When he’s not been worrying about the economy Martyn Day has been hatching plans to bring DEVELOP3D to a live audience and on 20 March, 2012, at Warwick University, we will be hosting the free event DEVELOP3D LIVE.
DEVELOP3D Magazine is inviting you to its inaugural product design, engineering and manufacturing event at Warwick University on 20 March, 2012.
The single-day event will bring together experts from around the world, and some of the most exciting, interesting speakers we could find, to give insights into what is coming next, the latest technology to give you competitive advantage and a host of genuinely new ideas to breath life into product development and manufacture, both in the UK and around the world.
For more information and to claim your free registration, visit the DEVELOP3D LIVE site here.
It is hard to ignore the continuing economic woes that have played as the background to the summer.
It seems that individuals, banks and now countries are all still dealing with the previous decade of credit excess. Growth is proving elusive and politicians seem to be clueless as to how to untangle the situation.
Despite this uncertain background it’s amazing that UK factory activity has, until recently, been the only sector to provide any good news and growth. Maybe we are leaders in the design and production of
riot equipment? We’re certainly doing good business in Libya.
The Guardian newspaper reported that the UK exported 33,899,335 pounds worth of ammunition, crowd control equipment and tear gas to the troubled country in 2010.
In October, the Prime Minister, David Cameron stated that advanced manufacturing should be at the heart of the UK economy but we have yet to see anything that will actually aid such firms.
Picking on immigrants and quantitatively easing more money into the pockets of bankers is not going to give us high quality engineered products that are good for export. We need strategy and action in addition to this painful financial firefighting.
DEVELOP3D LIVE is a day of concise, informative presentations, explaining how new technology can compact development time, reduce costs and give your firm a cutting edge
With this in mind, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time this summer looking into putting together a free conference for our readers. We are going to pull together a number of global experts and show the latest and greatest technologies for those in the product design and manufacturing market.
With the aid of Dell Precision workstations and AMD FirePro professional graphics I’m happy to announce that on 20 March, 2012, at Warwick University, we will be running DEVELOP3D LIVE – a day of concise, informative presentations, explaining how new technology can compact development time, reduce costs and give your company a cutting edge.
We will have some fascinating demonstrations, a number of exclusive ‘first looks’ and will be giving lots of great stuff away too. Please put the date in your diary and register your interest at www.develop3dlive.com – as places will be very limited.
SolidWorks
In other news, I was quite shocked to hear of the sudden departure of Jon Hirschtick from the DS SolidWorks board of directors, followed only days later by the news that the company’s executive VP of Research and development, Austin O’Malley, had also left.
The combined sudden news made it sound as if there was meltdown at the very heart of SolidWorks. Hirschtick is an enigma in the CAD world, having started SolidWorks in 1993 with other industry notables such as Mike Payne (who developed Pro/Engineer and Spaceclaim).
SolidWorks heralded the advent of 3D mechanical CAD on the Windows desktop. The company was sold to Dassault Systèmes in 1997 and has gone from strength to strength. Hirschtick has always been cordial, thoughtful, a shrewd investor and a pioneer of community-based customer relations.
The news comes as SolidWorks is developing a major reworking of its core modelling product of the same name. It seems that much of the new technology is coming from DS in Paris, based on the Catia CGM engine.
With DS taking a closer role in the day to day business and development of the SolidWorks brand and products, it just doesn’t look good if you lose two of the highly-respected management team in short succession.
This may well be a coincidence but when significant players leave an organisation, it’s usually stage managed, not allowed to fall into the hands of the conspiracy theorists or land in the lap of competitors who might say they were pushed.
These significant exits appeared to surprise just about everyone and only serve to dent confidence. I’ve drawn some criticism in the past for talking about the ‘Dassaultification’ of SolidWorks, with Jon Hirschtick actually kicking back that I’m not covering the ‘SolidWorksification’ of DS. I guess that’s because I don’t really see that much change to DS method, practice, employees or dealerships.
Though it is true to say that the previous CEO, Jeff Ray is embedded within the DS organisation and working on geographic operations and assisting in improving DS marketing.
As the 3D design market moves from Windows to operating system independent and cloud-distributed networks there will be a lot to play for. Most of these mid-range 3D CAD firms are developing their next generation products, looking to make use of forthcoming processors, operating systems and mobile ‘connected’ hardware.
Bad decisions made now could literally render any currently popular design application irrelevant. Though readers of Ralph Grabowski’s Upfront ezine would have been treated to his view that the ‘cloud is dead’, even before anything has been delivered.
www.upfrontezine.com/current.htm.
Martyn Day talks about DEVELOP3D’s first live event
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