2019-10-28

Planning & Strategy.

• CAD software giant PTC acquired Onshape, the browser-based CAD startup founded by Jon Hirschtick, for $470M. Hirschtick, also one of the founders of SolidWorks, is nothing less than a legend; he has arguably had as large an impact on engineering software as any other living person (note that I interviewed him in a panel back in 2017, when Onshape was valued at around $800M, and found him to be friendly and very passionate). Onshape's primary selling point always revolved around shareability (multiple users can edit the same design at the same time) and mobile (Jon was ebullient that design changes could be committed via iPads on jobsites), and their freemium model (which is similar to GitHub's) extended the classical disruption strategy that SolidWorks used so effectively. But while SolidWorks claims millions of users, OnShape is being acquired with "more than 5,000" - which, assuming a mix of "standard" and "professional" licenses, means an ARR in the neighborhood of $9M and a per-user valuation near $100K. PTC says that "this acquisition is the logical next step in PTC’s overall evolution to a recurring revenue business model;" the question that I'm still skeptical of is whether browser-based software makes any sense whatsoever for the CAD industry. Nevertheless, Onshape's open source data is remarkable; see this repository of over a million CAD models from Onshape user data.
• McMaster-Carr's API documentation.
• Adafruit and Digi-Key are donating one Circuit Playground Express to Black Girls CODE for every unit purchased.
• A now-old NYTimes profile of New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (NUMTOTs).
• NYC will invest $1.7B on 250 miles of protected bike lanes, protected bus lanes, and transit signal priority traffic lights. This would be about 5x as much bike infrastructure as was evaluated in this study, which (you'll recall from 2019-10-14) resulted in a cost per quality-adjusted life year of just $1300.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A video visit to Oak Ridge National Lab's radiochemical engineering development center, where plutonium-238 is synthesized.
• A hacked 3D printer that's set up to "print" with Perler beads.
• A quick, old blog post on the difficulties in finding (and eventually manufacturing) a vintage 20th century electronic connector: The DB-19.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• The US's nuclear arsenal no longer relies on 8" floppy disks.
• A Michigan appeals court ruled that mechanics performing tire rotations aren't legally required to tighten the car's lug nuts.

Distribution & Logistics.

• Saildrone's autonomous unmanned sailboat completed a round trip transatlantic crossing.
• The NYTimes on how e-commerce has transformed NYC's streets. UPS and FedEx "racked up more than 471,000 parking violations last year, a 34 percent increase from 2013...The average number of daily deliveries to households in New York City tripled to more than 1.1 million shipments from 2009 to 2017."
• A map of all the scheduled sub-100 mile routes operated by the big 3 US airlines today.
• Uber and Lyft appear to be directly linked to a 2-3% increase in traffic deaths since 2011.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• Starting next week, (frequent guest editor) Drew Austin is leading a reading group that explores technology’s effect on physical space as well as our individual and collective experience of that space; its focus has (as you would imagine) a high level of overlap with what we cover here in The Prepared. Sign up!
• ISO 1073-2:1976, "Alphanumeric character sets for optical recognition."
• An interactive map of flaring locations (places where natural gas is burned off) from NOAA's Earth Observation Group data.
• A good explainer for why laser light appears speckled or "grainy" when it reflects off of an irregular surface, like a wall. If a laser shines directly into your eye, it does not exhibit speckle, but when a beam reflects off of a wall its wavelets diffract and interfere as they travel to the observer.

Tangents.

• A short history of the hard hat.
• Wink (the last thing of any value left over from Quirky) is continuing to founder under Will.i.am's ownership.
• A map of "Walt Disney World—a place where people are willing to ditch their cars and get around on foot, bus, and monorail—superimposed over Seattle at the same scale."
• "San Francisco to End Disastrous Dockless Vehicle [car] Pilot."

Inside the world's first long-term storage facility for radioactive nuclear waste.