SolidWorks World 2010 Day 1 General Session
This morning Jeff Ray took the stage for his annual Keynote. He got the crowd excited right off the bat by announcing that over 5000 people are registered for today at Solidworks World. In times of recession Solidworks Corp. seems to have done something right, engaging customers, avoiding any layoffs, and working in secret on new products; some of which were debuted. Personally I was most excited to see the veil pulled off an on stage desktop to reveal…. an iMac. The excitement tapered as the realization set it off what was being shown. Rather than porting SW over to a mac it appears Mark Biasotti and a few others have been developing a suite of apps that run based off the cloud. Hints of this have been appearing in the past few years with products like 3d Content Central and 3dVia but Jeff was able to say that by year’s end Solidworks will be shipping a product to subscription customers that somehow works in the cloud.
Other notes from the speech. Bernard Charles, CEO of Dassault Systems, made his first trip to Solidworks World and took the stage with essentially one message in mind. 3D Everywhere! He took the opportunity to give an on stage demo of the 3dVia app I reviewed in the past. 
After Jeff was done Wowing the crowd and pointing out a few key folks, including my seat neighbors and fellow ESP users Larry Marvet and Jared Huffman, he pass the mic to James McLurkin.
James, despite a minor hiccup in power point, easily showed the crowd his intelligence by talking way over their (and my) heads regarding swarm algorithms as it applies to robots. More exciting though was his demo of said swarm. It seems a theme of Solidworks World that someone MUST drive a robot on stage. James also left everyone with a pointed message asking for the 5000 Nerds in attendance to have some pride in their nerdiness.
The speeches were great and the software teasers were just enough to get everyone in the mood for 3 days of Solid modeling fun. Stayed tuned for more to come, for now I will leave you with James McLurkin's messag.
Support Your Community.
Help your country.
Save the World.
Be a nerd.