NOVEDGE blog

Interview with Chris Anderson: "Technology is not important. What's important is participation"

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Chris Anderson over the phone, for Novedge's series of interviews with artists and innovators. I am a big fan of Chris's books and Novedge fits perfectly in his Long Tail business model . For those of you not familiar with Anderson, he is a writer and the founder and chairman of 3DRobotics, a robotic manufacturing company. He was also the editor of Wired from 2001 to 2012.

Novedge: I'm a huge fan of your books and really enjoyed Makers. My first question for you is: How would you define yourself? You're an entrepreneur, you're a writer. How do you describe what you do and who you are professionally?

Chris Anderson: I try to avoid that question (laughter) I do a lot of things. I try not to come up with any single label. I'm a CEO. I'm a boss

Novedge: One thing I'm curious about is how you became passionate about writing about trends and the future. What lead you to it?

Chris Anderson: I have been very lucky to be around people who were kind of doing the same thing. I was lucky to grow up with a family who encouraged kids to be thoughtful about where this is going and where you should go, and to be exposed to a kind of analytical culture in my family. Then I was lucky to work in places that encouraged that first at Nature and Science and then at Wired. Wired is a publication very much about ideas and trends, from science to future technology.

Novedge: How did you first come into contact with 3D printing?

Chris Anderson: I heard about Makerbot and I happened to be in New York shortly after they started. I asked to get a tour, went to Brooklyn and walked through the facilities. I ended up buying their 3D printer on the spot. I bought #380 and that was mind blowing. I put it together and it didn't really work very well but the next one I got worked great. And the rest is history.

Novedge: What's the favorite thing that you printed on your Makerbot?

Chris Anderson: I wrote about it in Makers. We printed a lot of things but the thing I actually like the most was furniture, you know, items that I do with my daughters. The things I design myself are pretty cool but I'm not a very good designer, so the things that we download from Thingiverse and print out, those are the ones that print so well. So, yeah, I like the furniture the best.

Novedge: Let's talk about how hard it is to use the printer and the software. Do you see regular people learning how to use the software or do you see more people downloading the designs and printing them at home? How hard do you think it is to use this technology, if you don't already work in a tech field?

Chris Anderson: It used to be very hard and now it's getting incredibly easy. So now my children do this. They don't need me anymore. They use Tinkercad on the web, which is super easy for kids, but also very powerful. So, by and large, it's not really any harder for them that using Word software and printing paper. It seems very natural to them. Again, three years ago this was super hard but now it's literally like regular printing.

Novedge: Apart from Tinkercad, is there any other software that you would recommend or that you love to use?

Chris Anderson: It really depends on how sophisticated you want to get. The kids use Tinkercad and I actually prefer it for most of my stuff. When I want to get a little more complex, I switch to Autodesk 123D and then in the office, professionally, we use AutoDesk Inventor.

Novedge: There are companies out there, like Shapeways, where you can get a design or you can order something already 3D printed. Is there one you like the best? Do you wish they did something different?

Chris Anderson: We use Shapeways all the time. About every week we send them something. What we use Shapeways for is the material that we can't touch at home, like metals. Shapeways's printing service is very easy to use, but it takes quite a long time, it can take a month for something to arrive. Ideally it's a little bit less than that. So you have to wait. But when it shows up, it's absolutely beautiful. We actually don't use designs that are already on Shapeways. I don't know why but we don't. We tend to use or create our own designs or download them from Thingiverse and then send them to Shapeways.

Novedge: What do you like the most about Thingiverse?

Chris Anderson: I just love the variety. My favorite designer there goes by the name of Pretty Small Things. She's a theatrical set designer on Broadway but as well as designing sets she puts these designs on Thingiverse and they're beautiful. So yeah, I just like the variety, I like the creativity. It's just there's always something new and cool there.

Novedge: I read your book Makers and  you talk about being an inventor vs. being an entrepreneur, how before it was hard to be an inventor and an entrepreneur and now things have become a little bit easier.

Chris Anderson: The process to go from invention to market is a two-part step. The first was to go from idea to prototype, and that used to require skills, machine skills, manufacturing skills, fabrication skills. And the second was to go from prototype to production and that required understanding, having access to mass production capacities and all of that. Both of those have now gotten much, much easier. Obviously a 3D printer is a great way to go from idea to prototype and likewise for a laser cutter or any of these technologies. So you don't need machine skills to go from idea to prototype. And then to go from prototype to production is increasingly easy as well because of so-called cloud manufacturing. Those same files that you design on screen and send to your 3D printer, you can upload online.  Manufacturing companies will take those files and mass produce products for you any way that you want. It's sometimes a little more complicated than that, depending on the product. But fundamentally, regular people have access to both prototyping and manufacturing, which was not the case when my grandfather was inventing things.

Novedge: Are we all entrepreneurs? Are we all inventors?

Chris Anderson: No, no, I don't think so. And that's fine. I think we are all creators in some way, but I don't think it's necessarily in everyone to become an entrepreneur. I think that one percent of people could design and innovate and everybody could start playing with their creations. Let's say most people do nothing but print other people's designs or distribute them, or customize them. Let's say most people do nothing creative with it: but one percent do have their own ideas or do invent something, or innovate. And let's say one percent of them decide they want to become an entrepreneur. That's one out of a thousand.

Would you say that that's a failure? You know, only one out of every thousand of these people becomes an entrepreneur. There are 300 million people in this country - that's when you realize that 0.1 percent is a very large number. It means you've got thousands or tens of thousands of new entrepreneurs, new manufacturers, new product categories, new products themselves that are entering the market that wouldn't have existed otherwise. And that feels very much like the Web, which basically gave everybody the power to publish and, you know, lots of people did nothing more than update their Facebook page but some people created Facebook. The lesson of the web is that the most innovative ideas, the most energetic entrepreneurs, typically come from outside the traditional industry. This is the first time that has been allowed to extend to manufacturing as well.

Novedge: I like the comparison that you made between the internet and 3D printing, this revolution in manufacturing. What are the advantages of actually having more people participate in making products? What are the benefits to society?

Chris Anderson: What we're talking about is what is called democratization. Personal computers democratized computing, the internet democratized communications and now we're democratizing manufacturing. Any time you democratize, you're basically bringing more diversity, more people, more ideas, more contexts to development. What you find is that typically most people are "amateurs", they're not professionally trained and they don't have credentials, they don't have work experience, they don't work for companies that are in the space. And yet, when you look at everything exciting on the web it was all created by people who were initially amateurs. When you look at the biggest web companies today, they were all started by people in colleges, more or less. And they weren't working for IBM when they created these products. They were working for themselves, or maybe not working at all. They were students or they were just users and they had ideas. Now, maybe they were only one out of a thousand or whatever, just a tiny fraction of people have those skills, but because democratization increases the pool of participants so hugely, that small fraction of geniuses creates a huge new pool of talent that wouldn't otherwise have been tapped. So it's simply that geniuses are hard to find. Great ideas are hard to predict, and the best way to do it is to increase the pool of participation so much that the geniuses will emerge.

Novedge: Would you say that it also equalizes the playing field a little bit? We are removing barriers to education and access to capital.

Chris Anderson: Yeah, very much. I think the combination of these tools and these web services and sites like Kickstarter, which brings access to capital to everybody with a good idea, are all leveling the playing field and lowering the barriers to entry. That's exactly what the web and open source software did and it works. Every important trend in technology over the last three decades has been essentially to lower the barrier to entry to participate. Some of the barriers were cost, some of the barriers were permission, some of the barriers were complexity, some of the barriers were community. As all of those things fall, people suddenly start doing stuff. They start acting. They start creating products and companies. People think that technology is important. Technology is not important. What's important is participation. When technologies work it is because they make it easier for people to participate. And I don't have to predict this any more. It's 2013. We are 40 years into the personal computer era. We are 20 years into the internet era. We are seeing what's happening and this is just the next chapter in that story.

Novedge: Companies are starting to hire differently, they're starting to have a different culture inside. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Chris Anderson: 3DRobotics is an open source community and also a company and so we are a traditional company in one respect, where we have employees who have roles and responsibilities and we create products. But we are also a community in the sense that we have an open platform that allows tens of thousands of people to participate and volunteer and create. Traditional companies do it all themselves and we share the function between professionals and amateurs, between employees and amateurs and engineers, between the closed and the open. So that's my company, that's the way we're structured. I wouldn't say that all companies should be structured that way. I'm sure most companies aren't structured this way but it is certainly one of the lessons from the open source movement that this sort of cross sourcing in a process can create the kind of sophisticated product that people thought could only be created by traditional companies. Turns out that a well-constructed community can be a powerful innovation driver. That's something I think all companies need to pay attention to, but it might not be appropriate for everybody.

Novedge: How different is it now to finance your project? Can you say something about Kickstarter and the impact it is having on the industry?

Chris Anderson: I think Kickstarter is really the final element that completes the industrial revolution of the maker movement. It lowers the last barrier, which is the access to capital. It does three miraculous things. The first is that it moves money forward in time. It moves money from the end of the process, when people buy a product, to the beginning of the process, when you actually need to invest in R&D and production tooling. So simply the act of taking presales and getting the customers to fund the product is terrific because the customers are ultimately the decider of whether it will be a success. The second thing it does is that it builds a community around the product so that lots of people pre-order something and they become invested in the success of the product. They want to promote it, by social media or otherwise, and they want to participate in its design and give feedback.The community is a very important marketing tool, to say nothing of a feedback tool, and using that tool improves the product before it comes to market. And finally, Kickstarter does market research. If the product fails on Kickstarter it probably wouldn't have survived in the market. Move on to something else. In a sense it "de-risks" a product. That's one of the hardest things to do in traditional industries and it's what Kickstarter was designed to do. Anybody can do it. And I think that's the last barrier. A bunch of other sites are doing the same thing and it's not perfect. We are seeing that some people are realistic about what it takes to get a product from prototype to production, and some aren't. But by and large it is less risky than traditional startups. So, I'm really enthusiastic about it.

Novedge: In Makers, you talk about the "happiness economy". You write that basically, once we achieve a certain standard of living, we are not motivated by more money necessarily, we look for more meaning.

Chris Anderson: I did talk about that. That's not my specialty. There are many other people who know way more about it than I do, but when I look at communities where the participation is open like our own, they are rarely driven by money. They are mostly driven by passion, by what we call scratching your own itch. Paychecks ? That's great but it turns out people are doing amazing things as volunteers, driven by passion.  And what you give them is a platform and opportunity to act on that. To take the passion and turn it into something that's shared, something that's a tribute to something bigger than themselves and inspire other people to follow their path. My previous book Free was all about that, about the non monetary economy. Meaning is another word, passion is another word. Connection. These are all forces that drive us to do things and when you think about it, most of our interactions with people are not done for money. Most of what we do is driven by non-monetary forces and to be able to turn those powerful social forces into an economic force just by harnessing passion, that's the opportunity here. So I think that the more control we have over our lives, the happier we are. That's kind of the big lessons. Fundamentally what people want is a sense of knowledge and meaning and certainty and all the things that come with it. To the extent that we can extend that to the products all around us, the sense that we can be more involved in their creation and use, the happier we are. Take food for example: wanting to have a connection to something as important as the food you eat makes you less of a passive consumer and more of an active participant . When you look at the people who are going to Farmer's Markets and buying local, there's a reason why what they want to know about the origins of these products. They want to have a connection to the community. They want to feel that there's more than just a product they're consuming, that there's a movement they're supporting or a story that they believe in or a value that they share. And that relationship with our goods is something that you are seeing across the board. It's just one of those things that emerges out of developed economies and I think that we now have the potential to take that beyond food and textiles to more sophisticated manufacturing goods around.

Novedge: Do you think the same will happen in manufacturing?

Chris Anderson: Yeah, I'm speaking to you in my office in Berkeley, which is next to a furniture design company, called Swerve. We're here in California but California is not a low cost labour market. And yet, they're making furniture. How do they keep on making furniture? The reason that people buy it, and pay more for this furniture, is that they feel that it's a superior design. And the reason they feel it is a superior design is that they see the designers. They talk to the creatives. They understand the process and they value the culture that this design came from, because it's their culture. It's shared.

Novedge: I have one last question. What advice would you give our readers about moving forward with the democratization of manufacturing?

Chris Anderson: It's hard for me to give advice to your readers because they already know a lot of this stuff. My breakthrough was not so much doing it myself but doing it with my children. When we brought a 3D printer home and started showing the children how it worked and using the tools, their own creativity emerged and that really encouraged me: if children could do it, anybody could do it. A lot of your readers probably have 3D printers at work. I would encourage them to consider a 3D printer at home. If they have children, a child growing up in a house with a 3D printer is a child that can imagine something and then can make it for real. And that's a powerful lesson. Some of them are going to become the adults who are the designers of tomorrow. It's an inspiration that my generation grew up with a home computer and we created, you know that generation created our web. This generation may grow up with a 3D printer and this generation can create the new industrial revolution

 

To learn more about Chris Anderson, visits DIY Drones and keep in touch with him on Twitter.

Makers by Chris Anderson is Novedge's Book of the Month.

No, It Will Not Make Tea

If you have been spending time on Planet Earth during the last year or so you must have heard that we now have 3D Printing that will soon and forever change the way we live. If you read the articles on the mainstream media you will probably think we have just invented the Star Trek Replicator 1.0 and as soon as 2.0 will come out we will be able to ask Siri for “Tea, Earl Gray Hot” and have it materialized by this incredible thing called 3D Printer in a few seconds…

Well, I have bad news for you, there is no Next Generation (pun intended) 3D Printer model to be released soon that will make you tea. Even if we were able to manipulate matter at the level necessary to materialize tea (and mug) out of thin air the energy requirements are so enormous that for many generations to come traditional tea making will remain the better option (I guess that a Siri enabled kettle will do most of the trick anyway..)

Disappointed? Well, don’t be because this revolution is happening, it will just not be as big as if we could control the creation of matter out of energy at subatomic resolution. What this revolution IS about is the popularization of “Rapid Prototyping”, a quarter century old technology, due to the recent introduction of low cost (read few thousand US$) desktop 3D Printers. These low cost printers are making Rapid Prototyping technology that once was only accessible to companies with deep pockets available to pretty much anybody that can benefit from it. This is in my opinion similar to the car revolution that was the result of the introduction of the Ford Model T. With the Model T the car became affordable to the masses where it was only available to the financially privileged and this changed forever the way we travel: personal mobility became available to anybody that wanted it.

Practically, what will change once we will all have a 3D Printer? I believe so many things will change that this is really hard to predict but I’ll go out on a limb with some examples that I feel very strong about.

• It is like holding the object in your hand, literally. How many times you have heard that with the latest and greatest 3D visualization software “it is like holding the object in your hand”? With 3D Printing that is exactly what you will do: you will hold the physical object in your hand and play with it. Anybody that knows about design knows that you should prototype early and often and with 3D Printing it is so easy to build prototypes that you will do just that, on your desktop.

• Rapid prototyping will be available to small companies and individual designers. Because of the affordability of the technology 3D Printing will not be just for the Boeing and GM of the world but, for example, architects will be able to print their dioramas to show their customers faster and better than they are doing now.

• You will be able to download lots of plastic toys and parts. When I was a kid I loved to assemble plastic models. If you are familiar with them you know that they come as injection molded plastic parts. If you have a 3D Printer you can download the 3D models of these plastic parts and print them yourselves. No need to go to the store. Many toys will be sold as MP3 files (STL to be precise that is the MP3 equivalent for 3D Printers)

• Goodbye LEGO? I do not really know if LEGO will be replaced by 3D Printing but you can certainly see that now you can create something quickly with a simple 3D editor like Sketchup and print it. Not only you could download your toys but you can in fact design them and have them materialized right away. What a way to nurture creativity. If I were a Kid I would love that. Oh well… I do not need to be a kid – I love that, period!
  

So, the 3D Printing revolution is in fact happening and it will be very interesting to see how it will impact all of us. Then, maybe you could brew yourself a nice tea, Earl Gray hot, and think about what you can do with a desktop 3D Printer and let us know.

How do you think affordable 3D Printing will change your future?

 

Cristiano Sacchi – is the co founder and CEO of Novedge

Interview with Kenneth Wong, CAD Journalist and Blogger

When I first met Kenneth Wong here in San Francisco my thoughts were not focused on the missing aureola of acronyms that impeccably decorates all his pictures. While shacking his hand I was repeating to myself: "I'm meeting one of the last CAD journalists, a very endangered species. I don't know if I'll ever meet another one before they all go extinct." In the past few years we have been so busy exploring the benefits of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook that we have almost completely missed the gradual extinction of CAD journalists and magazines (thanks to Al Dean there is at least one exception). Now it's time to look at the CAD press not anymore as a legacy of the past, but as a component of the new CAD ecosystem. Following Kenneth Wong and the emerging generation of CAD journalists we are witnessing a transformation process that will make the new press a critical player in the way we produce and consume technical information. Here is Kenneth's interview.

Kenneth can you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional activities?

when I’m looking for stories, I pay attention to not just the technological angle but also the human angle

Nearly a decade ago, in one of my temp jobs, I ended up as a receptionist for a publishing firm in San Francisco. It was the same firm responsible for producing Cadence magazine (no longer in existence). The magazine’s editor in chief, Arnie Williams, noted I had a flair for writing and a curiosity about technology. So he hired me as a junior editor. That was my introduction to CAD. Since then, I’ve also cycled through a number of computer games and digital video magazines as an editor. At the moment, I’m Desktop Engineering’s resident MCAD writer and blogger. My writings also appear in Architecture Week, Computer Graphics World, Cadalyst, and other outlets.
Unlike many of my colleagues, I studied literature in school, not engineering. So when I’m looking for stories, I pay attention to not just the technological angle but also the human angle. I’m a first-generation immigrant, born and raised in Burma, Southeast Asia.

You have been working in the CAD field as a journalist for some time. Can this market support a magazine and a team of independent journalists, or will we have to rely on bloggers and press releases in the future?

Instead of magazines, we now have brands: Desktop Engineering, Cadalyst, Manufacturing Business Technology, to name but a few

We used to think of a magazine as a book published monthly. But in the past decade, that model has changed considerably. Instead of magazines, we now have brands: Desktop Engineering, Cadalyst, Manufacturing Business Technology, to name but a few. They’re made up of printed issues and a slew of properties associated with them, such as newsletters, blogs, webcasts, podcasts, and forums. CAD bloggers like SolidSmacks and Deelip emerged as recognized brands in their own rights because they give compelling reasons for people to rely on their insights and judgments.
This creates new fields and venues. Small businesses that can’t afford to run print ads can now participate online. In the end, we may have fewer printed magazines, but a richer media landscape, supported by a greater number of advertisers. I doubt the day will come when press releases become people’s prime source of news. As we all know, they are anything but independent.

Your style as a journalist is focused on the user's perspective. Can you share with us the process you go through when creating a typical article?

You won’t find a lot of technical details in my writing

When deciding to pursue a story, I always ask, “Would a user care?” You won’t find a lot of technical details in my writing. If I’m writing a feature story on a new product release, I’d rather focus on how easy (or difficult) it is to create dimensions in it than on what the modeling kernel is. I frequently broadcast the topics I’m considering in my Twitter and Faceboook updates, just to get readers’ reaction. I also scan comments on popular CAD blogs to identify people I could interview. On several occasions, I contacted them and asked them to provide quotes for my stories. In Desktop Engineering’s Virtual Desktop newsletter, which I’m responsible for, I regularly feature “Tweet of the month” and “Reader comment of the month,” culled from what readers have to say about certain topics. I think their opinion matters just as much as mine.

For several years, pervasive use of 3D in browsers has been perceived by many as the next big thing. But it hasn't happened, or at least not on a popular scale. What are the reasons for this delay?

The mouse-and-keyboard combo is perfectly suited for text input, but a handicap for manipulating 3D

Partly, it has to do with how we interact with computers. The mouse-and-keyboard combo is perfectly suited for text input, but a handicap for manipulating 3D. The other factor is the lack of standard for repackaging 3D CAD data for the Web. I’m hoping Google’s O3D open API (http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/) will serve as a rallying call for this cause. By the way, online games and virtual communities like World of Warcraft and Second Life are doing a good job cultivating a groundswell for browser-based 3D. Online communities like Dassault’s 3DVIA and 3D ContentCentral represent similar efforts. I think light-hearted, consumer-friendly Web 3D will pave the way for the more serious implementations to come.

How does your approach differ when writing an article compared to writing a blog post?

I see blogging as a way to connect with the readers on a more personal level

In my news articles, I seldom use the first-person voice. I usually keep the “I” out of the text and simply report the facts. In blog posts, my thoughts, my reactions, and my quirky personality are as much a part of the story as the facts. I take that approach because I see blogging as a way to connect with the readers on a more personal level.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists seem to be attracted to all sort of technologies except CAD and 3D technologies (with very few exceptions). As a CAD expert and resident of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley region do you have an explanation for this?

CAD market is growing [...] without the kind of wild swings that give VCs an adrenaline rush

I’m no expert on venture capitalists (VCs), but they seem to be dictated by hype, buzz, rumors, and market volatility. CAD market is growing (as seen in CIMdata’s annual reports), but it’s a safe, steady market without the kind of wild swings that give VCs an adrenaline rush. I think VCs who’re in it for the long haul should consider CAD.

What should CAD bloggers learn from CAD journalists and what should CAD journalists learn from CAD bloggers?

bloggers have shown us that, in the new era, a story is on ongoing dialog

CAD bloggers stand to gain a lot of credibility by adopting some traditional journalistic practices, like taking the time to fact-check before posting something, citing respected sources and statistics to reinforce their points, and balancing a story with opposing viewpoints. Journalists should learn to blog and use social media (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example) to engage with their readers the way bloggers do. Traditionally, journalists think of a story as an essay or a speech. Bloggers have shown us that, in the new era, a story is on ongoing dialog. So let’s talk!

I would like to thank Kenneth for taking the time to answer my questions. If you have any questions for Kenneth or for Novedge, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

Kenneth's Virtual Desktop Video Edition To view all issues of Kenneth Wong
Virtual Desktop Video Edition visit DE Channel on youTube.

V-Ray RT Can Change the Way We Design

The Moore Law is supplying us with an incredible and ever growing amount of computer power. There is so much computer power, in fact, that most of the time we use only a small fraction of what is available on our workstation. Why not use some of this unused power to improve our design and rendering processes? This is the idea behind the new V-Ray RT for 3ds Max, where RT means Real Time (more info on the Chaos Group website). The concept is simple: while you work as usual in 3ds Max (or in the future it could be Rhino 3D or Cinema4D) an application running in the background generates a high quality rendering of your current 3ds Max view. Move your point of view and the rendering will start a new image, pause for a second, and the rendered image will catch up with an incredible photorealistic quality. To get a better idea of how it works, I recommend watching this 10 minute video created by Peter Guthrie, an Architectural Illustrator/Computer Graphics artist based in London.

Enjoy!

Franco Folini

V-Ray RT Video V-Ray products are available from Novedge

Interview with Lou Gallo, SolidWorks Power User and CAD Podcaster

In the past, if someone asked me to come up with improbable or strange combinations of technologies I would have suggested things such as 3D animations and Twitter or CAD and podcasts. I have since learned that if something looks improbable or strange to me it doesn't mean it's impossible or even wrong. Tackling those apparently impossible combinations requires both vision and determination, qualities which characterize Lou Gallo, the SolidWorks Power User who started a regular podcast about SolidWorks.
Not only is Lou Gallo proving the combination of a CAD podcast possible, he is also showing how this combination can be successful. While listening to his podcast in the morning drive to work, it becomes obvious that podcasting about SolidWorks makes perfect sense, but who could have seen this opportunity? I honestly didn't. Here is my interview with Lou to understand how he does it.

Lou can you tell us a bit about yourself and your professional activities?

I began listening to podcasts, mostly on tech, in 2004...

Sure. I am a mechanical engineer from Wisconsin with a background in robotics and automation systems. My interest in CAE tools began in college. After graduation, I began working in the mechanical and semiconductor industry and am currently with Digital Dimensions, a SolidWorks reseller in Arizona, San Diego, Fresno and Sacramento. I have been in the CAD industry now since 2001 and enjoy visiting customers and helping solve problems within engineering and design. I began listening to podcasts, mostly on tech, in 2004 and realized that I wanted to provide tech content of my own back to the SolidWorks community. I started my own podcast in January of 2006. The podcast is now joined by a blog and a Twitter-like community called THE HEaRD. I have always been a bit of a technology junky so I tend to spend time discovering new technologies in web-based applications and CAD related tools.

While podcasting might seem to be an odd option for a graphic and visual context such as CAD, your success proves opposite. How did you get started, and how do you involve people?

[podcasting] can be challenging in selecting a topic that will not require a visual aid

This is a common question I am asked, but when I started the podcast, my goal was to provide SolidWorks and tech related content that users could take on the go. Since most of my podcast listening was done in the car on my commute to work, I figured this was a space that could be filled by news and tips on a CAD tool used not only by my customers, but any SolidWorks user worldwide. It can, however, be challenging in selecting a topic that will not require a visual aid like a blog or video. Another goal of mine is to bring awareness as well as useful tips, so if after listening you try or lookup how a feature or tool works, I have done what I set out to do. As far as involving the listenership, I try to get them to interact on THE HEaRD or Twitter, however I get a fair amount of interaction thru email and comments through the website.

Based on your experience, what are the main differences between a blog and a podcast from the end user point of view? What type of content fits best for each of the two channels?

It is all about the enclosure. A blog is really no different than a podcast as far as the "feed", except a podcast has an enclosure or something that the reader can then take with them. In my case, that is an MP3 which they can either listen to from the website, be consumed through an RSS reader, or more commonly through a podcatching client like iTunes. By publishing my content to my website, the user can choose to consume the content from the web, leave comments and read the show notes, just like a blog, or have it delivered automatically by subscribing. I started doing a blog as well since there were topics that required that platform to best communicate certain topics (pictures and/or video).

How do you interact with your listeners? What type of feedback are you getting from them?

I encourage my listeners after every show to send me feedback via email, comments, or the micro-blogs (Twitter or THE HEaRD). I get feedback from all of these outlets.

What did you learn moving from listener to author?

the first couple of shows took an hour to record a 5 - 10 minute show

Great question. A lot! Before my interest in podcasting, my audio recording experience could be summed up in three words, Windows Sound Recorder. I had been recording webcasts live and using video capture software but never mixed in music or tried to fade in/out transitions before. This took a lot of research to learn what equipment to use (mics and mixers) and what software was the best to use for recording. The other issue was the RSS creation. When I started there were very few people that podcasted and most were technical so building the feed was typically a manual process which I did in Notepad. This made it a lot of work but it was educational and helped me find a better workflow to get shows recorded and posted. The first couple of shows took an hour to record a 5 - 10 minute show, then an additional hour or so to get all the posting and feed creation done. Today a 20-30 minute show takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to record, write show notes and post!

Can you describe your audience, for instance - how large is it? Where are they located? What is their professional level?

the podcast has gotten over 100,000 downloads

The podcast has gotten over 100,000 downloads since I launched and the monthly downloads seem to be increasing as podcast awareness grows. I started this solely due to my love of the recording technology and my desire to share my SolidWorks and tech knowledge with the community. The size of my audience is really not important to me as long as I know I'm helping people.
The reach of the show is worldwide. A majority of the listeners are in the US & Canada but I have listeners across the globe in Europe, Asia, and Australia.

How do you select the content you provide to your subscribers?

Since 1-2 shows a month relate to tech news or new technologies, the industry will provide me content to cover. On the SolidWorks front, since so many of us use CAD tools a certain way every time, we tend to get into ruts. I try to choose new toolsets or useful tools that are typically missed by most users. I also spend time covering new toolsets as well as products released on the SolidWorks Labs site. I will occasionally get groups of Bloggers together to chat about tech topics and do a 15+ part series each year covering the What's New for new releases of SolidWorks. I have recently gotten into doing live coverage of events like SolidWorks World and COFES 2009. I am always interested in feedback or topics for future shows and will cover that when requests are sent in.

What type of integration do you have among Podcast, Twitter, and your blog?

The podcast is a weekly show which I have published every week since 1/1/06. It can be found in iTunes, but it is fed through Feedburner, so any mechanism that people have to download blog/podcast feeds will work. I also have links go out in my HEaRD account which echos to Twitter (@gol10dr). All podcasts are posted on my site along with their show notes at http://solidworksheard.com/podcast so listeners can leave feedback through the comment system. However they can also find me here at Novedge as well! Thanks Franco for the interview and the work you do at Novedge!

In my opinion CAD systems such as SolidWorks have been affected only marginally by the Internet and Internet technologies. What is your opinion and which web technologies and tools are more likely to have an impact on CAD systems from the end user point of view?

I am a huge fan of web applications and their success is typically enhanced by offering their users a local experience

I agree. In general most Desktop CAD systems are only marginally affected by Internet technologies but that is going to change as web-based applications become more ubiquitous. I am a huge fan of web applications and their success is typically enhanced by offering their users a local experience or Desktop integration. As design teams become more global, these web-based technologies are going to offer a bridge to unifying concurrent engineering efforts by allowing real time communication and data sync.
Tools are emerging now that allow in-CAD conversation like Vuuch Discussions but even tools like GoToMeeting are bringing remote teams closer and allowing real-time interaction that local design departments have at their dispose. Social technologies are also allowing engineers to get ideas and feedback right from the customer so this is an exciting time to be an engineer.

I would like to thank Lou for taking the time to answer my questions. If you have any questions for Lou or for Novedge, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

Pixologic ZBrush Discovers Rapid Prototyping

Pixologic users can now finally join the group of Rapid Prototyping enthusiasts and start creating real 3D objects out of their ZBrush models. This is an important and very welcome step. It will help push Rapid Prototyping, or 3D Printing as Pixologic likes to call it, into the mainstream by increasing the number of users and lowering prices.

ZBrush users can now finally start creating real objects out of their 3D models

ZBrush is an incredible 3D virtual sculpturing system used by all sorts of digital artists to create the most astonishing models. Now those fantasy creatures can leave the computer screen and move out into the desktop.

This new feature has been made possible by two ZBrush plug-ins released by Pixologic and available for download from Novedge. The plug-ins are:

3DPrint Exporter plug-in (download)

With 3DPrint Exporter you will be able to export your favorite ZTool in STL and VRML file format, opening you to the world of the 3D Printing. Now it's possible for you to print your model: (1) Sculpt your art with ZBrush; (2) Optimize if needed your model with the Decimation Master plugin; (3) Export it with 3D Print Exporter.

Decimation Master plug-in (download)

With Decimation Master you will be able to easily reduce the polygon count of your models in a very efficient way while keeping all their sculpted details. This solution is one of the fastest available and is able to optimize your high polycount models from ZBrush, allowing you to export them to your other 3D software packages.

Franco Folini

RandomControl (fryrender) Goes Realtime

RandomControl, the maker of fryrender and previously known as Feversoft, is joining other companies on the real-time rendering arena (Bunkspeed Hypershot, seac02 LinceoVR, etc.)
To prove the value of the technology they are working at, they are circulating this impressive video:

The video was recorded in real-time using RandomControl's engine RC5. The original scene was created in Autodesk 3ds Max and was exported and precomputed using fryrender RT.
The resulting data file (along with the camera animation created in 3ds Max) were played in RC5 using rc5player.exe in record mode.
The frames were output by rc5player in real-time (at a rate of over 20 frames per second). All effects precomputed by fryrender RT such as DOF, vignetting, Global Illumination and physical materials were interpreted by RC5 in real-time. The frames were assembled in a video editing software, and an audio track was added for greater effect.

Some of the RC5 features which can be seen in action in the video are:

• Full Global Illumination (as precomputed by fryrender RT)
• Depth Of Field (as configured in fryrender)
• Fullscreen Anti-Alias
• Interpreted fryrender physical materials
• Real-time tonemapping / fryrender-like quality (FP32 HDR)
• Camera vignetting
• Camera animation

Franco Folini

PS: If you are interested in knowing more about fryrender I would recommend to read the interview I did in March 2007 with Chema Guerra, the CEO of RandomControl.

Novedge in the World of Social Media

On March 2nd, Skittles shook the world by changing its homepage to a big social media playground; when navigating to skittles.com you found yourself in a stream of Twitter messages with the tag #skittles. For 24 hours this was a big hit, but there was no filter, and also abusive tweets from pranksters about the company and its products turned up at the homepage of Skittles. The following day, the homepage was redirected to the fanpage of Skittles on Facebook, with almost 600,000 fans. Via the menu option 'chatter' you could still enter the Twitter stream. Today (March 4th) the homepage of Skittles is redirected to the Wikipedia page about Skittles.

Many people expressed their opinion about this campaign; some called it a genius and innovative move (although risky), others called it an utter failure, 'the worst thing to ever happen to social media branding'. But the fact is that Skittles got huge media attention during these days, everybody talks, tweets, and blogs about it (including us).

Incorporating social media in companies is a hot topic nowadays. This doesn't mean that when you'll navigate to our website next week, you'll end up at Facebook or Twitter, but it is very interesting to see all the developments in this field! How far are companies going to attract people with the use of social media channels and to have them interact with each other and the company? What is the best channel to interact with your (potential) customers? There are so many options to choose from, just think of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, (corporate) blogs, communities. So you subscribe to (some of) these channels, and then what?

Novedge is exploring the mysterious but wonderful world of social media too by launching a big campaign.

Novedge is exploring the mysterious but wonderful world of social media too by launching a big campaign. Novedge has a page at Facebook and LinkedIn, our news source Pulse already has 141 (and counting!) followers at Twitter as @_Pulse_, and our community SpaceClaiming has 580 members. And of course, we have this blog :-). But besides that, Novedge is also starting a new community, called RhinoJungle (with its own Facebook page). This community is set up especially for the users and fans of Rhino and all Robert McNeel products. With facilitating these communities, Novedge wants to offer an extra service to our customers, to create a platform for sharing ideas, questions and 3d-work.

With this adventure Novedge aims for more direct communication, growth of members of our communities and a growth in followers on Twitter. We believe that the world of social media is boundless.

Mirjam Hart

For more information on this topic, take a look at this foldier sPression, an online collection of the Novedge social media activities.

Interview with Chris Williams, Vuuch Founder and CEO

Let's be honest: the CAD world is boring. I read CAD blogs and news every single day (using Novedge Pulse), and I rarely find something really exciting. In this market, technological improvements are very gradual and real breakthroughs happen only once in a decade. Also, the adoption of new technologies in the design and manufacturing process is usually very slow.
The first time I heared about Vuuch, I quickly realized that I was looking at one of the few truly new ideas in this field. It is always refreshing to see a novel approach to old problems. In this case we can trust the source of the new ideas: Chris Williams, the CEO and Founder of Vuuch, has already been tested by the CAD community and by the market. Let's hear from Chris exactly what Vuuch is about.

Chris, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m a mechanical engineer by education and early in my career I worked as a designer for a number of companies. During my years as a designer I worked on the board and in CAD, which ultimately led me to start a CADKEY VAR in the Boston area. After a few years I decided to go to work for the CAD OEM’s and hence worked for CADKEY and PTC in sales. After PTC I joined RAND TECHNOLOGIES where I built their East Coast operations and major account team. During my last two years at RAND I ran a process consulting group which sold to the largest Pro/ENGINEER customers in the USA. One of my main customers, United States Surgical, recruited me to run the core engineering and advanced research teams, consisting of 250 engineers developing medical devices.

along the way I’ve owned an espresso bar and done some real estate development

After spending time as a customer I moved back to PTC (living in London England) and then on to a series of startups. The first was Product DynamiX which developed a product development wiki and the most recent was Seemage, which I sold to Dassault, just over a year ago. Along the way I’ve owned an espresso bar and done some real estate development.

As CEO of Seemage (acquired by Dassault Systèmes) you have played a key role in one of the few successful start ups in CAD. Why is the CAD market so difficult for newcomers?

This is really a great question and I love the fact that you call it the CAD market! Partly because I consider myself a CAD guy, but also this in part defines an answer. CAD, like Seemage delivers clear productivity to a single person, the user. For me the most important thing is to deliver value to an end user without constraining them. Seemage success can be credited to delivering end user value through a fantastic product that was the vision of Eric Piccuezzu and James Dugalais. All I did was help the market see this value.

the most important thing is to deliver value to an end user without constraining them

Of course you need a great team and a great product, but this is not enough. You must provide the user clear value. This is where it becomes difficult and why so many startups fail. Design is hard enough and by its nature it is a freeform flexible process, so anything that constrains the users will have limited success. Many startups have elegant solutions that deliver value to a group or the company but not the user, resulting in slow or nonexistent user uptake and a lackluster business.

Vuuch, your new company, promises to bring social media technologies to the PLM world. How do you mix PLM tools (known among users for their rigidity and very structured approach to information management) with something as informal and intrinsically unstructured as the new social media tools?

It is either not fair or at least incomplete to say PLM is rigid and therefore imply nothing in the development process is rigid. PLM mirrors the rigid approach that was there before the technology. When I was working on the drafting board I had to release parts, update BOM’s, and define affectivities, all of which are very rigid. It is a fact that structured information management is part of product development. PLM automates this structured process. This doesn’t mean there are unstructured things going on in design teams.

Vuuch is about the unstructured. The design process is filled with unstructured activities

Vuuch is about the unstructured. The design process is filled with unstructured activities. This is not to say design teams are out of control, but it is to say that a big part of what they do cannot be stuck in a box with a nice neat workflow bow. For me this makes perfect sense because they are being asked to be creative.
For instance, a designer is constantly asking for bits of information from other team members. Email has become the dominate tool for this. The problem with this approach is their inbox has no understanding of what they are doing, so they are left to sift through messages and manage folders of messages and at the end they are the only one that can ever see this… regardless of who else might get value from these messages.
With the Vuuch your messages are filtered based on what you are working on. T oday we have a beta plug-in for Pro/ENGINEER and will release a SolidWorks plug-in at SWW 2009 and we will add additional plug-ins for things like Word and Excel. Beyond plug-ins your team can access discussions through our web portal at www.vuuch.me

So what is Vuuch and how will it affect the design process?

Let me start with the name. Vuuch is the webification of the English word vouch, which means to call or summon, truth, up hold by evidence or give personal assurance, all of which summarize the impact of Vuuch.
Everyone engaged with others in the pursuit of something, no matter if it is planning a meeting or designing the next cell phone, communicates with their team using micro messages. Micro messages are those emails, IM, or twitters you send to the team to get information you need to complete your deliverable. Like the mail you sent me the other day asking about this interview. In design these messages are about something very specific, like a bolt diameter.

Vuuch is the webification of the English word vouch, which means to call or summon, truth, up hold by evidence or give personal assurance

The problem with these messages is they grow out of control because they tend to bounce back and forth through multiple replies and therefore makes a mess of your inbox. These messages have both a short-term and long-term value. In the short-term they get you your answer and in the long-term they can tell someone how the design came to be, or why the bolt is a half inch.
People spend countless hours searching for information. Message management accounts for a large portion of this. Vuuch ties together your deliverables, discussions and people in a clean a simple web delivered solution allowing the team to create and access discussions in the context of creating their deliverables. The bottom line value is a savings in time by removing the need to search for stuff you know you have and/or allowing people to better understand the origin of design decisions.
Take a look at the quick demonstration at www.vuuch.com, come by our booth at SolidWorks World 2009 or signup for a Free Trial.

You are a Twitter user (@vuuch), as well as a blogger. How much do your own personal experiences with those tools and technologies influence your company vision?

I must admit I don’t really get Twitter. I use Twitter as an experiment and investigation of value. First I am evaluating the user interaction approach and second discrete value. Some of the best learning comes from having to force myself to turn these tools on.

A designer of a part wants to see what effects what they are doing, not everything that is happening across their team

If you looked at the original design notes for Vuuch you would discover how we borrow from technologies like email, blog and IM. Email provides a great way to attach information, blogs provide organized persistence and IM is about real-time and a single message stream, all aspect of Vuuch.
Current social media applications are not effective for product development as they do not understand context. A tool like Twitter or Yammer has no understanding of what a development team is trying the deliver. If I Twirl, Twitter, Yammer, IM and RSS I end up with noise. A designer of a part wants to see what effects what they are doing, not everything that is happening across their team.

The major obstacles to an effective distribution of information and data within a company are often more political than technical. How does Vuuch approach these challenges?

If political barriers exist, they are more about process. Vuuch empowers and organizes the informal design discussions across the product lifecycle. Vuuch is not focused on predefined process and therefore not constrained by political barriers.

One of the major drawbacks of socially enabled content is that the amount of feedback and contributions can easily become overwhelming. How does Vuuch cope with this problem?

This is the exact problem we solve. Feedback is not a side effect of socially enabled content. In design discussions, feedback has to do with the topic being discussed and resolving multiple points-of-view. Most people would agree that an email message is not socially enabled content, but take a look at anyone of your own email discussions. The back and forth between the participants creates an overwhelming situation.

With Vuuch your discussions are organized through the topics or the items they are associated with

With Vuuch your discussions are organized through the topics or the items they are associated with. For example if you open a CAD file or an Excel file, Vuuch will present only the discussions about that file. Or you can ask Vuuch to display only your CAD or Solidworks discussions, or your discussions about a single part design, which might be represented by multiple files. Vuuch understands the relationships between deliverables, people and discussions. Following on with the example above, Vuuch can generate a web page for each part of your product and make this page available to your team (future release – current implementation filters based on associated files). You can think of this page as a clearing house for all discussions about that part. This page allows team members who don’t use applications to engage in the discussions about a specific design, for example a project manager or procurement person might use this page to track what is going on with a design.
The net result is Vuuch organizes your design discussions and allowing you to interact with the information that is important to you when and where it is important, meaning in the context of what you are doing.

Does having a complete history of all the conversation that occurred during the product development process come with any negative implications (e.g. additional liability for the company)?

The issue is how to manage the history of discussions. Look at your email today, a deleted email is really not deleted. A good friend of mine is an electronic forensic specialist and much of her work is about tracking not only emails, but other documents and there version history. She can find what you are convinced is deleted. With Vuuch a company will have these discussions in a single place and therefore be able to better manage their exposure.

I would like to thank Chris for taking the time to answer my questions. If you have any questions for Chris or for Novedge, please leave a comment below and we will be glad to answer.

Franco Folini

For more information on this topic, take a look at this foldier sPression, an online collection of the most interesting videos and articles about Vuuch.

Novedge Pulse Pushes the Limits of Social Media for CAD

Blogs are an important source of information. We all know this. Most of us started bookmarking one CAD blog and going back every day to read the new posts. It was a nice way to stay updated while drinking a morning coffee. Soon, we found our attention and time split among a set of cross-referenced blogs. Gradually we realized that going through all this interesting stuff would take up a good slice of our morning, more than we could afford. This was the moment when we switched to an RSS reader. In the beginning, the RSS reader worked perfectly. It reduced the time we dedicated to blogs and news with minimal compromises. But before we knew it, the amount of blogs and news exceeded the time budgeted. At this point the more adventurous of us began experimenting with Digg and Delicios, and found, unfortunately, that they didn't work. Digg and Delicios are general tools that can't be customized to focus on our specific areas of interest. At this point I realized I could create something new, something that would take the best of available technologies and rescue CAD users and professionals, giving back the pleasure of the morning coffee-CAD news ritual.

take the best of available technologies giving back the pleasure of the morning coffee-CAD news ritual

Today Novedge Pulse processes the feed of about 350 different sources, matching each post and news with a database of over 550 authors. Each author is clearly recognizable by his picture, and fully traceable with a link to his LinkedIn profile and his Twitter page. Posts and news are grouped together on a daily base. Readers vote on each item with a click of the mouse -- either promoting it with a heart beat or demoting it with a heart burn. The collective preferences of Novedge readers dynamically creates a list of the most interesting and relevant posts as they appear on the Internet.

Novedge Pulse processes about 350 different sources, matching each post and news with a db of over 550 authors

I receive feedback from Pulse users almost every day. My goal is to improve usability, adding a few select features while keeping Pulse as simple as possible. I recently released a new version of Novedge Pulse with some important improvements and tuning. Now I have additional reasons to believe that Novedge Pulse is the most advanced source of information in the CAD and 3D graphics online world. Here are the reasons for my statement:

• Novedge Pulse collects information from about 350 sources and matches each news item with a database of over 550 authors.
• All news and blog posts are gathered and published on Pulse in real-time.
• Readers can easily vote on every single item with just a click. This simple rating system lets the best posts and most interesting news of the day quickly emerge at the top of the page, while pushing the less important items towards the bottom.
• Novedge Pulse contextualizes each news and blog post. Based on the type of information and availability, each item shows a link to the author profile on LinkedIn, the author page on Twitter, the source RSS feed, and for companies, a link to the corresponding Yahoo! Finance pages. This is valuable for readers who want to be able to quickly verify employers, affiliations, and resumes of every blogger.
• Novedge Pulse can be browsed by date and by author, selecting different levels of detail. The page will remember your preferences the next time you come back, without requiring a login.
• Each news or blog post can be easily identified and linked by a permalink. Text and video comments are also enabled on every item page as way to complement the comments on the original blog page.
• All news and blog posts on Novedge Pulse can be easily republished thanks to a public RSS feed. Publishers don't have to worry about annoying ads. Pulse is free and the RSS feed is ads free.

The number of visitors to Novedge Pulse is constantly growing, pushing Novedge to improve the service and allocate more resources to guarantee a better and more reliable service. We are committed to support and extend Novedge Pulse. Make Novedge Pulse your first website in the morning!

Franco Folini