Architecture + Business + Software…
Here are a couple of recent articles that are definitely worth a read if you are thinking about starting a business:
Evernote Shows Startups: ‘Free’ Can Pay – by concentrating on making customers happy you can use ‘free’ products to make money. Also, don’t get hung up on the percentage of your customers who pay, but the number of customers who pay.
From the latest issue of Idealog a great read by Rowan Simpson about the Mythical Startup – most overnight successes take time!
As a GRAPHISOFT Partner we hear about the next version well in advance but we are sworn to secrecy so I am stoked that today we can talk about the next version of ArchiCAD – Version 15. ArchiCAD 15 delivers some awesome features and I can’t wait to get it to my customers:
May 3, 2011
BUDAPEST, May 3, 2011 — GRAPHISOFT announced today ArchiCAD 15, the latest version of its premium design software for architects. ArchiCAD 15 enriches architectural forms available for designers to unleash their creative minds. The new version also expands the scope of the BIM workflow to include renovation & refurbishment projects.
“ArchiCAD 15 addresses architects in their native language with innovative approach to handling design spaces and forms,†said Miklos Szovenyi-Lux, Vice President of Product Management, GRAPHISOFT. “In addition to reinventing the 3D design space and providing architects with a wide array of new design tools, ArchiCAD 15 also addresses the increasing number of architects who earn their living from renovation and refurbishment projects,†he continued.
ENRICHED ARCHITECTURAL FORMS
The evolution of forms has always walked hand-in-hand with the evolution of structures. From the simplest barrel vaults to the most sophisticated rib vaults, the architect has always aspired to combine durability, utility and beauty (Vitruvius). These very principles can be seen in the finest examples of Modern architecture as well. ArchiCAD 15 expands the design capabilities of its BIM tools, including new Shell structures, to support the broadest spectrum of architectural shapes and forms found in both classical and modern architecture.
NEW DEFINITION OF DESIGN SPACE
The evolution of the design process has gone through at least as many revolutionary steps as the forms and structures themselves. During the course of the past few decades, architects have gradually left the “flat-lands†of 2D sketching for the exciting “high-lands†of designing in 3D virtual spaces. The increase in freedom brought about by the third dimension, however, adds a new degree of difficulty to orientation in space as well. ArchiCAD 15 introduces 3D guidelines and editing planes to revolutionize the 3D space definition, making the perspective view the natural, 3D environment for building design.
RENOVATION WORKFLOW SUPPORT
The advent of modern technology has significantly increased the life-cycle of a building. As a result, renovation and refurbishment projects are nearly equal to the volume of new buildings in most of the developed areas of the world. ArchiCAD 15 expands the design scope to renovation and refurbishment projects with native BIM design and documentation workflow support all the way through.
In addition to the impressive list of new and refined design tools and workflows, ArchiCAD 15 includes improvements to its IFC interface and OPEN collaboration workflow with engineers, full 64-bit support for the Mac OS, and improvements to its parametric object libraries as well.
ArchiCAD 15 will be released May 23, 2011. Shipment to customers will begin a few weeks after the official release. Following a tight release schedule, all 26 local versions are planned to reach the market by the end of Q3 2011.For more information about ArchiCAD 15 please visit: http://www.graphisoft.com/archicad/
For a live demonstration of ArchiCAD 15 please register for the coming “BIM and DESIGN†Webinar on June 7, 2011.
About GRAPHISOFT
GRAPHISOFT® ignited the BIM revolution with ArchiCAD®, the industry first BIM software for architects. GRAPHISOFT continues to lead the industry with innovative solutions such as the revolutionary GRAPHISOFT BIM Serverâ„¢, the world’s first real-time BIM collaboration environment, and the GRAPHISOFT EcoDesignerâ„¢, the world’s first fully integrated building energy modeling application. GRAPHISOFT’s innovative solutions have fundamentally changed the way architects around the world design and collaborate.
I am currently in Berlin for the annual GRAPHISOFT International Partners Conference but have managed to find a couple of days to explore Berlin – a city with an incredibly rich history that I could never do justice to explaining.
Instead I decided it is easiest to simply provide a selection of photos showing the old and the new architecture along with many of the ‘monuments’ that illustrate the history.
If you browsed through my photos from yesterday you may have seen an interesting ‘lotus shaped’ building.
The ArtScience Museum building was designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie and certainly has some interesting features, including:
While I didn’t have time to venture inside below are a few more photos:
I am currently in Singapore for a few days en-route to Berlin for the annual GRAPHISOFT International Partners Conference.
While I have passed through Singapore many times I have never had the chance to walk and explore the city and it’s history.
I am staying right beside the Singapore river so today talk a walk down stream.
Sir Thomas Raffles landed in Singapore in 1819 and signed a treaty on behalf of the British East India Company to develop Singapore as a British trading post and as inscribed on the plaque below his statue this was to change Singapore forever.
The contrast of the old fishing village and the modern metropolis is clearly evident today:
Further downstream I arrived at Marina Bay home to the Marina Bay Sands Casino ands it’s 150m long roof top infinity pool:
The double helix bridge:
And the Art and Science Museum:
Along the way I discovered many architectural gems from today and yesteryear:
“It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow”
On Thursday afternoon I left Webstock to head up to the beautiful Hawkes Bay and enjoy two evenings and one day of mixing it with some of the people behind some of New Zealand’s fastest growing businesses.
2011 is the second year Rod Drury from Xero has held his Accelerate conference at the Black Barn Vineyard.
Thursday night started with a social gathering for those who had arrived in Havelock North already. It was great to catch up with a number of old faces and meet many new ones as well.
Friday the conference proper started and, after a brief introduction by Rod, Sam Morgan kicked off the morning session talking about the importance of the business model. This high level over view was then looked at in detail in conjunction with a series of presentations from the likes of Sonar6, Jucy, Sidhe, Aptimize, Snapper and VoucherMob.
The presentations were awesome and many people shared some amazing insights and numbers and Sam and Rod were able to pull out both the good and bad points of the various business models – some of the presenters certainly have a few tough but exciting calls to make in the near term!
Lunch at a vineyard is never a quick experience and Accelerate was no exception. The setting was great and the networking over a great lunch was very enjoyable.
During the morning various topics came up that were to form the basis for the afternoon sessions where discussions and examples were discussed from off-shore development to staff incentives.
A really interesting example from the afternoon was from Sonar6 and talked about how they have shifted their sales focus from the small end of the funnel (converting leads to customers) to the big end (converting suspects to prospects.) The examples and methodologies discussed were incredible and show the power of experimenting, informing and then a small bit of selling. Interestingly since shifting their focus, Sonar6 has made more sales with less sales people!
Following the afternoon session we had another enjoyable evening of networking which included more food and a concert Minuit in the Black Barn Cellar.
Conferences such as Accelerate are extremely positive. Due to a high level of trust amongst participants highly confidential information is shared freely in an open and stimulating environment where everyone benefits.
It is hard not to leave a conference like Accelerate feeling pumped up and the credit must go to Rod for not only organising a great event but also in the people he attracted. Many of New Zealand’s business angels attended along with a couple of VC’s from Silicon Valley.
You can read more about Accelerate from Rod or from Mark Robotham who has a more in depth overview of the day which has saved me significant typing time!
This post isn’t actually about day 1 it is about the first half of day 1 as I have since left the conference to catch a flight to Napier for http://0to60.com/#mce_temp_url# – more on that in the next few days.
So anyway, after 3 days of workshops today the conference proper started and the twitter hash tag (#webstock) started getting hammered!
Following a brief introduction by one of the organisers – a team that requires a huge vote of thanks – we kicked off with Frank Chimero (@fchimero)
Frank talked about Digital Campfires and more particularly story telling.
Story telling and humanizing the web are extremely important concepts and have formed a strong part of the strategic branding work carried out by Cadimage with Brian Richards over hte last couple of years.
Frank used the simple concept of cold and warm to help indicate the power of great story telling. Saying your ‘xxxx’ (insert: wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend etc) is 72.8% water is not particularly warm – though factually correct!
Another extremely powerful example was an advertising exec from New York who for weeks walked past a blind man on to work each day who held a sign that simply said “Blind” After a few weeks the advertising guy asked the blind guy if he could adjust his sign. The sign was updated to read “It is spring and I am blind” Not surprisingly at the end of the day the Blind man’s cup was full of spare change.
Other comments Frank made that really indicate the power of and reason behind story telling included:
Stories connect us
We get together to get better
Webstock is a campfire
We tell stories to understand and to be understood
Following Frank was Michael Koziarski (@nzkoz) who decided against pushing Ruby on Rails but instead concentrated on how to be successful and the concept of Skunk Works and outlined some pointers for managers and developers/designers. The interesting advice for developers/designers was essentially “Quit your Job”
The morning was wrapped up hearing from Facebooks’ Â David Recordon who talked about HTML5 at Facebook, and then Mark Pilgram’s HTML5 keynote.
Over the morning was great and the buzz at the breaks was incredible.
As outlined in yesterdays post today’s workshop was “In-depth with HTML5: getting started with 4 key technologies with Mark Pilgrim”
I have never intended this blog to get overly technical so beyond telling you that we covered off four key HTML5 technologies – Video, Canvas, Local Storage and Offline – I thought it was best to share a series of useful links to various HTML5 resources.
- Firstly Mark Pilgram’s online book is a great starting point!
- Modernizr is a useful js library that makes it simple to check browser compatibility regarding new web features
- For those wanting to produce various video formats Miro Video Converter is extremely simple convertor with almost no settings!
- Videojs is another useful js library to deal with HTML5 video
- html5bolierplate.com and Initializr get your  started fast with HTML5
- Blowup HTML 5 is a site that shows the power of crossing <video> with <canvas>
- 20 Things I learned is a google 20% project that show cases much of HTML5 capabilities
Today the Webstock 2011 Workshops kicked off. My day was all about “How To Make Information Beautiful with David McCandless“
Based in London, David has developed a number of infographics and took us through the steps he follows to take a concept/problem/question through to a completed infographic.
Infographics, data visualisations and information is design is a rising trend and the depth of information contained in the infographics is staggering and much of this information is generally not visible – which is the beauty and purpose of the graphics David creates.
As an example, David once decided to try to grasp the concept of ‘billions’ – David struggled with the media dealing in billions like they were common to everyone when in fact “they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context” so David set about comparing various billion dollar values to provide a context for understanding.
The creation process involves four steps:
An important key is to remember that “Relationships are Beautiful” and related information/data can provide a great basis for a infographic.
Once complete an infographic should be:
The ability to display complex information and relationships in an engaging and easy to understand format in my opinion is a true talent – though that said I plan to give it a go so keep an eye out over the next few weeks.
In the meantime tomorrow’s workshop gets me into HTML5 so a bit of a change of pace I am sure but no doubt just as interesting as today.
This time last year I was about to embark on an MBA. While I enjoyed the course initially very quickly it was showing signs of not delivering to my expectations so I made a tough decision to withdrawal.
One thing I highlighted when I withdrew was that I have always read extensively and while I needed to read a huge amount during my studies what I was reading was being dictated to me – while not essentially bad I didn’t have time to read what I really wanted to.
Anyway to cut a long story short, while I have occasionally posted about the books I have read I haven’t posted about them all so I thought I’d list my recent reading – excluding a dozen or so novels!
I don’t necessarily recommend you read all the books below but I have certainly found all of them quite interesting, even some that weren’t quite what I expected (Global Citizens for example)
Every Bastard Says No – The 42 Below Story
– Justine Troy & Geoff Ross
Trade Me – The Inside Story
– Micheal O’Donnell
What the Dog Saw
– Malcolm Gladwell
A simpler Time – A memoir of love, laughter, loss and billycarts
– Peter Fitzsimons
The Brand Gap
– Marty Neumeier
Zag
– Marty Neumeier
Fletchers – A Centennial History of Fletcher Building
– Paul Goldsmith
The Design of Business – Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage
– Roger Martin
Making Ideas Happen – Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality
– Scott Belsky
Getting Real
– Jason Fried, Heinemeier David Hansson, & Matthew Linderman
Rework
– Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
The Fry Chronicles – An autobiography
– Stephen Fry
Global Citizens – Our vision of the World is Outdated
– Mark Gerzon
Think Twice – Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
– Michael J. Mauboussin
Wired for Thought – How the Brain is Shaping the Future of the Internet
– Jeffery M. Stibel
Think Twice also reinforced my own thinking with regards specifically to business books. You can’t simply read a book and follow the steps outlined to become successful. Successful people take what they read/learn and apply it with their own thoughts and ideas. I enjoy reading what has wokred (and not worked) for various people and companies but I don’t attempt to apply these ideas verbatim.