Category: Future

BE2Camp, 10 October, London

Web 2.0 meets the UK construction industry at a novel new event, BE2camp, to be held on Friday 10 October at the Building Centre in London. I have been part of the (international) planning team behind this event, so I am delighted that we now have some details confirmed. If you fancy becoming part of …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/08/be2camp-10-october-london/

History of CAD touches on extranets

David Weisberg has published online a comprehensive history of CAD, which is available free at http://www.cadhistory.net. I had a quick skim through a couple of chapters to see what, if anything, he’d written about construction collaboration technologies – and he hasn’t ignored them. Chapter 6 (Autodesk and AutoCAD, PDF), for example, has a page or …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/history-of-cad-touches-on-extranets/

Another good BIM viewpoint

The latest AECbytes viewpoint is from Stuart Carroll of US IT provider Beck Technology. In BIM: When Will It Enter “The Ours” Zone?, he responds to an earlier article on Building Information Modelling (BIM) by John Tobin (Proto-Building: To BIM is to Build), and echoes my own, often-repeated view (see post, for example) that it’s …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/another-good-bim-viewpoint/

Construction Matters (but ICT doesn’t)

Courtesy of the latest Constructing Excellence members newsletter, I got a link to the latest report, Construction Matters (Vol I, PDF), from the House of Commons Business and Enterprise Committee. I wanted to see if this report was any better than the recent Strategy for Sustainable Construction (see post) in regards to recommending better use …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/construction-matters-but-ict-doesnt/

Charrette’s offline

I’ve finally got round to reading last week’s Building magazine and, for me, the most interesting article (We did it our way) concerned an “intensive collaborative planning exercise that brings people together and asks them to come up with a development plan for an area” – also known as a charrette. Apparently, the charrette process, …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/charrettes-offline/

SaaStainability.com

Over the past few months, sustainability has cropped up more and more frequently in my posts to this blog. To be honest, the topic has also been cropping up just as often within BIW Technologies [my employer] and across the industry. There are ongoing internal conversations within BIW; the company has also contributed to the …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/saastainabilitycom/

SaaS raising enterprise expectations

Two core realities will shape Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) markets for years to come, says the latest research report (Enterprise Ready, or Not – SaaS Enters the Mainstream, costing US$1,295) from Saugatuck Technology. Saugatuck say SaaS is expanding well beyond its early low-cost, easy-to-deploy niche application roots (CRM, sales force automation and collaboration) to become a key …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/saas-raising-enterprise-expectations/

BIM and housing

On Monday, I had an interesting meeting with Nick Clements of New Zealand-based software vendor Bisco, who plan to “revolutionise building by changing the way information flows through the building industry”. Bisco’s technology can extract information from various generic 3D CAD design models (ArchiCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, Autodesk Revit and – soon – Vectorworks) and then …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/bim-and-housing/

Bentley and Autodesk target interoperability

A couple of months ago, a PR slip suggested a joint Bentley/Autodesk announcement was imminent. Well, it was announced late yesterday that the two AEC software giants have agreed to expand interoperability between their solutions portfolios: “Autodesk and Bentley will exchange software libraries, including Autodesk RealDWG, to improve the ability to read and write the …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/bentley-and-autodesk-target-interoperability/

Sustainability Then

Sustainability Now was last week, so Phil Clark has been looking at the lessons learned (see my post). Overall, the two-day virtual event attracted 1,500 visitors and nearly 2,000 downloads of content ranging from video and audio to two live seminars, so from that perspective a pretty successful event. Phil agreed with me that in …

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Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/07/sustainability-then/

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