WorldCAD Access

Surfware vs. Celeritive Lawsuit Ends Early

Surfware decided to sue Celeritive over patent #7,451,013 involving engagement milling, which "allows 50% faster machining of titanium and other exotic materials by controlling engagement and tool load with a constant feed rate to significantly increase tool life."

Celeritive first countersued, and then blinked, and the two settled before going to court. Surfware agreed to license Celeritive some -- but not all -- of its technology. Here is how the two announced the agreement:

Surfware: Announcement: Surfware vs. Celeritive Lawsuit is Settled

Celeritive: Surfware, Inc. and Celeritive Technologies have settled the claims and
counterclaims made against each other

Metris Down 62%

Metris reports that revenues fell 62% to €18.4 million in the first half of 2009. Despite cost cutting measures, net income was negative: -€18.5 million. Source.

In other news, Nikon says it has accumulated 92.17% of Metris shares as part of its takeover plan. The takeover is not quite complete, for it has to follow complicated Belgium law, like this step:

If following this reopening of the Takeover Bid, NIMD SPRL [Nikon] achieves an acceptance level of 95% or more of the shares, NIMD SPRL intends to proceed to a squeeze-out public bid pursuant to the provisions of Article 42 and Article 43 of the Belgian Royal Decree of April 27, 2007 on public takeover bids and Article 513 of the Belgian Company Code.

Source.

Countdown to Russia: 10 Days to Go

I am pretty darn excited about my upcoming trip to Russia. In these last days, I am getting requests from many Russian CAD vendors and publications to meet with them. I'm hoping this will be some sort of breakthrough for Russian-Wester CAD connections.

The final step before you know that you are going for sure is to have the Russian visa in place. In the US, there might be disagreement over the status of illegal immigrants, but there is no such question in Russia. Basically, it works like this:

1. You arrive on the day you say you arrive, as previously scheduled by an official travel agency.

2. You receive entry and exit papers going through immigration.

3. You carry your passport, visa, and entry/exit papers at all times for inspection at any time.

4. You are in city and hotel each day as specified by the travel agency.

5. You leave when your visa says you leave; and you don't lose that exit paper.

Kind of like a packaged tour without the 40 fellow travel companions. None of that "Oh, well, I think I might wander into Chechnya for a few extra days." Nope.


Russian Visa Process

After an official Russian tourist agency schedules your hotels and travel inside Russia, you submit your passport, paperwork, and photo to a commercial visa processing agency here in Canada or USA.

Your passport must be valid for at least six months, and it must have at least three blank pages. (With all the traveling I've done in the last four years, mine is close to having only three blank pages.)

The visa processing center coordinates with the Russian embassy, and promises to return the passport (with impressive looking visa page affixed inside) in 14 days. They even provide a Web link for tracking the visa's process!

The visa application costs $260, including the visa photo and FedEx delivery. If you need it faster, the price doubles.

Now in Russian: WorldCAD Access on NanoCAD

I am pleased to report that this WorldCAD Access blog is now available in Russian on the NanoCAD site.

I can't read a word of it, but every entry posted here eventually shows up on
www.nanocad.ru/information/blogs/index.php?page=blog&blog=WorldCAD_Access.

(NanoCAD is also one of the sponsors of The Future of MCAD roundtable taking place in Moscow on Sept 8. Details here: isicad.net/articles.php?article_num=13189)

35 Minutes with Jeff Ray

DS SolidWorks ceo Jeff Ray yesterday spent a half-hour answering questions I had about his company and its future plans:

* About those million seats:

There was no special jump in the numbers: The 1 million was simply the number of commercial + educational seats licensed since SolidWorks 95. DS SolidWorks will continue publish seat numbers, he told me, unlike Autodesk and others, who have stopped.

The one millionth license was sold to OGIO, maker of bags, who uses SolidWorks to engineer the design of bags. They examined how golfers used golf bags, and added a notch to the handle for the finger that carries most of the load.

* About SolidWorks 2010

"The feature wars are behind us," he began. The emphasis now is on stabilizing the core code and creating a great user experience. It's like the difference between a Lexus and a Yaris -- both are cars, but one feels better to drive. Experience became a priority after they learned half of their customers spend 70% of the day inside SolidWorks.

He felt sorry for his marketing deparment, whose job it is to figure out how to market something as squishy as “experience.”

* About Direct Modeling

"No direct modeling," came his blunt reply. It is impressive to demo, but is not practical for engineers, he said. Instead of adding direct modeling, DSSW wants to make Instant3D into something that is better than what is being newly offered by Siemens, Autodesk, and PTC. 

* About Multitouch

SoldiWorks is dabbling with touch screens, but has not yet seen a clear winner; current technology is not yet good enough. Users should not, however, be saddled with the keyboard and mouse, and so something will some day replace the duo.

* About Linux and Mac

Mr Ray has no interest in "just" porting to Mac or Linux, but to be even more flexible than that. If they see users moving to another platform, DSSW is working at understanding trends so that they can be ready.  Right now, DSSW is working on making it easier to share drawings with IP protection intact. 

All the new and different forms of technology is disrupting users -- social networking, the cloud, portable purpose-built devices, Internet kiosks -- and DSSW does not want to fall in love with one specific technology. Users should not be bound to the desktop, even as the desktop computer remains central to 3D modeling work.

This change means DSSW needs to change its Microsoft-locked software in two ways, I suggested to Mr Ray:

1. Write new software that is independent of hardware and operating system;

2. Or, rewrite SolidWorks to make it independent of Microsoft's code libraries and operating system.

He replied, "Yes. And yes," but with this rider: "We are not abandoning Microsoft, who have been a great partner." He admitted that Jon Hirschstick was very lucky to take a chance on Windows for his new engineering software back in the early 1990s -- against all advice.

"Only SolidWorks can kill SolidWorks," he declared. We talked of the need for companies to be sufficiently paranoid that they can cope with the changes that must take place. At age 15, SolidWorks is in danger of becoming complacent, Mr Ray admitted, and so he watches to stamp out We-have-always-done-it-this-wayisms.

* On the Cloud

"Insanely overhyped." The key is file management, he feels, which has been set up by IT [information technology] people for managing data in an IT kind of way -- and not for engineers. The cloud has some attributes that can help eliminate barriers, such as making the right data available to the right people at the right time. 

I asked about CPU off-loading, and he agreed that was another possibility. But he insisted that it had to be completely transparent so that the user didn't need to conciously set up the cloud-based rendering or FEA. This was a design criteria for SolidWorks, he added.

Any timeline of when any of this will be shipping, I wondered? "There is a timeline, but we are keeping it to ourselves for now."

* On the Relationship with Dassault

He said that visiting Dassault Systemes' R&D labs was an eye-opener for him, for that place is obsessed with technology; indeed, he remarked, Dassault was pushing DS SolidWorks in innovative directions.

"For the first dozen years, SolidWorks had to fight it alone. But now it is time to cooperate [with Dassault]” -- yet each keeping its different customer base. SolidWorks is no threat to Catia, and vice versa. "We are not going into big accounts, and Dassault is not going into our [SMB] market."

Then this zinger: "Customers are fed up with not being able to share data between Catia and SolidWorks." At some point, a translator will be delivered.

He ended our time by providing me with travel advice for Russia.  

www.solidworks.com

[Disclosure: SolidWorks provided airfare, accomodation, ground transportation, and some meals.]

ASCON Strikes Back

Press releases are usually announcements, but once in a while companies use them them for other purposes, and then they become a bit of a puzzle.

A press release from yesterday announces:

ASCON Counts Real Cost of CAD Software Solution

...implying that somewhere an unreal cost is being counted. The company never names names, but the subhead gives us a hint:

What are we really paying for when buying low-cost CAD.

I suspect they are countering Alibre's temporary $99 offer, as well as the many offers of temporarily free software from Autodesk, SolidWorks, and the likes. Here is the list of objections ASCON came up, points that can be valid, depending on the specific package:

• Reduced functionality.
• Added cost from updates, maintenance, and training.
• Time and territory limitations, water marks, no commercial use permitted.

In contrast, ASCON says, their KOMPAS commercial 3D MCAD software is just e75 a month (works out to about US$1,200 a year, yet includes maintenance, support, and training.

The arguments in the press release are unfortunately generalizations, such as “small mistake in design of the product can turn out to be million USD losses at the stage of production or even worse sales.”

ASCON has been around for 20 years, and their software is used by about 40,000 customers. When I visit them next month in St Petersburg, perhaps I can get some background on the events that initiated this press release.

www.ascon.net 

Your Cheatin' PR

Gagan Biyani of MobileCrunch describes how interns at PR firm Reverb Communications are paid to write 5-start reviews of games, on behalf of game publishers and developers who use Reverb as their public relations firm.

Astroturfing is nothing new; Microsoft uses it on and off, as do political parties. Entire magazines and sections of newspapers consist of editorial content written by ad firms.

What's new this decade is that the anonymous "wisdom of the crowds" -- crowdsourcing -- allows impostors to slip in more easily. What the public demands, however, is the ability to distinguish between fake and real reviews. Fortunately, blogs and other social media quickly get out the stories on these bad apples. 

Although Reverb slyly attempts talk around what they do, Mr. Biyani details his procedure for determining which reviewed products were gamed in Cheating the App Store: PR firm has interns post positive reviews for clients.

Meanwhile, over at PRsarahevans.com, Sara Hevans affirms that most PR firms aren't like Reverb: Catch PR people doing something RIGHT!

The Anxiety of Finishing a Book

Yesterday afternoon, I finished my latest book -- the third one I've written on Bricscad. 

The process of finishing a book is one of high anxiety for me: what have I missed; is something still misspelled; where has the typesetting screwed up?

The copy editor has reviewed it; the tech editor has reviewed it; and I have, too. Still, mistakes abound, particularly in brand-new books (less of a problem in updated books). After all that, I generate a PDF and print out the entire thing for one more go-over with a red pen.

I will find roughly three errors per page. On this 144-page book, that means nearly 500 mistakes to catch and correct. Most frustrating to me is the knowledge that many of those errors are new ones introduced during the corrections I made from the copy and tech editors.

I admire a book that contains a single error, for I know how many have been caught by eyes keener than my own.

Google Books as Firehose

Robert Fulford of The National Post writes about a new book that spans Renaissance and Google, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West by Anthony Grafton. 

People like me are still grateful for the riches of the Internet after all these years. Grafton, however, finds the new order highly imperfect. He thinks Google Books chooses its titles carelessly and has no plans to cover the first 200 years of printing. Google "operates less as a vast, coherent ordering machine than as a gigantic fire hose dousing the world's readers with texts untouched by human hands or minds."

I wonder if there are volumes on Google Books that will never be read by anyone, kind of like the mountain peaks that populate my home province of British Columbia.

The Internet has become such a zealous cataloguer that we can now envision a time when no one will be delighted by the serendipitous discovery of a long-sought volume; it will already be online.

I doubt it. In going through my great aunts things, we've come across quirky items that she collected in her 94 years, including the very cool cover of this slim volume:


Printed in the late 1800s, it's a German gospel songbook for female voices written in old German script --which I can read. I don't expect to see it in Google Books. (Click thumbnail for larger image.)

Is PR Communism?

While in Prague a few years ago, I picked up the local business paper. The front cover photo was of a gagged businessman. The article compared public relations tactics with those of the country's former communist regime. Considering how much pr firms seek to control the media, it was an interesting hypothesis -- see the early entries to "The Microsoft Chronicles" in the Gizmos Grabowski blog where I document of some of the pressure tactics employed by Microsoft's pr firms against the media.

DS SolidWorks this month has been inviting bloggers and editors to its headquarters to preview SolidWorks 2010. (We editors are puzzled why we are being flown in one at a time, rather than all at once in a group -- but that's another story.)

I was looking forward to my trip next week, but then I read Roopinder Tara's travelogue at CAD Insider, Bound and Gagged, in which he reported that an unnamed software company [wink, wink] placed him under embargo and so he cannot report on the product's new features until 1 September.

I had planned to live-blog my SolidWorks visit, just as I did with the visit to Autodesk's Inventor offices earlier this year. So when Mr Tara used the E-word, I reread the email of invitation from Beaupre (SolidWorks' pr firm), but found no mention of an embargo or an NDA [non-disclosure agreement]. Last night, I asked Beaupre to confirm/repudiate the rumor. (Update: Beupre confirms that the embargo is being sprung on arriving guests: "We have asked reporters to honor a 9/1 embargo on the SW 2010 release.")

To a busy editor, the formula looks like this:

Two days of travel + Non-exclusivity of the news = What's in it for me?

As Mr Tara noted, embargoes made sense in the old days when it took 2-3 months for articles to appear in print. But these are no longer the old days; today, we editors even deal in pre-news -- announcing news before it occurs.

The Vendors' Point of View

Deelip Menezes* reminded me that Scott Sheppard of Autodesk explained the corporate defense for embargoes www.deelip.com/?p=410&cpage=1#comment-1123>:

Embargos are a long-standing part of the information sharing process. It allows the information to be widely disseminated over a period of time but have that information become public at the same time. In this way, one blogger does not "scoop" another. All bloggers can start posting at the same time.

For vendors, this position makes perfect sense, especially from public corporations who need to protect against insider training of shares. (Autodesk, however, has twice allowed selected bloggers to spill the beans on new AutoCAD releases before all others.)

The Editors' Point of View

For editors like me, however, the phrase "at same time" is the crux of the problem. What benefit do my publications gain from posting the same news as everyone else and at the same time? This is why I never wrote a review the new 3D mouse from 3dconnexion, for example.

In an earlier posting, I noted that I like the Wall Street Journal's new policy: they accept embargoes only if they get exclusivity (which I would define as a 24-hour lead on everyone else).

Corporations love parrots. My guiding principle is instead something Yoav Etiel told me in the early days of upFront.eZine:

"Tell me what I don't know."

Otherwise, there is no point to reading upFront.eZine and WorldCAD Access.

As to why my publications should deserve to get exclusives from any vendor, they don't need to. Several CAD vendors ignore me, such as Bentley Systems and Dassault Systemes. Others see a benefit to working exclusively with upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd. 

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*) Deelip Menezes has since posted his commentary on the SolidWorks embargo under "Bound, Gagged and P***ed".