The SolidWorks Blog

Five Questions Friday with Eric Golden of Equipois Inc

2010-03-12T10:00:00-05:00

Name: Eric Golden

Title: President & CEO

Company: Equipois Inc. (www.equipoisinc.com)

Hometown: Washington, D.C.

1) Why did you choose to do the work you do?

I find the idea of building something enduring very compelling. At Equipois, we are building a venture, helping to build a new category of technology (which we call “dynamic assist devices”), and physically building zeroG arms at our facility. We also have a mission that everyone can believe in and feel good about – making workers both more productive and safer. I also personally love giving people jobs. Work is a huge part of our lives, and if I can give you a great job, I feel like I’ve made a tangible impact.

2) What is your proudest career moment?

I feel that my career thus far has been a process – a series of small victories (and setbacks) along a path. In essence, I think the best is yet to come.

3) What goal do you have that inspires you most?

My most important work-related goal is making Equipois a major success for its customers, employees and investors. As the founder and CEO, this goal remains the last thing I think about when I go to sleep and the first thing I focus on when I wake up. As it does for most CEO’s of young companies, it crosses the line to obsession.

4) How has SolidWorks made a difference in your life?

One of Equipois’s core company values is innovation, and SolidWorks is the key tool driving our innovation. It is the underpinning of our product design, an important component of our workflow and applications engineering, and even contributes to our marketing effort. Our engineers revel in discovering the newest capabilities of each release and putting them to use, with bragging rights for the first and most creative.

5) What do you do for fun, and what’s your favorite food?

While I work a lot, I make a point of spending one-on-one time with each of my three children every week. With the older ones, I take them each on an annual father-son/father-daughter trip, and have been able to introduce them to the activities I love, including skiing and scuba (in their case, snorkeling). These are some of the best moments of my life.

When I was a New Yorker my favorite food was steak from Peter Luger’s. I must sheepishly admit that, now that I have been in Los Angeles for almost ten years, my favorite food has “evolved” to sushi.

Thanks to Eric for taking the time to talk. If you’d like to be featured, or nominate someone else, leave a comment with your suggestions.

SolidWorks World 2010 Presentations Available Now

2010-03-10T10:50:20-05:00

Good news. Our SolidWorks World 2010 proceedings website went live last week. You can go there to check out pictures and videos from the show, but even better, all of the breakout presentations are available.

If you attended the show, you have access to all of the PowerPoint files from every presentation, as well as all of the videos that were recorded for the breakouts. You can start looking at those right now. It's one of the benefits you get with your conference fee.

If you didn't attend, we're not forgetting about you. You can check out all of the PowerPoints too, as well as a limited number of the presentation videos. However, we'll be making more videos available to you every week for the next few months, until we reach the point that you can see everything that attendees can. Everyone wins.

So have at 'em.

The SWUGN Technical Summits Are Back!

2010-03-08T10:48:50-05:00

I am one of those people who likes to try to pinpoint a moment in time that sets about a series of events that all lead to something. In this case it's how did I end up working at SolidWorks. Well it goes all the way back to October 2005, and a 2-day SolidWorks Technical Summit. It was the first time I met Richard Doyle, and it was the event that got the ball rolling for the Los Angeles SolidWorks User Group, and everything since then.

So beyond these summits being a good place to network and meet people, what are they?

Well they are like mini SolidWorks Worlds. Of course there are no massive stages, or 5,000 people general sessions, but there is plenty of networking, ton's of learning, and easily the best value for a days worth of top notch training. All for $40!

The day starts out with breakfast and an opening session hosted by Richard Doyle. Then its off to the first two morning sessions, each of them being an hour and fifteen minutes long. At each session time slot you will have your choice of two different topics to choose from. Richard does a good job of trying to spread out the more popular topics throughout the day so you won't have too tough of a choice.

Lunch quickly rolls around and by that time your guaranteed to already have a few pages of notes that will include quite a few tips that you can't wait to use in your daily work. Lunch is of course provided, and there are usually some prizes to be given away. I have heard he sometimes even gives out a free pass to the next SolidWorks World!

After lunch it's three more sessions where you have six topics to choose from. Don't be afraid to split the sessions, just be mindful of others when switching rooms!

And just like that the day ends. So what did you get out of it? Well considering the fact that these events usually have top notch presenters, I guarantee you will learn something. I have been to a few of these over the past two years, and have learned something every time. It is hands down the most productive way for a company to spend $40, and a days pay on training. About the only way you will not learn anything is if you fall asleep in a corner somewhere.

So when and where are they in 2010? Well here is a list:

San Jose, CA 3/23 (Registration is open)

Durham, NC 4/20 (Registration is open)

Chicago, IL 5/25

Omaha, NE 6/22

London, UK 7/20

Harrisburg, PA 8/24

Cincinnati, OH 9/21

Salt Lake City, UT 10/26

Tacoma, WA 11/16

I personally will be attending at least one of those, so I hope to see you at that one. Registration is already open for the first two events, so get signed up today, you don't want to miss out! More information can be found on the SWUGN Site.

Five Questions Friday with Rick Woodbury of Commuter Cars Corp.

2010-03-05T10:00:00-05:00

We’re starting a new weekly series here called “Five Question Friday” that will feature SolidWorks customers, resellers, employees, etc. all answering the same five questions. We're hoping to give our readers a little more insight into the people who make up the global SolidWorks community. If you’d like to be featured, or nominate someone else, leave a comment with your suggestions. We'll try to tackle as many as we can. So without further ado, here's our first victim. I mean honoree.

Name: Rick Woodbury

Title: President and CEO

Company: Commuter Cars (www.commutercars.com)

Hometown: Spokane, WA

1) Why did you choose to do the work you do?

In about 1982, I was stuck in traffic in Los Angeles and noticed only one person in each car around me. I contemplated how many millions are stuck in my situation every day and just seem numb to it -- a frustration without a solution. I thought about what would be the solution. It was obvious that length of a vehicle was much less important than width for increasing freeway lane capacity in cars per hour. Making a car half as wide, or able to fit in a half lane with adequate clearance would allow a doubling of lane capacity. Shortening a car would make a much smaller difference because most of the real estate used by a car is the space in front for braking reaction time and braking distance. Since roughly 90 percent of all cars have one person in them why would people choose a wide car for most of their trips, given the choice?

It occurred to me, of course, that a narrow car would tip over in cornering. Being a casual Porsche race driver at the time, I was quite aware of the relation of lateral G forces and center of mass. I've been an advocate of hydrogen fuel for cars since 1975 when I first read about it in a Brazilian magazine. I knew that although an internal-combustion-engine car would be hard to ballast enough for stability, a hydrogen car using iron-titanium hydride or a similar carrier for the hydrogen would make great ballast for stabilizing a narrow car.

I stewed on this for nearly 20 years wondering when a car company would figure this out. I remember speaking with Peter Schutz, and Helmut Bott, Porsche's president and chief engineer at the time about hydrogen. They said that it was a 20 year project, and that they could only afford to work on five-year projects at Porsche.

Almost exactly 20 year later I learned of the progress being made at Daimler-Benz, and their planned purchase of Ballard stock, a hydrogen fuel cell company. Many things came together at that time that catalyzed my son and me to build a prototype narrow car that ran on batteries just to prove our theory. We originally thought that batteries wouldn't have enough range and that our work was to prepare for hydrogen power. We learned quickly though that batteries were more than sufficient for the average commute. In fact, because the Tango was not trying to be everything to everybody, only appealing to 90 percent of all car trips, that inexpensive lead-acid batteries would be sufficient. As we built and developed our proof-of-concept vehicle, we found it to be more and more valid. Little by little we got capital to advance the design to the point where it is today.

2) What is your proudest career moment?

There are many happy moments. It's hard to put one in front of another. They were all stepping stones on a very long path, but most by far, lies ahead. That said, I’d have to say that completing a garage-built prototype with my son that beat some Corvettes on the autocross track despite being only 39 inches wide would rank right up there.

3) What goal do you have that inspires you most?

For the Tango to get a foothold so that the doubling of lane capacity can be achieved, it must have immediate advantages over a standard car. In California, Europe, and the Orient, lane-splitting is allowed for motorcycles, some of which are five inches wider than the Tango. The Tango is actually five inches narrower than a Honda Gold Wing motorcycle from mirror to mirror. I've noted situations where traffic jams were so bad coming off of the San Francisco Bay Bridge that the motorcycles were traveling in 20 seconds the distance that it took cars to travel 20 minutes -- a 60 to 1 advantage. The Tango could have done the same.

So in philanthropy, one can give the golden egg, or give the goose that lays the golden egg. I believe that funding Commuter Cars is like the latter. It is Commuter Cars' goal to put 150-million Tangos on the roads of the world within 30 years or hopefully as little as 15. I believe that when the average commuter sees the benefit, enjoys the freedom and excitement of driving a Tango, they will naturally gravitate toward a tipping point just as the Model-T and the PC did, and people will wonder how we ever got along without them.150 million Tangos, possibly $3 trillion in sales, may sound like a lot, but it's only about half of the single-occupant commuters in the world. In the U.S. alone, which is roughly one third of the world’s automotive market, it would have the following effect.

There would be a savings of $39 billion in the retail cost of gasoline to consumers which would be replaced by $5.2-billion dollars of electricity at retail based on $.10 a kilowatt-hour (kWh). It would also probably save most of the $17-billion in wasted gasoline due to traffic congestion. The electricity used may not all be clean, however, it could be, and naturally will be, as clean sources like solar and wind become more commonplace and economically feasible.

4) How has SolidWorks made a difference in your life?

SolidWorks allowed us to take our destiny into our own hands and hire an engineer or two to work on our project in-house. Before we were spending way too much, with too little control, with companies that used other CAD solutions. I was also able to learn SolidWorks to a small degree. It is very user friendly and affordable. We could never have afforded other solutions or the engineers that used them. It really made the redesign possible with our extremely limited budget.

5) What do you to for fun, and what’s your favorite food?

I rewrite the words to Taylor Swift songs so that I can play and sing them on my guitar. My favorite food is a Pizzeria Uno Pizza (Uno Bar and Grill). I’m nearly half way across the country for the nearest Uno’s.

Thanks to Rick for taking the time to talk with us. If you're interested in learning more about how Commuter Cars user SolidWorks, be sure to check out our case study.

March is SolidWorks Time-Savers Month

2010-03-04T15:14:27-05:00

One of the eager young go-getters around here decided to put together a series of videos all about little tips and things that can save you time in your day-to-day work. We'll be posting two a week to our YouTube channel, so if you want to see them as soon as they're live, go ahead and subscribe today. I'll also be posting them here for your viewing pleasure. Here are the first two.

Enjoy!

More on the new technology shown at SolidWorks World 2010

2010-02-23T13:40:15-05:00

Earlier this month at SolidWorks World 2010 in Anaheim, we gave attendees a glimpse into some powerful new solutions that we’re currently developing. Over the past few weeks we’ve been watching and reading all of the various blogs, forum posts, and news articles talking about what we showed. We thought we’d take this opportunity to address some of the questions that we’ve seen.

First, let’s talk about the Monday morning technology preview. This is work R&D is doing to see how we can solve fundamental problems our customers have using emerging technologies. Key technologies explored were 1) the use of cloud computing, and 2) using various types of devices to create designs and access your data. I’m just going to summarize a few points that were made by Jeff and the team here.

Device Choice. Whether you have a PC, a Mac, or a netbook, you should be able to work on your designs. If you have a mobile device like an iPhone or Android phone, you should also be able to access your design data. We demonstrated all of these, as well as the use of a Windows multi-touch device. The iMac and Windows 7 devices were running native implementations of the software, while the netbook was accessing a hosted version of the software through a thin client interface.
Easy Design Access. The cloud-based data storage solution we showed allows users to access designs from any computer. If you’re creating a design at work, you can go home and continue working on it from your home computer. Our customers also want to share their designs with customers, suppliers and colleagues. The problem with sharing is that you end up with a lot of copies of your data. The solution demonstrated allows users to easily share a single copy of the data--just like sending someone a link to a YouTube video.
Design Tools and Content. Helping users create great designs is at the core of what we do, but CAD systems are still too complex. Users want to capture design intent so they can make changes predictably. But sometimes users want to make changes that they didn’t anticipate at the outset. We demonstrated a unified approach that allows users to make these non-parametric changes while leaving other design intent and feature information intact. Currently, users also need to deal with too many low-level concepts in CAD tools that don’t really represent how things work in the real world. We’re making this content more lifelike. For example, springs will stretch and contract. And, to assemble things, you’ll be able to use concepts like glue, welds and hinges rather than atomic mates.
New levels of performance and productivity. We can’t deliver a great user experience without great performance. Think of the power that users can get with multiple cores on the desktop, and many virtual machines in the cloud. If you put that all together you get massive opportunity for performance improvements. It’s not only about making things faster, but using this power to do multiple things simultaneously to save time. We want the system to predict the user’s next step so things can be ready when needed. This includes real-time analysis data and photo-realistic renderings. Users also don’t like waiting for files to open. So we want the data to always be available in the application instantaneously, just like you access objects in an Xbox or PlayStation game. In fact, as those of you in Anaheim might have noticed in the demonstration, we’ve eliminated the concept of Open File.
Unmatched Reliability. CAD data is complex. Designs require large data sets with lots of references. When the system goes down due to software or hardware problems, designers can lose a lot of time. In the preview we showed, the data is ALWAYS SAFE. You never have to worry about saving, and if you have a failure, you can just restart the system and begin working again, exactly where you left off. You can even walk over to another computer and start working there, exactly where you left off. We’ll keep track of what you’ve done so you can get back to where you were--at any time, from any computer. It’s all up in the cloud at all times.

While what we showed is fully functional and working, we haven’t created a specific product offering. Similarly, there’s no defined schedule for deployment, other than to say SolidWorks users should be able to start taking advantage of some of these capabilities in the next 2-5 years. Regarding the Macintosh platform, we are currently looking at different ways to best serve Mac users, but again, there is no defined timeline, and there is also no plan to create a native Mac version of the existing SolidWorks product.

Something else worth noting is that once these new solutions become available, SolidWorks customers will be able to access and migrate to them as they feel comfortable. We don’t envision any kind of forced migration window in the foreseeable future, and we do envision continuing to support the locally-installed version of SolidWorks for our customers.

On Wednesday, we made a big announcement concerning a new solution we’re calling Product Data Sharing. Product Data Sharing will allow SolidWorks customers to share data with anyone, anywhere. There are no server or IT requirements, and setup is quick and easy. It will work within SolidWorks 2011, a web browser, or even on a mobile device. Versioning capabilities will let you keep track of your latest files, and you’ll also be able to visualize product structures – including part, assembly, and drawing relationships – without being in SolidWorks. Product Data Sharing also lets you build communities of your suppliers, customers, and other engineers to share information or work together in real time. Our current plan is to make Product Data Sharing available to SolidWorks customers by the end of 2010; we’ll be making more information available during the year.

We’re excited about the products we’ll be making available in the next few years, and while change is never easy, we think we’re doing the right things to prepare our customers for the challenges of the future. We’re also aware that there are a lot of questions out there regarding things like service providers, bandwidth, data security, licensing and third-party applications. One of the tradeoffs to showing preview solutions is that we’re still working on them, and much of what was shown remains a work in progress from multiple perspectives. And while we’re not at a point where we can address all questions individually right now, we understand the concerns. We’re listening to you, we’re doing our homework, and we’ll be making answers to these questions (and others) available in the coming months and years.