Dassault announces that the 2 top awards at the British Female Inventor and Innovator of the Year Forum have been won by an inventor who designed and developed her idea entirely on CATIA V5.
PreVu offers a 60 second soundbite through a speaker which is small enough to fit into a CD record case.
Invented by Morag Hutcheon, Design Director of Quadro Consulting Limited, who co-founded Origgio Ltd, the company behind the development of pre.vu. She came up with the idea of creating an easier way to discover new music after being frustrated at not being able to listen to or access music on visits to her local record store.
Quadro Consulting Limited based in Buckland, Hertfordshire (15 miles south of Cambridge) design customer-focused products for the hi-tech, telecoms, healthcare and consumer goods markets. It was established eight years ago and has supporting facilities in Hannover (Germany) and Hong Kong.
http://www.pre.vu/
It looks as though Autodesk have re-branded Alias products following the recent completion of the acquisition.
Trying http://www.alias.com now re-directs to Autodesk.
ImageStudio is now known as AutoDesk ImageStudio and they also offer Autodesk DirectConnect to enable data exchange between leading CAD products, such as SolidWorks, and ImageStudio.
There are various demos available which are worth a look. It is interesting to see the approaches used in this product.
Adobe Labs (formerly macromedia) provides the opportunity to examine emerging technologies and products from Adobe.
http://labs.macromedia.com/
One of these is the XMP toolkit that allows you to embed metadata (data about a file) into the file itself.
You can read more about XMP the Extensible Metadata Platform on the Adobe Website
http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/
@Last are producers of the SketchUp software, popular among the architectural community and thus used primarily by Architects, for modelling buildings and other architectural features.
Lots of news reports on this one … starting with the Official Google Blog
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-home-for-last-software.html.
…or read the offical announcement from @Last Software.
http://www.sketchup.com/index.php?id=1439
…or a collection of News stories
http://news.google.com/…q=google%20sketchup&sa=N&tab=wn
So what will Google Do with it?
Perhaps incorporate the product to allow modelling of buildings from images in Google Earth ? Time will tell …
There’s an interview with Frank Moss, who was recently named head of MITs Media Lab, in Business Week Online
http://www.businessweek.com/…design_top+stories.
The Media Lab has an annual budget of $30 million and has helped spawn many small innovative companies.
One of the interesting things he mentions is how innovation used to be driven by large corporate Labs but now is more likely to come from people working together in network based environments.
Disruptive technologies, rather than incremental change are more likely to generate successful entrepeneurs.
Another follow up – this time regarding 3D Search techniques.
Back in October I reported on a research project being undertaken by researchers at Purdue University about Engineering Shape Searching
A recent report in a news article from the National Science Foundation describes how this technology appears to have evolved into the 3D-Seek product, developed by Imaginestics (a Purdue Research Park based company).
http://www.nsf.gov/…105851
You can try out the freehand doodle search capabilities on-line at the 3D-Seek Portal
http://www.3d-seek.com .
The European Patent Office provides a useful source of information related to Patents.
http://www.european-patent-office.org/index.en.php
Among other things you can access Europes network of patent databases through the esp@cenet portal
http://www.espacenet.com/
and in particular use the worldwide search engine at esp@cenet for searching patent documents.
http://ep.espacenet.com/search97cgi/s97_cgi.exe?Action=FormGen&Template=ep/EN/home.hts
Imagine carrying your favorite software, preferences, profiles and data on a device no bigger than a pack of gum. With a U3 smart drive, you can plug into any Windows XP or 2000 PC and be productive wherever you are.
Check out the potential at
http://www.u3.com/
And check out the growing software availablity at
http://software.u3.com/
One item that sparked my interest is Pass2Go
http://software.u3.com/Product_Details.aspx?ProductId=74
- Memorizes and securely stores your online and offline passwords, so you will never forget them again.
- Automatically logs you into online accounts and completes online registration and checkout forms with one click.
This technology is really interesting … perhaps one day all software will be supplied on USB sticks …
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