Morning coffee: investor news, China & bees
Happy Monday! Last week was a big one, with all of the regular news plus International Pi Day and the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for what we know today as the Internet. Sir Berners-Lee used the occasion to call for an Internet users' "Magna Carta...
ESI ends 2013 on an up, with revenue +7% in Q4
ESI Group yesterday announced results for the quarter and year ended January 31, 2014. Total revenue for the quarter was €45.5 million, up 7% as reported and up 13% in constant currencies (cc). For the year, total revenue was €109 million, flat year/year as reported...
Happy Pi Day!
Today is March 14, which in the US is written as 3/14 and has morphed from a day to celebrate the birth of Albert Einstein and the Greek letter π into a day to eat ... pie. The US Department of Education has some nifty ways to celebrate, including writing a Pi-ku. A...
Hexagon expands into vehicle safety
Last month, drone multicopters. This week, vehicle safety. Hexagon continues to push the envelope on our definition of precision measurement technology, taking it in unexpected directions -- like collision avoidance in mines. SAFEmine started six years ago,...
Rethinking simulation — should you?
Not long ago, I was at a user conference and started chatting with the person sitting next to me. Interesting guy, works for a company that makes plastic doohickeys. We're talking about his design challenges, and how he wants to use CAD/CAM technology to make better...
Morning coffee: deals, grants and the budget
Happy Monday! Did you remember to change your clock on Sunday? If you're in the US, you lost an hour of sleep this weekend. If you're not, please understand that your US colleagues are sleep-deprived and feeling like we're all an hour behind. We'll get over it. Coffee...
ANSYS hits Q4 targets, but plans to do better
ANSYS keeps rolling along, relying on a mix of products and end-industries to insulate it somewhat from broader macroeconomic winds. The company reported Q4 revenue of $236 million, up 7% from a year ago, with software revenue up 4% to $148 million and maintenance and...
Autodesk’s Q4: license transition, AEC strength
Let's do a little math, shall we? If we buy software at Staples for $5,000, Staples gets $5,000 and the creator of the software gets maybe $3,000 of that. Assuming we don't buy any more, in 5 years, the vendor will have gotten just $3,000 from us. If we buy that same...
Morning coffee: earnings & manufacturing at the White House
Happy Monday! We hope you had an excellent weekend and that your favorite movie won big at the Oscars. Pour a cup and let’s do a quick recap of last week as we warm up to a new one. It’s the Economy … A strong "meh" isn't really the news we want, but that's what we're...
US shipbuilding: a study in contrasts
Did you know that US shipyards built 1260 ships in 2012? And that 99% of the units were commercial while 60% of the revenue seen by the builders was from the military? Me neither -- I had suspected but had no idea it was this imbalanced. I also didn't know that the US...