Live from AEC Systems 2000 in Washington DC

Special @EC Edition

by Ralph Grabowski 

(Reprinted from upFront.eZine, Issue #204, June 20, 2000, www.upfrontezine.com by permission of the author/publisher)

A/E/C Systems 2000 Stats

The June show hosted 16,236 attendees and 245 vendor booths, while 2,700 attended the conference program. A/E/C Systems 2001 will be in McCormick Place - Lakeside Center, Chicago IL USA, June 18-21, 2001.

AEC Systems Show Report, Part 3:
Wednesday, June 7

Up at 6:00 a.m. to get ready for the e-idc.com breakfast press conference. With too many invites to meet with too many dot.coms, the smart marketing people are throwing in a free meal to attract the media. Today, I've got five receptions lined up.

I miscalculate the walking time, and arrive in the Regency Hyatt hotel's third sub-terrarium floor a half-hour early. Even so, the room is filling, but the e-idc.com event starts late. A flashy abstract video tries to link the launch of the space shuttle with the launch of e-idc.com (idc is short for "international design and construction"). The official launch date is this Friday, 23 June, although the http://e-idc.com Web site is already operating.

How does e-idc.com plan to differentiate itself from other dot.coms? By being a "global international e-commerce site." Founder Joseph Boggs declares, "We want to be an international 365/24/7 provider that allows anyone anywhere in the world to order any material in six clicks." A big plan, and a plan questioned by the media enjoying its free breakfast: How well can an American start-up place itself in 175 countries? It doesn't help matters when one e-idc speaker refers to "the continent of the United States."

E-idc.com plans to make money from the "trillions of dollars" worth of transactions that place in the design and construction industry. They plan to take 3% from manufacturers, and charge a US$12.95/month subscription fee. E-idc.com could face stiff competition from identical sites offering lower transaction fees and no subscription cost.

Mr Boggs emphasizes that the user interface needs to be as intuitive as email and fax. I can agree with that; unfortunately, I find the design of their Web site on the confusing side. I do perk up when he speaks of their interface to a wireless Palm designed to order items direct from construction sites. Later, at the e-idc booth, Wayne Ciccolo, senior manager of Web production, shows me how the Palm interface is supposed to work -- once the Web site is up and running.

It's 8:40 am. Although Creamer Dickson Basford, e-idc's pr firm, had promised to let us go in time for this morning's keynote address, the answers to questions keep on. As I and other media types slip out, we get handed the e-idc press kit and a cool metal-encased notepad.
We race across the street to the Convention Center and into Room 40, but we're not late. The multimedia equipment is acting up. David Wiesburg finally gets things going, hosting a panel of three ceo's. Their points are:

Graphisoft: The AEC industry is moving to integrated IT (information technology) for better control of information by more people. For example, online product catalogs are better than print catalogs because of broader product selection; structured searches; and qualified lead generation. Graphisoft is offering their own GDL format for the future of e-catalogs, because it is parametric; 150x smaller than an equivalent DWG file; and 50,000 products already available in GDL.

Primavera: The Internet is forcing integration across applications. Average useful life of a facility is about 30 years. Primvera is launching Primecontract.com.

Bentley: Predicts that this year some portion of every construction project will be procured electronically. He had a warning, though: some businesses see the Internet as tv. Take time to learn the new technology; find opportunity to place at least one project on an extranet site; and start to think of the implication of every aspect of your business (including human interaction) handled by a computer.

A Bentley staffer sitting next to me whispers that the aecXML "barcode" logo contains a hidden message in its two sets of numbers. 09051984 is the date Bentley Systems was founded; 08121999 is the date that aecXML was announced.

Keynote over, it's time for me to meet vendors at their booths on the show floor. Here are the notes I took on my Palm:

Punch WebGroups: Web group software that mixes project hosting with collaborative document management. Previous versions of documents are stored on their server to save space on local computers. You get two free Web groups with 10MB storage space; pay US$10/month for 100MB storage. Can be customized for corporations, and installed on your site.

I ask vp of marketing John Williams why their logo is a kangaroo. Their name used to be Kangaroo, but another company complained. They switched the name to Punch (what kangaroos do) and kept the logo to annoy the complainer. Their baseball cap is so cool that I wear it the rest of the day -- and I don't like to wear a hat.

Remote Engineering's PocketCAD: A simple CAD program written for the Microsoft PocketPC operating system (aka Windows CE v3). They licensed AutoCAD OEM to write a translator that uses Microsoft ActiveSync to allow drag'n drop of DWG files, which are converted to PocketCAD's own format. The software has 30 draw, edit, and view functions, plus full object snap. You can enter data manually or by pointing; runs on any Windows CD-based device, except some of the older monochrome versions. Demo available at http://www.pocketcad.com Web site. Price is US$189; includes PocketDWG file viewer.

ArcSecond's Vulcan: sharing the booth with PocketCAD was the Vulcan, an instrument that looks like a mean spike. It transmits x,y,z data five times a second, allowing you to peform 3D "scans" of construction sites. Two transmitters are set up to determine the baseline for an area sized 150'x150'x12'h to an accuracy of 1/4". The PocketPC can be attached to the Vulcan to collect and display the data.

ArrisCAD eZ: Perhaps the briefest product name, eZ is a TCP/IP-based conferencing program that allows team members to interact over the Internet. Unlike other conferencing software, this one lets all participants interact simultaneously. US$199.

12:00 noon, and time for lunch at the Construction.com press conference. Ceo Karim Khoury is unsually confident. This comes from growing up in a construction family, then becoming a chartered accountant. His site calls itself an "e-procurement system," and features an invitation-to-bid system, as well as lines of credit up to $100 million, e-payment, and centralized credit approval. Claims to have 1,200 buyers and 90,000 sellers today -- some 10 times more than the nearest competitor. They will charge between 0.5% and 2% for each transaction.
In the middle of his presentation, Mr Khoury surprises the lunch-munching media by declaring that aecXML is developing too slowly to ever succeed. Instead, he is going with Netfish to provide XML translators.

After lunch, I take in the National CAD Standards meeting for a half-hour. This organization may well win the prize for the longest Web address: http://www.nationalCADstandard.org . Back in 1997, this organization managed to combine the AIA CAD Layer Guidelines, the CSI Uniform Drawing System, and the Tri-service CAD Standards into a single document. The standard is a system for classifying drawing-centric building design data, and for setting plotting standards. Version 2 is due to become available this August; price is US$250.
The NCS does not attempt to solve drawing exchange problems; that's being left to the IAI and aecXML. Slipping out of that meeting, I'm off to the B2B E-commerce panel that I reported on last issue.

At 3:30pm, I take off for the next reception, a beer bash in Graphisoft's booth celebrating Flag Day. Don't ask why. I don't drink alcohol, so I make do with ice-cold glasses of Sprite, and help myself to chicken wings. I sit for awhile with Graphisoft chairman Gabor Bojar. He tells me of his desire to find an organization to takeover his GDL format for describing intelligent CAD objects. He recommends I visit the http://www.graphisoft.com/gdl/ and http://www.o2c.de Web sites, then invites me to visit him in Budapest.

At 5:00 p.m. is the CAD Society reception. More food. The organization is working on a "bill of rights" for CAD users called the Interoperability Commitment Project. Specifically, they are looking at a way to ensure that users have full rights to the data they create with CAD software. One example is the ability to use any software necessary to access CAD file formats. That could include reverse engineering the format, or using out-of-license CAD software. To this end, the CAD Society is looking to expand its membership from 400 to 40,000 in the next year.

At 6:30, busses take invited guests to the Bentley Systems reception at the National Press Club. This is my fifth reception of the day, and I've stopped eating. (The evening is described in last week's upFront.eZine #205

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