Photo by Kevin Marino/Balfour Beatty Keith Walsh, virtual-design construction intern at Balfour Beatty, helps fellow employee Daniel Shirkey, senior process manager for traffic planning and design, navigate virtual- jobsite software, called HazYard, which Walsh helped program. Shirkey wears an Oculus Rift headset he bought after attending the second AEC Hackathon in March. Related Links: Greg Howe's Take on AEC Hackathon 1.2 AEC Hackathon: an Industry First Sponsor prizes are beginning to ensure the usability and usefulness of software developed at the architecture, engineering and construction "AEC Hackathons" now popping up around the country and, soon, abroad.For the weekend charrette, team

Related Links: Viewpoint Returns to Estimating With Platform Upgrades McGraw Hill Sells ENR and Construction Group to Equity Investor U.S. ERP Vendor Viewpoint Reels In U.K. Collaboration Service 4Projects Private-equity firms looking for opportunities in construction-industry sectors have gone from casual dating to getting downright serious with their investments. Experts say collaboration and web-based tools are their top desires.Chris Daum, president of FMI Capital Advisors, the investment banking subsidy of consulting and research firm FMI Corp., says his group has seen an "unprecedented upturn in inquiries" during the past 18 months, asking for FMI's input to look over deals in

Photo courtesy of Suyang Dong/University of Michigan SmartDig's market includes earthwork contractors looking to boost productivity in cities. Related Links: Robots on the Jobsite Advancing in Construction Bridge Builder Hooked on GPS-Guided Gantries Why are some excavators wearing what appear to be giant quick-response codes? The QR codes are not the latest e-commerce trend on construction sites but part of a research project at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, aimed at making machine controls more accurate in urban settings."It's weird," admits Suyang Dong, a researcher at the school's Laboratory for Interactive Visualization in Engineering, speaking of the strange signs.

Big data is like the Atlantic Ocean; it’s huge and deep and full of power but we know that—whatever we have done so far—we have barely touched its potential.One example of tapping the potential of big data is a service that mines and analyzes the hits generated by more than one million mobile wireless devices as they register at one cell tower after another while traveling along.  The identities of the users are never known, but it doesn’t matter. It is the pattern of movements on a grand scale that tells the tale.The transportation studies the data analytics company, AirSage,

Image Courtesy of Tesla Motors Inc. The plant, to be built on a 600-acre site, is slated to be open by 2017. The Sept. 4 revelation that northern Nevada is the site for Tesla Motors' planned $5-billion lithium-ion-battery "gigafactory" sets the stage for what is likely to be a sharp drop in the cost of such batteries over the next few years, as market forces come to bear.The electric vehicles built by the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tesla Motors Inc. are powered by batteries composed of thousands of the small, cylindrical, lithium-ion 18650 commodity cells such as those commonly found in

Image Courtesy Gehry Technologies Gehry Technologies' GTeam platform allows for online collaboration on BIM design documents. Image Courtesy Gehry Technologies Gehry Technologies' Digital Project is a BIM design and management suite. Related Links: Trimble Steps Into Facilities Management With Manhattan Software Acquisition Trimble Buys Crane-Safety Instrumentation Company Show Me the Money: 5D-Cost Estimating Tools Taking Off Gehry Forms Alliance of Architects To Promote Technological Integration Gehry Tech Launches Latest BIM Collaboration Tool Q&A: Over the Horizon with Dennis Shelden, Gehry Technologies In the latest of a string of high-profile acquisitions, Trimble, Sunnyvale, Calif., announced Sept. 8 it has acquired Los

Estimators have never had it easy in the rough-and-tumble world of construction cost estimating—especially when using traditional 2D files or drawings for quantity takeoffs and cost estimates.

Related Links: Trimble Steps Into Facilities Management With Manhattan Software Acquisition Wireless Load Monitors Boost Crane Safety Trimble's construction technology vice president cites a growing crane market as a reason behind its Aug. 21 purchase of Load Systems International Inc., Quebec City, Canada, a crane-safety instrumentation firm."In a world that has experienced scores of major crane accidents in recent years and thousands of smaller incidents that hold up construction projects, LSI's crane-avoidance and load-management solutions certainly match Trimble's focus," says Bryn Fosburgh, Trimble vice president of construction technology. Fosburgh would not comment on the cost of the acquisition.Fosburgh says that,

Images Courtesy of Trimble Manhattan Software's programs allow facilities managers and building owners to manage portfolios of buildings and other real-estate assets. Expanding its applications for spatial modeling past the construction phase of the building lifecycle, Trimble, Sunnyvale, Calif., announced August 19 that it will acquire London-based Manhattan Software, a maker of facilities-management and real-estate-management software. Trimble says will take a 100% stake of Manhattan Software and integrate it into its Trimble Buildings Group. The acquisition price was not disclosed.Manhattan Software's offerings include its Integrated Workplace Management System, which allows for planning and management of real estate portfolios, and CenterStone

iImages courtesy of INVIEWlabs Unifi's subscription-based cloud service uses cloud technology and improved algorithms to make BIM files more searchable with multiple metrics. Related Links: UNIFI Free Trial A cloud-based building-information-modeling management service is leveraging advanced search and metadata tagging functionality to super-charge how teams manage project assets.The subscription service by start-up Unifi currently handles only Autodesk Revit files on its platform, with support for Trimble Sketchup files expected later this year. The company says the platform works like this: By dragging your entire library folder structure into Unifi, the application automatically tags each piece of content with metadata and