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Inside this Issue
Mr Walton is president and ceo of GiveMePower, which was founded in June 2000. He has 18 years experience at hi-tech companies.
upFront.eZine: The GiveMePower business is new for you. What were you doing before?
Bill Walton: I founded GiveMePower after serving as director of sales and marketing for a software manufacturer who had licensed the core technologies contained in our PowerENGINE software development system for a line of stand-alone surveying software. Sales grew over 1,000% and we quadrupled the company size in two years, with most of the growth directly attributable to this decision.
After seeing first-hand the amazing reaction we received from the surveying community, I decided to form GiveMePower to change the way general purpose CAD is used. After nearly two years of careful planning and development, I'm convinced GiveMePower represents the future of CAD for a large number of end users and developers.
upFront.eZine: And the name, where did it come from?
Bill Walton: GiveMePower was an instant hit when presented to a focus group prior to incorporation. The name represents what we offer to the design/build community, and ties in perfectly with the PowerCAD brand name.
upFront.eZine: How much of PowerCAD is yours, and how much was done by Mr Graebert and his programmers over in Germany?
Bill Walton: Our products are based on core technologies developed and defined by the Graebert Group over an eight-year period. A team of GiveMePower developers worked with Mr. Graebert's core programming group for about 18 months enhancing and re-branding FCAD technologies for the North American market. The resulting product line includes:
Aside from providing us with core technologies, Mr. Graebert is a registered architect and a director of GiveMePower. We're pleased to have his substantial business acumen and over 20 years of CAD industry experience.
upFront.eZine: What's with "$99 Million PowerCAD LT+ Promotion With Distribution of Up to One Million Free Full Function 2D CAD Systems" campaign? Isn't that a bit silly? You're in danger of TurboCAD-izing yourself -- a good product that suffers from being marketed too cheaply.
Bill Walton: Our PowerCAD LT+ promotion is patterned loosely after Adobe's Acrobat product distribution model, and is designed to propagate PowerCAD use and brand awareness in a crowded desktop market. What better way to prove ourselves than to deliver a full-featured 2D CAD free for up to 1 million users? You're correct that some people may assume because it's free, PowerCAD LT+ doesn't do much. If early results are any indication, this notion is being dispelled.
Aside from getting out the name out, PowerCAD LT+ serves as the perfect companion to PowerCAD CE or PowerCAD Pro, and as an introduction to a broader line of Power applications and solutions scheduled for release in months and years to come. Once the promotion ends, PowerCAD LT+ will be priced at $99.
upFront.eZine: PalmPilots and PocketPC are great for text entry, but slow at graphics. Convince me that people should want to run a CAD system on what is essentially a miniaturized 286.
Bill Walton: The Windows CE operating system is taking significant market share mainly due to its advanced graphics capabilities and the higher horsepower devices being made for it. Having remote access to designs and drawings on a handheld/wireless platform represents a major advancement in CAD processing.
We've spent two years optimizing PowerCAD CE for efficient operation on Windows CE devices, and the results are very encouraging. People are consistently surprised at just how fast and how little space is needed to run PowerCAD CE on these lesser powered devices. Speed will only improve over time as vendors clamor to meet the large demand forecast by virtually every major industry analyst.
At CADwire, Evan Yares notes that Lockheed built
the new A-12 Archangel aircraft in under 30 months -- from go-ahead (by the
CIA) to first flight. Here's the catch: The aircraft was designed without CAD;
the first flight took place in 1962.
Mr
Yares made his comments to while referring to a recent press
release that states, "Regional Aircraft Makers Soar to New Heights
with Complete IBM Product Lifecycle Management Solution from MSC.Software: Hardware,
Software and Services Combine to Reduce Development Time by 25 Percent and Design
Passenger Jet in Less Than 36 Months." <http://www.mscsoftware.com/press/press.cfm?pid=571&Div_ID=1&non=1>
Without
CAD, a new plane design gets off the ground in 30 months; with CAD, it takes
36 months. More interesting is how the Lockheed Skunkworks ensured its lean
design and manufacturing team -- read about it at <http://www.cadwire.net/commentary/?16521>.
Retro is cool. A 45-year-old friend lamented to me last night that she didn't
save her flower-embroidered bell bottom pants from Grade 12 for her teenage
daughters.
Generic CADD users
are keeping their faith. And now they're getting help from some of the original
programmers. Ransdell & Brown is working with General CADD Products to develope
General CADD Pro, a general-purpose 2D CAD program that features:
The product is currently being tested by external beta testers and it is expected to ship in spring. http://www.generalcadd.com/gc1.htm
Related to the above news item was a discussion I had when the TurboCAD people were here a couple weeks back. One of them wondered how so many CAD vendors seem to be hanging in there. These vendors typically have customers in the 50,000 to 300,000 range.
We decided these companies had reached a critical mass that allowed them to exist without have to become very large. They had a sufficient number of customers to keep going via upgrades fees and related sales (training, maintenance, etc). We even came up with a name for that niche: "Boutique CAD."
There are indications that Autodesk will launch Architectural Studio soon. <http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/section/0,,585585-123112,00.html>
Revit is making a big fuss over the selection by an AutoCAD user group's board of directors of Best CAD Software: Revit was chosen for 3D architectural software. Says SVPAU board member Roy Salume: "We felt that ADT was simply too difficult for users to set up, had too long a learning curve, and just wasn't user friendly. Revit has a nice intuitive feel to it. We hope this will be a wake-up call to Autodesk. Users won't use Autodesk as their defacto software if a competitve product can meet their needs better." Ouch! Expect Revit to make plenty of hay from that harvest.
PEPS TubeCut removes the need for dry runs of cutting tubes by rotary axis laser machines. http://www.peps.com/products/tubecut.htm
STEP-NC is a manufacturing extension to STEP, for annotating design info with manufacturing data for CNC (Computerized Numerical Control) systems. http://www.steptools.com/library/stepnc/faq/faq.html
The CadCARD has been updated through AutoCAD 2002. http://www.cadcard.com
Autodesk has expanded its subscription service to Europe. Pricing was not announced.
Cymmetry Systems is shipping AutoVue SolidModel for Java with support for Inventor 5, Solid Edge 10 & 11, Unigraphics 18, CATIA 4.2.4, Mechanical Desktop 6, MicroStation v8 and HP-RTL. http://www.cimmetry.com
Open CASCADE can now import ACIS v7 (SAT) and all 63 Parasolid schemes (XT), and export in ACIS format. http://www.opencascade.com
People/Companies on the Move
LightWork Design has spun off its NavisWorks
Division into an independent company, NavisWorks Ltd. http://www.navisworks.com
PTC appointed Thomas V. Butta as chief marketing officer. Mr Butta was previously CMO at Red Hat.
Lonnie Fawver the new public relations manager for Eagle Point.
There is some question over whether Intel will ship a 5GHz version this year of its 64-bit CPU."
German graphics board vendor ELSA may be forced to shut down after eight banks refused to extend a line of credit. The company employess 800. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/24007.html
The 3dfx.com Web site shuts down Feb 19; visit the http://www.voodoofiles.com site for drivers and other support. Nvidia had bought the assets of 3dfx last year for US$55 million.
ABCNews.com canceled an agreement to provide streaming video and news reports to Yahoo, partly because it was finding better terms for its content elsewhere. - Reuters
The Web site http://jscript.dk/unpatched/ lists known IE6 security holes not yet fixed by Microsoft.
Re: Lego Shapes Needed
"My daughter uses Lego Mindstorms to build robots. As part of a school project she is drawing her robot and the terrain it navigates in Inventor 4. Do you know of any library of Mindstorms parts that she could use in Autodesk Inventor 4?"
The editor replies: "If you can help out this reader, email me at grabowski@telus.net "
Re: Migrating to Inventor
"AutoCAD compatibility
is definitely the key feature that puts MDT ahead of Inventor. Even with MDT,
though, you can't share all your .dwg-formatted data with regular AutoCAD users
because of MDT's custom objects. That's why our company instead went with AutoSolids
<http://www.autosolids.com>, whose parametric solids show up as plain
old AutoCAD solids when a plain old AutoCAD user opens them. It's actually more
AutoCAD-friendly than even MDT."
-
Derek Paquette
Wayne-Dalton
Corp.
The editor replies: "Good point. I'd forgotten to mention proxy objects, although Autodesk provides a free plug-in that allows regular AutoCAD to display MDT objects. As http://support.autodesk.com/getDoc.asp?id=TS69144 points out, however, the plug-in does have its limitations."
"Just wondering how Autodesk comes around leaving all customers outside
USA and Canada without the offer for a FREE Inventor series. It seems like we
[in the rest of the world] paid for USA and Canada customers' free updates."
-
Leif Pedersen
BONUS
Energy
The editor replies: "It does seem unfair that some loyal customers get free updates and some don't. With Autodesk extending its Subscription service to Europe, perhaps you'll now get the free copy of Inventor as well."
"Thank you for your clear, brief, in-depth style."
-
Matthew Thomson
ASL Australia
"I read your rag every week -- super stuff!"
-
Bill Thompson
Atlanta GA
USA
- Scott Berinato in 'CIO'
magazine
http://www.cio.com/archive/011502/meter.html