Disruption on the Showroom Floor: AU 2007 Review

As this year’s AU comes to a close, the exhibit hall once teeming with beer-drinking attendees will be barren and empty in a matter of hours. The usual line-up of developers, service providers, and hardware vendors that have become staples in the Autodesk community will greet each other a final time until they return next year. Just as every year, however, new faces have also arrived. In the sea of “me too” applications and “just another” consulting companies, a handful of newcomers at AU have earned their titles as disruptive technologies on the showroom floor.

Tucked quietly beside the caterer’s service entrance near the back of the exhibit hall, NextEngine turned heads with their Desktop 3D Scanner. This simple white box, smaller than an inkjet printer, scans 3D parts with accuracy to 0.005”. Priced at just $2,495, the adoption rate will be high and possibilities for applications are endless. One expectation, however, is a reverse engineering capability like never before. The scanner will certainly, as is touted, close the gap between design and CAD. Expect to see this technology appear in fields ranging from medical to military—allowing physical parts to be digitized and analyzed in a matter of minutes. If prices fall even further, consumer markets surrounding gaming and avatars would open as well.

A stone’s throw from NextEngine, on the same back row of exhibits, a categorically opposite technology was unveiled. With RP&M leaders ZCorporation and Stratasys exhibiting their mature modeling hardware, Paul Nye and his wife unveiled their garage invention called the 2BOT—a new, simpler, and much less expensive 3D output device for architects and engineers. The hardware is reminiscent of an old pencil plotter, except instead of pencil lead, a drill bit moves on the x, y, and z axis to carve out site contours and other geometries in a simple subtractive manufacturing process.

While the technology is much more rudimentary than other additive RP&M systems, the disruptive feature is in its cost—both upfront and operational. At just $9,000 for a system, the 2BOT is easily affordable for any firm. More importantly, the system uses any material of the designer’s choice. Wood, styrofoam, plastics, or any other creative medium purchased at your local hardware store will suffice. Compared to the square inch costs of photopolymers and resins, or even metals for CNC, the 2BOT will operate at nearly the same material costs as traditional modeling mediums. Expect to see this technology introduced in small and medium-sized architecture, landscape, and site design firms where the costs of large-frame rapid prototyping have prevented such investments in the past.

We’re on the bandwagon

With my company’s recent launch of a web 2.0 community portal, www.mycadmash.com, I thought I would take this opportunity to share some thoughts on web 2.0 from a marketing perspective. Why not? Everyone else is. I mean, it is the hottest buzz word, right?

It seems that this ambiguous term has begun to permeate every advertising and PR agency's board room, and rightfully so. But how much do the heavy-hitters in technology marketing really understand about web 2.0? How much does anyone understand about it, or are we simply seeking to find a one-word definition to encapsulate what seems to me to be the very nature of human behavior in the presence of an unbridled communication and information world?

A couple of things I do know. Web 2.0 is not a new venue for advertising. Online advertising, e-mail advertising, even forum sponsorship and moderating, are all forms of e-media that play a part in web 2.0, but they don’t define it. For that matter, nor does blogging or video blogging define web 2.0. Again, these are aspects of effective communication within a web 2.0 culture.

And that word, culture, really is the essence of web 2.0. When considering a marketing strategy in web 2.0, approach it as though you were entering a foreign market with your domestic product. Everything has to be reconsidered, from the language and customs to the common methods of communication in that country. Web 2.0 is a new way of human behavior where limitless information is demanded, censorship is taboo, and hype is an archaic language that society has all but forgotten how to interpret.

Using mycadmash.com as an example, the concept is simple. We provide a community, you (as a so-called advertiser to the members) participate as one of them. Become their peer. Admit product faults, and offer real solutions. Banner ads that pray for clicks and try to ‘covert’ have no place in a culture where people buy from people they know and trust.

The Changing Tech Market

Years ago, while still hocking CAD for a monthly quota, I found myself generating a significant amount of volume from companies far outside the conventional "urban" centers of commerce. Later, I developed a local user group program for Autodesk's community marketing organization, known as AUGI, and noticed a strikingly familiar trend. During my research, I overlaid a map of U.S. user groups with a map of U.S. manufacturing GDP, and discovered a large percentage of CAD use in rural areas where manufacturing output was non-existent.

The oddities that I had experienced mark a notable industry shift in design and engineering. Over the past decade, while small service bureaus have declined, outsource contracting for design, drafting, and engineering has increased significantly. With today's computer-based design and even digital prototyping, to become an engineering service provider requires nothing more than a computer, a CAD package, and an internet connection. By contrast, antiquated service providers whose businesses carried overheads such as tools, machines, and working space have either closed, re-invented their businesses, or are being absorbed into larger companies.

As a result, the marketing for technology products within the design and engineering industries must shift as well. Many companies are finding that they can no longer rely on a personal sales team to produce sustaining volumes of sales amidst the widely dispersed market of small buyers. Instead, just as the industrial revolution ushered in an era of efficiency with automated machines, so today a marketing revolution has ushered in an era of efficiency whereby tech writing, data-rich collateral, and online interaction performs the job that a salesperson once did: educating the buyer and handling objections.

With the industrial revolution, were humans extricated from the factory? No. Their efforts were multiplied through the economy of automation. The same is true for technology business today. The most successful companies today use marketing both for branding and selling. In today's marketplace it is important to empower your sales staff with all the tools they need to leverage their time and efforts most efficiently. Successful tech marketing educates clients in mass, handles objections before they even come up, and even prompts sales through e-commerce.