From the CAD Side

While I spent most of my day on things geospatial I still keep a foot in the CAD door. My first professional article was in a CAD magazine (CADence) and my first job was using CAD (AutoCAD 9).

Two articles of note:

Roopinder Tara of TenLinks offers up some advice to newly minted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at his CAD Insider Blog. He looks back to the old days when the Yahoo was king of the hill on the Web due to its human powered directory. TenLinks tweaked that model for just CAD and has been on the map ever since. TenLinks made a few key acquisitions (and some sales, notably of GIS Monitor) but stayed true to its focus. He suggests Bartz look to some basics as she steers Yahoo forward.

Someone unnamed at Constructech (and my e-mail has gone unanswered about the author) writes about “An Infrastructure for ‘Intraoperability’” basically suggesting Bentley’s solutions are (BIM, etc.) should be in place in companies to support Obama’s infrastructure efforts. “To prepare for such legislation, companies should make sure they have the correct processes in place to support the flood of predicted activity. One such process is BIM…To help manage the BIM process in 2009, Bentley Systems, http://www.bentleysystems.com, Exton, Pa., recently released a new piece of software for the infrastructure industry. The heavy/highway industry is gearing up for a possible infusion of federal funds early this year, and BIM might be just the process to help expand and enhance the infrastructure industry in 2009.” That leads me to ask: will software infrastructure be paid for by the government or just stuff done with shovels? This piece seems to suggest this infrastructure should be in place before the legislation passes.