The CAD Insider

Press: Getting Your Money's Worth

Let's say you are a beleaguered CAD CEO and are trying desperately to move your company ahead in these tough times. Marketing is a good place to start. Let us examine the prevailing marketing guidelines that seem to be emerging.

DO:

1. Spend your advertising budget on Google ads
2. Befriend an already popular blogger

DON'T:

    Develop and invest in a marketing campaign.

Let's look into this a bit further.

Google ads

Very cheap, and you only pay when someone clicks. So what if Google can't tell the difference between Computer Artery Disease and Computer, Computer Aided Dispatch and Computer Aided Design? You can get rid of your high price marketing VP and most of the marketing department. It takes little skill to create Google ads and manage the campaigns -- except you do have to get your message into 3 tiny little lines. You can get tons of empirical data... immediately.

Befriend a Blogger

A popular blogger is like gold. A blogger gets popular because he/she is probably a subject expert, writes intelligently and often. Best to fly them to headquarters -- economy class is fine.  You can pitch to them all day but leave plenty of time for fun stuff, take in the sights of you town -- make sure you go to a good restaurant and let's not forget the power of alcohol. Altogether, this creates a warm fuzzy feeling -- and it can be had for a couple of thousand dollars, tops. Any blogger worth his salt will document his newfound knowledge of the company and its products. After all, a blog must be fed.

You can do this with press, too, but with less success. You could get old and die waiting for an article.

Marketing Campaign

In contrast to above, a full fledged marketing campaign takes planning and execution, often requiring careful consideration at the highest level. They take time to run and worse of all, can run into tens of thousands of dollars. Results are not as easy to gauge.. in the short term.

Point Clouds - When Are Billions of Points Not Enough?

April 7, 2010 - WALTHAM, MA - I'm at Autodesk's AEC Technology Day and hearing about importing point clouds into CAD. What looks initially like a glowing red building is, upon closer examination, constructed of millions of points.

 

Jim Lynch, Autodesk VP of AEC, show a how point clouds are utilized in 2011 prouducts

 The scan was probably a result of an aerial LIDAR scan. It's literally a mess of points... millions, I'm sure. Seems like a lot, right? But compare that to our natural vision. As I look down from my flight home, I see a forest. If I were on the ground, I would see the tree, maybe the leaves. Could I pull out a microscope, I'd see the cells. Though I've gone through 6 or 7 orders of magnitude in scale, I have never lost continuity. I may have to go past nano scale, another 6 orders of magnitude before the image breaks up and I get lost among the molecules.

On the other hand, I only have to zoom in 10X -- just one order of magnitude -- before the point cloud model of the building deteriorates and what look like surfaces from far reveal themselves as simply points, leaving me lost in the cloud.

At the fast pace of technology, expect point clouds to be get denser and datasets to take gigabytes of space. Of course, our processing power, be it multi-core CPU or GPU, will also be keeping pace.

Today's hard drives are measured in terabytes. They should be ok -- for now.

 
Leonardo's sketch? Nope. Squint... it's a bridge. We're going to have to a lot better than this to even approximate nature.

Economy Still the Elephant in the Room

WALTHAM, MA, Apr 7, 2010 - Overheard at Autodesk AEC Tech Day: a major architecture firm has only enough contracts to last through June.

As the firm happens to be a poster child for Autodesk, one has to wonder how all the technology Autodesk is showing us will be received. The 2011 products no doubt have a wealth of enhancements, additions, gee whiz features -- too numerous to mention, as a matter of fact. The press is dutifully putting it to paper, computers, voice and video recorders, which at some point will emerge in publications, web sites, blogs, etc. In a ideal world -- or at least a up economy -- we'd be sure our readers would be slurping it up. After all,  we are seeing major releases of major products.

But we are far from an ideal world.

It is a world of no job or job insecurity. It is a world of contracts that once were on the horizon but have now disappeared from sight. The boss is getting fidgety and there sure are quite a few empty cubicles. We're avoiding our favorite restaurants and eating at home has gone from steaks to hamburger -- and might soon be rice and beans. Forget the European vacation, let's just chill at home this summer. And the kids don't need to go to Johns Hopkins, don't we have a pretty good junior college?

And into these lives of quiet desperation, do we dump thousands of words, pictures and videos of the CAD's latest bells and whistles?