Trends & Market Research

PTC hits rough road

PTC has been very optimistic about its transition to subscription and its concurrent development of new business. Unfortunately for the third quarter of 2019, the company’s executive team had to do a lot of fairly excruciating explaining when the company’s sales failed to meet the company’s projections.    PTC doesn’t hold back on data. In fact, they have the opposite … Read more

AMD Q2 2019 results

AMD reported its quarterly results for calendar Q2 2019, revenues and operating income were down year-over-year as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits.  “I am pleased with our financial performance and execution in the quarter as we ramped production of three leadership 7-nm product families,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO.  “We have reached … Read more

Modo demonstrates new features for fashion, AEC, and content creation

The focus for Modo at Siggraph 2019 was cross-platform fluidity and cross-discipline applicability. The three speakers at Modo’s Siggraph user event included designer Thomas Groppi from NEXII, rigging TD Richard Hurrey from Kitestring, and 3D artist Warren Marshall from Warren Marshall Biz. Each speaker highlighted new features in Modo that improve visualization workflows and push the use of Modo into … Read more

Nvidia brings ray tracing and AI to Siggraph again

This year at Siggraph, Nvidia showed a lineup of RTX Studio Laptops and Mobile Workstations that the company said were purpose-built for creators, and coming from every major OEM—10 new designs from Dell, HP, Lenovo and Boxx, raising the number of RTX Studio models to 27. Various ISVs were represented in demos including Adobe, Autodesk, and Blackmagic Design.    Nvidia … Read more

Siggraph attendance beats forecast

We’ve been tracking Siggraph’s attendance since the conference started and attending almost that long as well. Siggraph went through an explosive period, climaxing 22 years ago in 1997 ago just before the internet bubble popped. Since then, the attendance has dropped hitting an all-time low in 2009 during the great recession. History of attendance of Siggraph since its inception   … Read more

Intel Q2 2019 results

Intel reported its calendar Q2 2019; revenues were down year-over-year 3% but grew quarter-to-quarter. Intel achieved 1% growth in the PC-centric business while data-centric revenue declined 7%. “Second quarter results exceeded our expectations on both revenue and earnings, as the growth of data and compute-intensive applications are driving customer demand for higher performance products in both our PC-centric and data-centric … Read more

Accelerating AR/VR:  Kronos releases OpenXR

With growing adoption from XR industry and expanding ecosystem support, Khronos has released an advanced acceleration standard, OpenXR 1.0. It comes with publicly available implementations and substantial ecosystem momentum. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance, cross-platform access to VR and AR—collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. The new specification can be found on the Khronos website … Read more

Could a dragonfly discover life?

During a recent meeting at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, Josh Steele, an APL Senior Science Applications Developer, spoke about the adventurous project to launch a drone to Saturn’s moon, Titan. Titan is an enticing target, and unlike any other place in the solar system, it has a nitrogen-based atmosphere like Earth. But, unlike Earth, it has methane … Read more

A few things we’re looking forward to at Siggraph

Siggraph combines an Academic Conference, with Science Fair experiments, trade show, art fair, and animation festival. It’s a select bunch, people who love computer graphics and in the past decade, the show has been dominated by the film industry. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of buzz at Siggraph for virtual production. However, where the interest has primarily been rendering, … Read more

Want a truck—Volvo has one for you

At the PTC LiveWorx19 conference the other week, CEO and visionary Jim Heppelmann showed off Volvo trucks—actually had two of them on stage with him during his keynote. Volvo and PTC have been working together for years. Volvo uses just about every bit of software PTC makes including PTC’s AR stuff—and they need to. Last year, Volvo made 260,000 trucks—that’s … Read more

Dassault announces plan to acquire Medidata for a heart stopping $5.8 billion deal

Dassault Systemes may have started as a CAD/PLM company, but it is morphing into something else entirely. The company has announced plans to buy Medidata, a health care company that provides a cloud-based platform to for clinical trials. In order to manage the deal, Dassault will put together a cash package of approximately $5.8 billion in order to pay $92.25 … Read more