Mar 10 2010

Still keeping an Eye on Woobius

I met up with Bob Leung from Woobius a couple of times last week (including at the launch of StickyWorld‘s Collaboration Cafe at London’s Building Centre – pwcom post), and he updated me on progress with Woobius Eye (see post). Now honoured with its own website, the latest stage of Woobius Eye’s development was the release five days ago of the public beta version (see Woobius’s blog posts).

Woobius Eye provides a web-based place for people who – in keeping with the Woobian mantra – want a tool that is “simply simple” and allows them to discuss a topic visually. Like a very simple whiteboard, it allows users to create and share an image online and annotate it in real time. A photograph, for example, can be uploaded and then scribbled on. This way, both sides of the conversation can literally see the points being made – rather than engaging in a long-winded conversation full of descriptions.

Better still, “It’s firewall friendly, platform friendly…, requires no setup, and you don’t need to register. Oh, and it’s free!”

However, the web-based product is only part of the story. Woobius’s longer-term plan is, of course, to take the product mobile (it was through the Vodafone Mobile Click competition last year that the prototype first gained publicity – and £23,000!). An iPhone app is already in development, with an Android version (hurray!) set to follow soon afterwards.

My view

From a construction collaboration technology perspective, I am excited by Woobius Eye, not least for the possibilities if and when it is integrated with Woobius’s core collaboration platform (it could conceivably also be a technology that could be adopted by other collaboration vendors to offer simple visual  collaboration within their own platforms).

However, it is the emergence of an application that will be delivered on a mobile device that is particularly interesting. Existing applications – webcams, screen-sharing, online meeting rooms or white-board tools – are OK if both parties to a conversation are sitting in front of a computer (and perhaps are also expecting to talk), but many discussions are often initiated when people are out and about. Currently, we tend to say something like “Let’s talk about it when I get back to my office,” but here is an application that would allow that conversation to take place anywhere so long as the roving recipient has a smartphone with Woobius Eye. Questions can be answered quickly, decisions can be made, and further, sometimes critical and damaging delays can be avoided.

(For example, just before Christmas last year, water started dripping through my dining room ceiling and I had to call out my friendly neighbourhood plumber – as always out on another job. Explaining the problem would have been much quicker if I’d had Woobius Eye to send him a quick explanatory image, which he could then have doodled on as we discussed where the water might be coming from.)

Integrate this step with a collaboration platform in a construction project environment, and other project team members will be able to see the visual record of the conversation (perhaps even play it back), and understand how and when decisions were made and by whom – with all details noted and recorded in the underlying audit trail.

[Disclosure: Woobius is a client of pwcom.co.uk]

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/03/still-keeping-an-eye-on-woobius/

Mar 09 2010

Daden showcases collaborative use of Second Life

On 25 February, Martin Brown and I talked to the Black Country Constructing Excellence Club about use of social media in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. We both mentioned the virtual world of Second Life and, being in the West Midlands, it seemed natural to highlight the expertise of Birmingham-based Daden (whose efforts were also praised, unprompted, by a contributor from the audience).

I have just received a news release from Daden announcing that the company has reached the finals in two categories of the US Federal Government’s Virtual World Challenge, with its Datascape and PIVOTE systems – both based on the Second Life platform. The competition is intended to encourage innovative and interactive training and analysis solutions in virtual worlds, with four categories: collaboration, skill building, instruction and visualisation.

Within the Collaboration category Daden entered its Datascape data visualisation environment. … the centre-piece of Datascape is a 20m diameter virtual map showing Google™ Maps (or its OpenStreetMap open-source equivalent). Just as on the web this map can be zoomed down to building level detail almost anywhere on the planet. But unlike the web version up to 50 users from across the globe can gather round or stand on the map and discuss what it is showing. Daden’s web integration technology then allows data from a variety of web and real-world sources to be plotted on the map – ranging from BBC news feeds and US Geological Survey (USGS) earth-tremor data to GPS data and the real-time location of aircraft flying over Los Angeles Airport. Additional screens around the floor-map allow for video feeds, RSS and Twitter feeds, infographics, slideshows and even collaboratively edited documents and spreadsheets.

Daden’s second entry … is PIVOTE. This is a training system for virtual worlds – which allows training exercises to be developed independent of the virtual world – and be playable not only in a variety of virtual worlds but also on the web and even on mobile phones. PIVOTE was developed as a result of Daden’s work on the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) project called PREVIEW with St George’s Hospital, University of London. This project, which created a training system for paramedics at the Hospital won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Initiative in 2009. PIVOTE has been released as an open-source application and there are now users from Argentina to Canada, and across many European countries. Whilst initially developed for medical training PIVOTE has since been used for topics as varied as retail customer service and youth citizenship.

Daden’s FVWC entries both have their own web pages (Datascape, PIVOTE), and are powerful examples of how Second Life can be used to create immersive, interactive user experiences related to the built environment.

I have seen Datascape used, for example, to visualise the city centre in Birmingham, while PIVOTE has been applied to construction health and safety training (working at height, for instance). Be2camp unconferences have also seen demonstrations of how Second Life can be used create virtual renditions of buildings that people can walk through or fly around, adding comments as they go, providing in-context feedback to architects and other designers. It may not to be every user’s tastes, but as a demonstration of the potential of virtual worlds for professional application, Second Life is very compelling (PS: Well done, David, Soulla and the rest of the Daden team).

[This is a slightly edited re-post of an article from my pwcom blog. It also appears on the Be2camp blog.]

Update (1 April 2010): Daden “just won 1st place in US FVWC with PIVOTE for training, and 2nd place for Datascape for DataViz.” (via Twitter)

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/03/daden-showcases-collaborative-use-of-second-life/

Mar 02 2010

tCn – The Construction Network – launches

[This is a re-post of an article from my pwcom blog, published 2 March 2010. A debate has been kindled in the comments section that is reminiscent of conversations around the time of the dot.com boom in 2000.]

TCNLate last year I was contacted by Ryan Briggs, one of the co-founders of a new social network aimed at the construction industry. The Construction Network, or tCn, aims to become the sector’s most exclusive business networking platform and has some big name partners, most notably the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB). Other construction associations and companies include CIBSE, the ICE, CIAT, Balfour Beatty, Glenigan, Mace and JCB.

tCn is being launched this week (2-4 March 2010) at the Ecobuild exhibition at London’s Earl’s Court, and as part of its promotion campaign is offering the chance to meet former England rugby union international Jason Leonard OBE on its stand (394) on Thursday 4 March. The tCn marketing machine (see the tCn blog) is also promoting a prize draw for all those registering to join the network, with prizes including golfing breaks in Cyprus and St Andrew’s, rugby tickets and a rugby shirt signed by Leonard.

The site is still a little bit rough round the edges (occasional bits of ‘lorem ipsum’ show where text is yet to be placed in the personal profile pages, for example), but Ryan tells me these will soon be smoothed out by the site’s developers as they get more feedback from early joiners. (Disclosure: I have provided some paid consultancy advice to tCn.)

Will tCn succeed?

So is there room for another social network in construction? After all, there are already dozens of architecture, engineering and construction groups in LinkedIn, lots of company groups and pages on Facebook, Ning-based networks for the readers of Building and Property Week (post) plus Ning sites such as the AEC network and Constructing Excellence’s G4C and Collaborative Working Champions (both of which I’ve helped with), and stand-alone communities such as Reorb – aimed at commercial real estate professionals (post).

I think there is an opportunity for tCn. In a very conservative market, there is some interest in utilising social media, but many organisations are (often understandably) reluctant to let their employees have free rein to access Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc while at work, perhaps regarding these as non-work-related. Having a network that is 100% focused on the construction sector, however, potentially overcomes that objection, with employees perhaps given permission to access this single platform because its main function is to foster business relationships. Moreover, tCn potentially offers organisations the chance to foster business networks among their employees or members and with companies in their supply chains at little or no cost to themselves. And it is being run be people focused on the platform, not as a ‘side project’ trying to nurture a community among readers of a print publication.

Its success, though, will depend on it drumming up sufficient subscription and advertising revenues from its partner industry organisations. We are, apparently, slowly emerging from a deep industry recession, but there is some uncertainty about whether recent ‘green shoots’ are premature, particularly as the forthcoming general election may yet mean further post-election turmoil as public sector spending is curbed. As I know only too well, marketing budgets are frequently the first to feel the pinch when money gets tight, but if tCn can show it is a cost-effective way to target individuals among potential customers and their influencers then it could thrive.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/03/tcn-the-construction-network-launches/

Feb 27 2010

Maybe there’s a SaaS for that?

Writing a “ten construction IT trends” feature for a UK construction publication this week, I found myself reflecting again on tablet PCs (partly stimulated by the launch of Apple’s iPad), and on the rise and rise of smartphones. I found myself asking: why focus on downloading ‘apps for this and that’ when you might be able to access online services through the device’s web browser?

As a fan of Software-as-a-Service, SaaS, applications, I still tend to advocate using web-based applications where possible, but recognise that such tools aren’t always appropriate on-site, not least because reliable internet access isn’t always available. Construction projects can sometimes be in remote locations with no telecommunications infrastructure in place at the start of projects, and maybe only limited 3G capabilities (despite the efforts of specialist companies such as EMS – who demonstrated “internet access in a box” to the first Be2camp event 18 months ago). WiMax hasn’t (yet) provided the extended reach that we were anticipating four or five years ago, and wi-fi coverage remains very patchy even within buildings. But the situation is changing; network providers, building owners, transport undertakings, etc are providing more and better internet connection opportunities.

If this trend continues, why would should we continue the practice of loading more and more applications onto the hard-drives of our mobile devices? We could, instead, access services and data held “in the cloud” via a web browser, rather than delving into online application marketplaces such as those provided by Apple or for the Android operating system.

Certainly, mobile access is forecast to continue to grow, and even to outstrip web access via conventionally-networked desktop and laptop devices, and this will have a radical impact on how companies deliver technologies to end users and how it is funded. For instance, rather than paying to download an application, you might be charged per-use – perhaps via some kind of micro-payments system or against a pre-paid subscription.

(This theme is also touched on in a short Information Age article, drawing on research from mobile telecoms analyst ABI Research.)

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/02/maybe-theres-a-saas-for-that/

Feb 23 2010

StickyWorld and the ‘Collaboration Cafe’

About 18 months ago I met Slider Studio architect Michael Kohn when he presented at the first Be2camp event I co-organised, at London’s Building Centre. I have remained in contact with him ever since (he spoke about principles of democratic design to another Be2camp event in Birmingham last August) and have just received an invitation to attend the 4 March launch of a month-long “Collaboration Cafe” at the Building Centre, marking the end of an 18-month research project – StickyWorld – undertaken by Slider Studio and funded by the UK’s Technology Strategy Board.

StickyWorld is a prototype project review and exhibition platform for creative business and education. The final month of the project opens up ongoing collaboration between six different organisations to wider engagement of the public and visitors to the Building Centre. The ground-floor cafe area is being transformed temporarily by an installation created by University of East London Unit 9, who are using StickyWorld, and Slider Studio is undertaking a ‘sticky note survey’ on collaboration within education and design practice, and with clients and communities.

I’m looking forward to seeing how StickyWorld has progressed since the first release I saw about six months ago (I have just signed up to get a private beta StickyOffice account), and to hearing how it is received by participants at the “Collaboration Cafe”. It incorporates many principles from Web 2.0-type applications, potentially widening the scope for collaboration beyond that made possible by conventional, industry-specific construction collaboration technologies.

A conference event at the Building Centre is planned for 30 March on the state of collaboration, which I will be contributing to, wearing both my Be2camp and my collaboration technology ‘hats’.

Update: The urbanism blog Polis also has a post on this topic: ‘StickyWorld’ and an Alternative Approach to Democratic Design.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/02/stickyworld-and-the-collaboration-cafe/

Feb 22 2010

Woobius simplifies pricing of “simply simple” collaboration solution

Since I first came across UK-based low cost file-sharing and collaboration vendor Woobius in April last year, I have kept tabs on their development. [Disclosure: I have also undertaken occasional paid PR consultancy projects for the company.]

Their latest news (see also blog post) concerns a simplified approach to the pricing of their core collaboration product, reflecting some user and company issues with the free trial pricing model. When Woobius launched its Software-as-a-Service platform, first-time use of the system (for storage of up to 200MB of information) was free, with users thereafter paying £10 per month per Gigabyte.

However, as Woobius co-founder Bob Leung explains:

“Lots of people set up multiple free projects on Woobius, then started paying for additional storage as their usage grew. So when it came to upgrading their accounts, each project had to be dealt with individually, resulting in numerous invoices and payment schedules. Responding to user feedback, we have therefore created a new category of user – ‘project owners’ – for those who want to manage multiple projects via a single account.

“With the new model, you still get free projects with 200MB of storage, but each user can only own one project. When they decide they want to adopt Woobius on more projects, they can upgrade their user account, and get both more storage and more projects. This is simpler than upgrading projects individually. All their projects then benefit from the additional storage instantly, and – importantly – every project can still have an unlimited number of users.” [my emphasis]

This last point, for me, is important. From my first exposure to web-based construction collaboration platforms in the late 1990s, I have always felt that – in a highly fragmented, cost-conscious and litigious industry like construction – pricing per-user or per-seat is unlikely to encourage good levels of collaboration or ensure high levels of auditability of information. As soon as companies are given the option of cutting corners, by, for example, sharing a single account rather than having separate logins for different users, then some will take it. If a dispute arises, it is then more difficult to identify who uploaded/downloaded/accessed a particular piece of information; identifying regular or proficient individual users of the platform also becomes difficult; and sharing logins also, of course, creates security and confidentiality issues (what happens if one person leaves the company and the user-name and password aren’t changed?).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/02/woobius-simplifies-pricing-of-simply-simple-collaboration-solution/

Feb 01 2010

Collabor8online: talking low-cost collaboration

I had a long telephone chat on Friday with Colin Barnes, founder of Collabor8online (see post), a little over two months since the construction collaboration solution’s UK launch.

Colin explained that Collabor8online was very much targeted at the SME end of the market.

“Recognising that for many businesses email is too messy and difficult to track and manage, we set out to make things as simple as possible. Collabor8online was designed with the needs of mechanical and electrical contractors in mind – that’s the market I know best – but we have also had interest from architects interested in a more economical way of sharing project information.”

Collabor8online is now being used by several companies ranging in size from ‘white van man’, through family-owned businesses with around a dozen operatives, to companies with multi-million pound turnovers, Colin said. There has also been interest from public sector organisations, including local councils.

“I think email is still the biggest competitor to collaboration applications at this level, but where businesses have more than one office or are working in offices abroad, the benefits – mainly in time and cost – of uploading documents and drawings once to a single repository soon become clear. But a simple online solution can also help a company demonstrate innovation – we have one company that invested £250 in Collabor8online for a year-long project partly to impress its client.”

Functionality

February will see a new release of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. The update will include an enhanced calendar function (integrated with Microsoft Outlook, Google and iCal calendar formats), which will help users track appointments, then actions arising, creating email notifications and ‘to do’ lists for team members. “We are focused on doing things that our users regard as essential,” Colin says.

“But we are being careful about how we build up the depth of functionality without losing ease of use. For example, initial feedback from users, including small firms of architects, has guided development of improvements to how Collabor8online manages document issue processes.”

For many users, simply being able to share files online is often enough. However, for those users that may wish to view and do online comment and mark-up of CAD files, Collabor8online recommends they deploy the Brava viewer (also used by established high-end vendors such as 4Projects and Business Collaborator).

Marketing

Collabor8online is built around relational database technology (MySQL) using Ruby on Rails by a small in-house development team based in Manchester (the company is currently about six-strong). Marketing to date has focused on building awareness in Colin’s ‘comfort zone’ of M&E contracting through articles (like this) in the magazines and websites serving that sector, but Colin’s background in construction computing, and in estimating software in particular, has also brought in a few sales leads. Indeed, his experience in estimating software leads him to think there may yet be an opportunity to integrate design and specification processes to the estimation process. He is also mindful of the opportunities that may come from having solutions that are accessible via mobile devices.

Pricing Collabor8online is a continuous challenge, Colin admits. The basic hosted product is still offered at £25 and allows up to 25 users and 2Gb storage of files, while the premium hosted model currently starts from £49 per month, with five times the storage space and allowing up to 50 registered users. This graduated approach appeals to many companies, he says, as – within the price bands – there is no cost impact of adding an additional user, and at the SME end of the market many projects involve teams of well under 25 collaborators (we talked for some time about the relative merits of per-project pricing, as adopted by market leaders like BIW and 4Projects, versus per-user/seat pricing to which Asite has been switching).

My take

When I wrote my first post about Collabor8online, I lumped it alongside several other firms offering low-cost collaboration to the construction market. Unlike some generic solutions, Collabor8online is being developed with the specific needs of the UK construction market in mind, and rather than focus on the needs of the design team (Woobius, for example, is being developed by architects for architects – post) it aims to meet the requirements of specialist subcontractors on a project. In a highly fragmented industry like architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), with its preponderance of SMEs, this may well appeal, particularly to small firms who regard the leading systems as both expensive and over-complex for their collaboration needs. Increasing acceptance of web-based SaaS is also helping expand the potential market for such low-cost simple solutions; firms don’t need IT expertise to adopt and deploy such applications, and there is less of a learning curve to use them than with platforms like 4Projects or BIW. That said, it could become an intensely competitive market with several solutions all priced at similar levels with similar levels of functionality.

Conceivably, Collabor8online could end up being used by lower tiers of specialist supply chains while their customers higher up the supply chain are using the more sophisticated products to collaborate with designers and the ultimate client. However, I wonder if there is a risk that the top-end product vendors might identify an opportunity to encourage low-tier adoption by offering simplified, low cost or even free versions of their systems so that they achieve top-to-bottom coverage of the whole project supply chain?

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/02/collabor8online-talking-low-cost-collaboration/

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/01/exit-business-collaborator-enter-unit4-collaboration-software-ltd/

Jan 26 2010

Glasscubes updates interface

glasscubes I wrote about Glasscubes last October (post), and have just received an email from Rob Hallums telling me about a new, more intuitive user interface to the application (read his blog post). There are changes to the navigation to create a Dashboard view (right) and a files repository, and the ‘Cubes’ have been renamed Workspaces (the same term used by BT Workspace, which Glasscubes superceded).

I have remarked before about the frequent use of ‘Workspace’ as a brand, and when I reviewed Glasscubes I was quite taken with the idea of ‘cubes’ – reminding me of cartoon Dilbert‘s cubicles, I suppose. In a reply to a comment on his blog post, Rob says:

“The change from Cubes to Workspaces has been a tough decision to make, and one which has taken many months to decide upon. However, due to the nature of the beast, we felt that it is a sensible idea to use a trusted word rather than a concept.”

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/01/glasscubes-updates-interface/

Jan 25 2010

Filegenius – yet more low-cost file-sharing targeting AEC

Last week, I had lunch with a long-time friend in the construction collaboration technology sector, and we talked about low and no-cost file-sharing. It is, we agreed, easy to take a generic file-sharing system and claim that it is invaluable for users in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, but a lot harder to actually show how such systems will specifically add value to AEC users. Too often, the systems include no CAD file viewers and storage capacity constraints can quickly erode their perceived value. I wrote about box.net (among others) earlier this month; another candidate identifying AEC as a potential market is US-based Filegenius.

I found Filegenius’s landing page for AEC by chance, and its talk of saving AEC firms “hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month in recovered reprographic and delivery costs” is depressingly familiar. These are the kinds of claims that technology vendors have been making to the AEC sector for a decade and more (conveniently overlooking that email is often used instead of physical delivery).

The real benefits come from integrating file-sharing into construction processes (workflows), from enabling context-sensitive collaboration, from avoiding time-wasting searches and rework, and from avoiding disputes and litigation. In my view, creating ‘electronic planrooms’ has some value when dealing with small projects and/or small teams, but for more ambitious projects employing bigger, more fragmented teams, you need something more sophisticated which supports industry-specific processes and protocols.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2010/01/filegenius-yet-more-low-cost-file-sharing-targeting-aec/

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