Gawlowski Design

SolidWorks has acquired Priware Limited, developers of the CircuitWorks software. This is great news, for it means CircuitWorks will now be included as part of SolidWorks Office Premium. For those of you unfamiliar with this, CircuitWorks enables ECAD importing and exporting, which is one thing I’ve always considered a weakness of SolidWorks when compared to Pro/Engineer. ECAD files are incredibly useful not just for high density designs such as cell phones, but with any pcb design and some clients actually require ECAD files as a deliverable in any project. Read more at Desktop Engineering.

French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur has come up with a list of ten rules for startup success, reprinted below (see the article in the Financial Times for the full story). Based on our past experience, it’s a very nice list and worth passing along so we thought we’d include it here:

Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible

Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.

Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.

Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.

Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.

Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.

Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.

Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.

Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.

Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Interaction between computers and people is something that continues to evolve in fascinating ways. The latest is a design environment for physics simulations that uses a whiteboard for interaction. Check out the video:

For some other interesting user interface designs, follow this link.

Below is an impressive video of some kinetic sculpture of Theo Jansen. It’s a beautiful convergence of engineering and art, check it out: