From Asite to Adoddle

London-based Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration technology vendor Asite has a completely new website and has also renamed its platform Adoddle.

A hand-drawn cartoon character resembling (to me) a cross between a light-bulb and a rocket is used to personify and represent the offering (previously branded simply Asite). ‘Addodle’ is shown beating the ‘chaos monster’, and, in a new overview of the company’s Key solutions, is progressively equipped with more kit:

The website also features similarly hand-drawn representations of Asite’s key markets. The company no longer sees itself as mainly focused on the AEC sector; it highlights its potential for corporate use, FM, infrastructure, government and financial services clients too, while its Adoddle video uses a simple manufacturing example of web-based sharing and collaboration.

The new branding coincides with the latest version of Asite’s platform. Release 15 includes Revit plug-in support for publishing building information model files from Revit directly to Asite’s cBIM (collaborative BIM) platform. Its BIM features also include an integrated model viewer, model file versioning and version comparison, and the ability to instigate workflows (eg: RFIs, submittals, etc) from the model viewer, and to attach views while creating comments or workflows.

My reaction

Asite CEO Tony Ryan has been tweeting for a while using the Twitter handle @Tonyitsadoddle, so I was already beginning to associate Asite with the word “doddle”.

If anyone is puzzled by the word “doddle,” it is a noun of British origin meaning something simple or easy to do. I don’t think Asite is trying to muscle into the easy-to-use territory initially claimed by Woobius with its “simply simple” approach to collaboration (post; and its use of hand-drawn imagery) or Collabor8online (post; coincidentally, I spoke to CEO Colin Barnes earlier today), among others, but the Asite website is now cleaner and simpler to navigate, with prospective customers presented with a range of Adoddle modules (“Adoddules” maybe?) appropriate to their particular industry requirements.

Asite has also retained its other social media places, including its community blog and forum, on its website, plus links to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These are fairly long-standing social media initiatives, being started around three years ago, and I will be interested to see how the Addodle approach is received by Asite customers and end-users. In particular, will the website revamp generate increased interaction between the business and its stakeholders?

Marketing managers among Asite’s competitors should also be interested in this quirky marketing strategy, I think, as it differs markedly from the serious, somewhat bland, professionalism of the websites of the likes of Aconex, 4Projects and conject (post).

Update (10 August 2012)Credits: the video was produced “in the old jittery style of Roobarb and Custard cartoons” by Mallard Productions for Asite and agency BlueHat.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2012/07/from-asite-to-adoddle/

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  1. From a marketing perspective, I like the simplicity of the video explanation and I even appreciate the cartoon. It’s catchy if they’re trying to attract a small business or start up audience. I don’t know that I really see a big business solution. Of course I haven’t tried the product and this is simply what I got from the video. I am, however, intrigued.

  2. Thanks, Rocio. I did wonder if corporate customers might hesitate if presented with this simplistic cartoon-level approach. As you suggest, quirky approaches may be more common among smaller start-ups – in the UK collaboration sector, I recall Clouds UK creating ‘Hector the Protector’ three years ago.
    Paul

    • Jeff on 5 August 2012 at 11:43 am

    Laughable, unless the target market is Uni students and start-up businesses. Does not inspire any confidence for bigger projects.

  3. You are both spot on – this is the first of many that will build up to the sophisticated Big Business/Big Data view.

    1. This comment was obviously in response to Rocio and Paul’s constructive comments. Jeff on the other hand clearly doesn’t realise that Asite has been running some of the largest projects in the world for the past 11 years 😉

  1. […] However, its core business remains its project collaboration toolsets, which have expanded beyond document collaboration to encompass what it has branded cBIM – collaborative Building Information Modelling (first shown as long ago as October 2006!) – and cMOB – collaborative mobile applications (August 2010) – and which was rebranded Adoddle in mid-2012. […]

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