Related Links: U.K.s BIM Mandate Driving Major Shift in Digital Tools Adoption Advancing 3D Printing Capabilities Excite Construction Leaders 2013: A Year of Better BIM Collaboration on Jobsites ENR's Construction Science Fiction Collection He’s often called Autodesk’s thought-leader, a futurist about global construction trends, a big ideas man, probably unfailingly polite and, as of late, a construction science fiction author. (See ENR's Imagining Construction's Future collection.)Dominic Thasarathar, a directory of strategy at the design and collaboration software provider, would chuckle at the titles, given that the Londoner still thinks of himself as a technology manager from his days with firms

ENR’s editors are always on the lookout for new and useful electronics that have the potential to improve the construction workflow. Over the course of 2013, we’ve run across or experimented with a few devices that show promise. Some of them might make it a bit easier to stay connected on the road, while others will be more at home in the office or on the jobsite.Click here to begin the slideshow.

Illustration Courtesy of Bentley Systems Approach connects engineering with geospatially defined 3D construction packages. Illustration Courtesy of Bentley Systems Approach offers dashboards to track progress. Related Links: Bentley's Lean CM and Workface Planning Product Construction Industry Institute Report on Advanced Work Packaging A s project size grows in complexity, so does the need for advanced tools for work-face planning. At its "Year in Infrastructure" conference in London, Bentley Systems Inc. in late October announced that its ProjectWise Construction Work Package Server (WPS), a system for managing the life cycle of work packages, is now being validated by industry firms and

Related Links: Contractors See Gains, Gaps With Growth of Mobility Tools To Rent or Buy AEC Software Tools? Vendors Add More Choices Bentley Press Release UK Government Strategy, BIM Mandate Latest Bentley App Brings Geospatial Data to the Field Bentley Picks Up Ivaras Asset Performance Management Tools Data integration with building-information-modeling tools and cloud services is accelerating across the United Kingdom, thanks to the government's mandate that all public projects use BIM, including handover data for asset management, by 2016.For Bentley Systems, which counts some 36% of its annual revenue from its customers in the European, Middle East and African

Related Links: FPDetective Whitepaper Tor Software to Fight Privacy Invasion Belgian researchers are slated to release a free software framework to the public in November that is designed to identify "fingerprinting," a browser-based method of tracing users by tracking features of a specific device, creating a unique ID.In a recent study at the University of Leuven, Belgium, researchers used the framework, called FPDetective, to crawl many popular sites. Results found that more sites use fingerprinting techniques than previously was believed.A device fingerprint is a set of system attributes with a combination of values that are highly likely to be unique

PHOTO Courtesy of TurboCAD TurboSite's Geolocation feature allows users to tag photos and video to site plans and then share the info as a PDF. Related Links: TurboSite The GPS Device that Utility Workers Love TurboSite, an iOS app that leverages a smart device into a field reporting tool, has rolled out a new plug-in that turbocharges the app for Autodesk Revit users.The plug-in for TurboSite uses a device's built-in GPS and gyroscope to collect a user's geographic location and orientation within a structure and tie it to the multimedia collected on an iPad or iPhone."TurboSite was cost-effective and was

Pictures, notes and video are captured in a social network-type of news-feed format that can push alerts to select workers. Related Links: Textura IPO Turns Up the Heat on Construction Tech Startups FieldLens The most important elements of social networking sites are their ability to share media, post comments and store all that data and more as a permanent web record. The same can be said for web tools that manage a construction site. The new web application FieldLens aims to become the Facebook of project management services."I tried using Facebook on a project two years ago," says Todd Wynne,

Related Links: Fluid Contract Manager's YouTube Channel Collaboration Apps Top ENR Survey Results A web-based construction-management platform optimized for an iPhone's screen size and mobile ergonomics is coming out on Nov. 1."It was born out of complete and utter frustration," says Don Speedie, president of Sparks, Nev.-based Fluid Contract Manager, about what provoked him to create his iPhone-inspired design. When he came up with the idea, Speedie was working as a construction manager, a position he occupied for more than 14 years."I built it from the ground up with the iPhone in mind," says Speedie.The design's fluidity was such a

PHOTO courtesy of white clouds Autodesk's redesign of Hyperloop requires specialized equipment to weave transit tubes out of carbon-fiber composite materials while maintaining the tubes' original 7-ft, 4-in. diameter. PHOTO courtesy of white clouds The proposed new design for Hyperloop's transit tubes weaves them out of one ring of carbon fiber and then pinches it into a figure 8, forming two independent tubes. Related Links: Video of Autodesk's Design Oak Ridge National Labs A design software leader is rethinking the construction methods and materials for Hyperloop Alpha, the high-speed mass-transit proposal that shoots passenger-filled capsules suspended on air cushions through

Elon Musk’s recent Hyperloop proposal resurrects discussion in the U.S. about the advantages of true high-speed ground transportation. The country desperately needs a national consensus as to what constitutes fast and cost-effective HSGT before a single track or guideway is laid, but as of yet the conversation has failed to develop the required consensus for true high-speed ground transportation. Mr. Musk’s proposal gets the discussion going again.But as to his proposal, while Mr. Musk correctly criticizes the California high-speed rail proposal for being too slow and too expensive to build and maintain, his own Hyperloop technology is only a concept.  U.S.