/v-alrt/ Every fall, electronics manufacturers introduce a flock of new devices to entice consumers. ENR likes to root through the offerings to look for items that might serve the needs of construction. Click the image to begin the slide show.
Engineers with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration are on track to support surface construction on the moon within a decade, says Robert P. Mueller, senior technologist in the advanced projects development in the surface systems office for engineering and technology at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
Related Links: Independent Project Analysis Profile of Ed Merrow Author Ed Merrow, founder and president of Independent Project Analysis Inc., which studies complex megaproject performance, offered cautionary advice to constructors to test project fundamentals before committing to a project, as failures often are preordained by flaws in "the sequencing of information early on."MERROW"Failure almost never starts in the field," Merrow said, in a keynote presentation at a Bentley users conference in London in early November. Errors and omissions in the planning process will generate surprises in construction and lead to project-management challenges. But those problems are only compounded by earlier
The first thing to understand about space elevators is that, in principle, they should work.“A space elevator appears feasible, with the realization that risks must be mitigated through technological progress,” concludes the International Academy of Astronautics in a peer reviewed feasibility assessment with 41 contributors published late last year.
Related Links: Aconex Connected BIM PROBUILD Construction A cloud-based project-management system has added building-information-modeling management to its 2D-based workflow. Aconex has an eye on enriching models with life-cycle data by giving access and annotation capabilities to project participants via their browsers.The firm's new "Connected BIM" feature now is integrated with Autodesk Revit. Other integrations with Trimble's Tekla and Bentley's MicroStation are in development. Revit users can publish models from the design software directly into the Aconex ecosystem for management within the context of the common data environment and project collaboration workflow. As the project evolves, subcontractors can attach information about
Photo Courtesy of Bartlette Cocke/Plangrid Jobsite and office communication regarding issues and answers is synced with RFI feature. Related Links: PlanGrid RFI Workflow Navigant Construction Forum Study on RFI An app designed to automate sharing and version control of construction documents has added a new functionality and now can capture issues and generate, circulate and post requests for information (RFI) within the same application.The PlanGrid tool is a cloud server-based system that stores and manages project documents for access by tablets on the jobsite. It is used as a collaborative platform for sharing information, such as field markups, progress photos
Vendors providing services and tools for construction-sector collaboration are finding themselves at the center of industry consolidation.German software vendor Nemetschek AG, publisher of Vectorworks CAD software and the 3D BIM tools from Graphisoft, said on Oct. 3 that it has acquired Bluebeam Software Inc., vendor of widely used PDF-based collaboration tools. It says the price is $100 million.Ten-year-old Bluebeam, based in Pasadena, Calif., has about 150 employees. It claims its U.S. users include 74% of the Top 50 contractors and 64% of the Top 50 design firms, as ranked by ENR. Users also are located in more than 100 countries,
Software firm Bentley Systems Inc. has acquired Blueridge Analytics Inc., the provider of SITEOPS, a cloud-based site development options analyzer. Subscribers upload digital terrain models and enter requirements in terms of square footage of finished floor space, parking needs, setbacks, roadway parameters and a host of other constraints, and then submit the project for analysis. The system weighs thousands of alternatives and “solves” for the most cost-efficient site design. The purchase comes four years after Bentley took an equity stake in the company. Says CEO Greg Bentley, “I’ve become convinced that site engineering should no longer be done any other
