A bit of business: Google to kill its Reader app
Quite a few of you read this blog via Google Reader and, since I'm beyond grateful that we talk every couple of days, you need to know that Google will be dropping support for Reader this summer. That means that if you do nothing, we'll stop talking and neither one of...
P3: Infrastructure wave of the future?
Imagine you're a town manager with aging infrastructure and a growing population: How do you build enough schools to meet projected demand? Boost the capacity of your water and wastewater treatment facilities? Revamp bridges that now carry twice as much traffic as...
Additive manufacturing roars into 2013
Additive manufacturing (aka 3D printing) is hot right now, making appearances in the US President's State of the Union speech, popular crime-fighting TV shows and all over social media. But is it just hype over something about-to-happen, or are companies actually...
Box.com tries cloud end-run for the AEC market
I use cloud storage for all of the usual reasons: always-on access makes it easy for me to work wherever I am. I can collect the files relevant to a project in one place, create a backup of important works-in-progress and collaborate with others without emailing large...
ANSYS revenue up 11% in Q4, looks at 10%-13% in 2013
ANSYS today reported results for Q4 and full-year 2012 that, while good, highlight the slow growth in Q4 of the company's non-Apache products. Since ANSYS has been such an aggressive aggregator of simulation technologies, it wouldn't surprise me to see more deals as...
Quickie: 3D Systems closes Geomagic acquisition
As expected, 3D Systems today announced that the Geomagic deal has closed. To recap, 3D Systems paid $55 million in cash to add Geomagic's 3D design, sculpting and inspection scan processing solutions to its portfolio. Geomagic is expected to be accretive to earnings...
Autodesk beats for Q4, disappoints in outlook & gets a new look
Lots of big news from Autodesk in the last 24 hours, including Q4 results, guidance for the new fiscal year, and a branding makeover. Q4 was better than expected on many fronts, but cautious guidance for 2013 caused the share price to drop 5-ish% this morning before...
DDD Q4 revenue up 45% on printer demand
3D Systems (DDD) today reported record revenue for both Q4 and fiscal 2012, as the hype around rapid prototyping continued to drive demand for its 3D printers and supplies. Q4 revenue was up 45% to $102 million; organic revenue was up 19%. For the year, revenue grew...
CAE competence management: are we ready?
There's an apocryphal story in CAE: A number of years ago, an auto company decided to see how consistently CAE was applied across its organization. Management asked a number of individual analysts to solve the same problem using the same code. Lo and behold, many...
Many signals positive as HEXA, NEMT and TRMB report
We've recently heard from three of the main publicly traded players in infrastructure software and this week we start hearing from some of their main customers. It seems, therefore, like a good time to review what's being said about the climate for software spend on...