By the early 1990s, the PC industry was still expanding and offering plenty of opportunity for all. IBM had lost its position of leadership and for a few years the market existed on commercial off the shelf (COTS) graphics chips from TI, and a bunch of XGA and VGA clone builders. In 1994, Number Nine, a small company in Boston, … Read more
Siemens’ latest version of its flagship design software, NX, has been updated with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company believes it is the first design tool to include AI and ML, but if Siemens is right on this score, it’s a feature that’s well on its way to being included in many more design and engineering tools because CAx … Read more
Graphisoft, an early innovator in BIM and one of the key companies in the Nemetschek collection of companies for design, construction, and project management has announced the appointment of Huw Roberts as CEO. Graphisoft’s former CEO Viktor Várkonyi is moving to a new job within the Nemetschek Group’s planning and design division, which includes Graphisoft. Várkonyi, who has been with … Read more
AutoCAD is targeted by many workalike software vendors precisely because it is the most successful general 2D/3D CAD program of all time. With four, six, eight, twelve million users of the 35-year-old software, entrepreneurs figure that there has to be a certain percentage of users who want something that costs less, even if it does less. AutoCAD is priced … Read more
The AEC market is busting out in 2018 for many reasons, but probably the driving force is the digitalization of the industry. Trimble has been quietly building on its strengths in GPS, civil engineering, automation, and transportation to enable automation in the field. Unlike many companies in the AEC space, which started in CAD and started adding on data management, … Read more
Revisiting KeyShot, a dedicated rendering tool for CAD users Is always a revelation. Sold as a standalone or plug program, Keyshot is a professional tool with an emphasis on ease of use. It’s well entrenched in the SolidWorks customer base, but there’s plenty of competition from within. SolidWorks, which has its own rendering module, Visualize, which is based on GPU … Read more
The Open Design Alliance has gone through a major transition as it expands to accommodate the varied requirements and interests of its broadening user base. Originally founded, with what now seems a fairly simple goal of making Autodesk's proprietary DWG/DXF format available as data exchange to companies and customers outside of Autodesk, the ODA developed its own CAD engine allowing … Read more
The path of Blender as a company and an organization has never been straight. As it has gained new supporters and users the Blender’s features have multiplied along with new add-ons. As the Blender community celebrates its 25th anniversary, Blender shows signs of growing up. As Blender celebrates its 25th anniversary, it’s worth asking: how long does it take to … Read more
Parallels’ best-known product Parallels Desktop, which enables Windows products to run on the Mac. (Source: Parallels) Just before Christmas 2018, Corel Corporation had announced plans to acquire Parallels, creating a surprise package for many industry observers. The tech commenting community seems to fall into two categories: those people familiar with Coreland those familiar with Parallel because many of the comments were … Read more
Following up on successful Autodesk University and building on its successful transition to subscription presented its investors with a positive accounting of its fiscal quarter Q3, 2019, which ended October 31, 2018. In addition, the company announced its plans to expand its focus on building and construction for the AEC sector with the acquisition of PlanGrid. Autodesk has declared the … Read more
Hexagon AB continues its aggressive expansion into new markets with the acquisition of Belgian CAD software developer Bricsys. Founded in 2002, Bricsys introduced its flagship product BricsCAD as an AutoCAD competitor and that is still the company’s largest base of users. However, the company has a talented team of developers and has added on new products and expanded the BricsCAD … Read more
Altair has acquired SimSolid and the company says it will change the process of analysis. SimSolid, founded in 2015 was based on technology developed by Victor Apanovitch who was also the co-founded of SimSolid. The company has pioneered meshless analysis. The software is able to run structural simulations on actual CAD models rather than requiring models to be simplified for … Read more
