NOVEDGE Blog

Louis Gary Lamit is a CAD professional and teacher with several years of experience behind him. He is the owner of Lamit and Associates and the author of the book Moving from 2D to 3D CAD for Engineering Design recently published by BookSurge. The transition from 2D to 3D has been an hot topic for […]

After yesterday's post about Ponoko, I received quite a bit of positive feedback by e-mail and on blog posts (for example on SolidSmack). In my opinion, one of the best ways to understand the power of the Ponoko approach to manufacturing is to go back to one of the minds that inspired it. This special […]

David ten Have is co-founder and CEO of Ponoko (blog), a company from New Zealand exploring a new approach to manufacturing. Dave’s goal is to provide a customized manufacturing process so easy that almost anybody can use it. Send Ponoko a 3D digital model and they will take care of transforming it into a physical […]

Chris Yessios is the President and CEO of auto.des.sys, Inc., and Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University. He holds a PhD in Computer Aided Design from Carnegie-Mellon University and his formal education includes a BArch and a Diploma in Law, both from the Aristotelian University in Greece. He taught and researched at The Ohio […]

you will not be able to resist the irony of this short video Everybody is talking about this PowerPoint presentation by Doug Zongker (blog), from the University of Washington. Doug, now a software engineer at Google, gave this talk at the humor session of the 2007 AAAS Conference in San Francisco. It’s based on this […]

Two days ago, on May 15, Oracle (ORCL) announced the acquisition of Agile (AGIL), a company known mostly for its PLM products, for $495 million. I don’t want to discuss the impact of Oracle in the PLM market here. If you’re interested you can find more detail at PC World, LinuxWorld, eWeek, Roy Wildeman, Ralph […]

Matt Lombard (blog, website) is the author of the recently published "SolidWorks 2007 Bible", a huge volume with over 1,000 pages. His book has quickly become recognized as the reference book of choice for the SolidWorks community (see Rob Rodriguez, Anna Wood, and Jeff Mirisola), of which Matt is a very active and well-known member.  […]

Paul Babb is the CEO of MAXON US, the company that makes the famous Cinema 4D modeling, rendering, and animation products. Based on my experience I can say that every company and product has its own personality. Whenever I have the opportunity to talk with a Cinema 4D user about their experience with the product, […]

Novedge is the largest online store for CAD, CAM, and 3D graphics software. We are offering a seasonal unpaid internship in our friendly environment this summer (flexible – about 2 or 3 months, between June and September). We are looking for a college student or recent graduate from Europe. The intern should come from a […]

Let’s start with the facts. A few days ago I was working at the data feed for a Google service called Google Base, previously known as Froogle. It’s an online service that allows sellers to upload a list of products with price and description and lets users search online for products to compare prices, shipping […]

Giuseppe Massoni is a jewelry designer and a Rhino 3D guru. He is a Tech Support Specialist as well as a Rhino Training Specialist for Robert McNeel & Associates (McNeel Europe), and is also in charge for the Italian Rhino Newsgroup. Giuseppe is a well-known and highly respected member of the Rhino community. He is […]

Parametric modeling, also known as feature based modeling, was brought to the CAD market in the middle of the 80's by PTC with Pro/Engineer. In a time when all 3D modeling was explicit (no parameters, no geometric relationships, no constraints), Pro/E was a revolutionary system. After a few attempts to defend the old non-parametric mode, […]

Greg Milliken is the CEO of Alibre. Greg is one of a kind — he has an impressive track record of success as an entrepreneur and executive in the CAD and 3D world. Greg can look at ideas with an open-minded curiosity, never taking anything for granted.  He is a very busy guy — it […]

Doug Halliday is the Business Development Manager specializing in manufacturing at Adobe. Doug's main focus is on Acrobat 3D and its applications for design and manufacturing. Recently he started a blog where he talks about Acrobat 3D and shares his experiences with the Acrobat users community. I first met Doug when, after posting my impressions […]

Victor Gonzalez is the CEO of Next Limit Technologies, a Spanish company known for the the famous Maxwell Render, a sophisticated rendering software based strictly on physical equations of light transport. After a long phase of beta testing, Maxwell Render enjoyed instant success upon its recent release. In order to know more about the company […]

As usual our monthly newsletter was sent out late at the end of the month. Every month I make plans to be ready by the middle of the month and every month something gets in the way. Not that I’m complaining about it. Writing the newsletter is a very interesting activity. It gives me the […]

The term blogosphere started as a joke but quickly became a common word to indicate the community and the social network of blogs and bloggers. Like every other community, the blogosphere has its own style, guidelines, and customs. These rules are a way for the blogger community to recognize its own members and to define […]

Ron Fritz is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Tech Soft 3D, the company that makes the famous HOOPS3D, a graphics toolkit used by several design applications. The impressive list of TechSoft3D customers includes Alibre, Autodesk, Bentley, Fluent, IronCAD, MSC.Software, PTC, SolidWorks, and TransMagic. After a long phase of apparent immobility, the announcement of some new […]

Robert McNeel is the CEO of Robert McNeel & Associates, the company that makes the famous CAD modeling software Rhinoceros, simply known as Rhino 3D. Novedge has been a McNeel reseller since the opening of our online store. The recent release of Rhino 4.0 was a great opportunity to learn more about Robert and the […]

Antonio Pellizzaro is the Lead Developer of Actify, the software manufacturer of the SpinFire product line, a group of applications for CAD data visualization and sharing. Actify and Novedge are both located in San Francisco, a few blocks away. I invited Antonio to participate in the following interview: Can you tell us a bit about […]

Sean Flaherty is the CEO of Nemetschek North America, the American branch of Nemetschek AG, the German company that is well known worldwide for products like VectorWorks and Allplan. Novedge has been a VectorWorks' reseller in the United States for a few years. The recent acquisition of Graphisoft by Nemetschek was a great opportunity to […]

Alex Mazzardo is the Managing Director at EVOQE, the worldwide publisher of the solidThinking product line, a suite of applications for industrial designers (CAID – Computer Aided Industrial Design). A few days ago EVOQE launched Modeler, a new product, and updated the entire solidThinking line. Taking advantage of the fact that Alex is Italian (like […]

I like "CAD Data Visualization," another may prefer DDC (Digital Design Communication), someone else might like the ambitious acronym PDC (Product Design Collaboration), but whatever name you choose, this kind of software program has been around for many years. The central idea is to provide affordable ways to visualize the content of a CAD file […]

In the last few years several companies from around the world have entered the market in the development and commercialization of CAD, CAM, and graphic software. Some are from countries that have a long tradition of software production, such as France with Dassault. Others, from countries such as India — with a background in outsourcing […]

The latest versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and FireFox offer a powerful new feature: they allow you to run a search directly from the browser without having to open a Google or Yahoo page. This is handy and convenient, and can save us a few clicks for every search we run (several per day, in […]

After keeping us waiting for years, Robert McNeel finally released Rhino 4.0. It's a completely new version of the popular Rhinoceros 3.0 NURBS modeler, mostly known by its nickname: Rhino 3D. Rhino 4.0 includes over 800 improvements based on users' feedback The development team put a lot of effort and energy into improving a product […]

Someone created a "simple" video to tell us a story. It's the story of our online life! And this someone is Mike Wesch from Kansas State University (Digital Ethnography blog). The connection between the video's story and CAD and Graphics Software is deeper than what may first appear. Thanks to Chris Anderson, The Long Tail […]

Is CAD software following the same path of web browsers? According to some small-size 2D CAD vendors (as reported by  Ralph Grabowski) there are too many free CAD systems and too long lasting free trials around. As a CAD reseller I should agree, and maybe I should say: free software is not good! But I […]

I would like to use the space of Novedge blog to announce a very interesting event I am organizing for BAIA, the Business Association Italy America. The event will take place here in San Francisco Thursday February 8, at Cooley Godward Kronish LLP on 101 California Street, 5th Floor. The sponsors are Cooley Godward Kronish, […]

I know it's already February, but that's the way things go! We wrote the January issue of our newsletter in January, but always something comes in to delay the final steps. This month the newsletter looks richer than usual. The size of the e-mail message is about 27 Kb, excluding the pictures. The first copies […]

I'm proud to announce that Novedge is now offering the power, security, and user protection of PayPal checkout. According to PayPal, 43% of North American online shoppers have used PayPal, while 24% of North American online buyers consider PayPal their favorite way to pay online. Starting today, Novedge customers have the option to choose between […]

Ajax used to be a product to clean the kitchen, but not anymore! Now Ajax means "Asynchronous Javascript and XML" and is ubiquitous on the web. Even when we are not aware of Ajax we benefit from it: this technology makes our browsing faster and more enjoyable. Ajax is a group of technologies that support […]