Video Walk-Throughs and 3D Rendering

We produce marketing drawings to help prospective tenants understand understand available space. To better communicate these drawings, we can render these plans in 3D. Another way to showcase a space online is through video. With services like YouTube it's easy to upload and embed videos into any website or blog. We've got two new samples on our channel. First we have a video tour of our office:

Next we've got a video that combines the tour with some computer rendered sequences:

This video demonstrates how 3D renderings can be combined with site footage to convey a leasing opportunity. In this case we have used our own office, but the technique could be used where some parts of a building are complete and others still need to be built out.

John Zsolt: Sustainable Development

John Zsolt was well known for his professional accomplishments as co-founder of Space Database Inc. Others knew him through his keen interests in sailing and skiing. Yet others knew John as a designer and builder of beautiful houses. This book from 1994 sheds light on another interest of John: sustainable development.

John saw real estate development as his second career, something he would do after Space Database. When John graduated from architecture school in 1990 his master's thesis focused on sustainable rural community development. In 1994 John received a grant from CMHC to further develop his ideas and to publish a research paper. We have re-published his work and made it available for purchase online. All proceeds will go to the BOMA Toronto John Zsolt Scholarship. Click the button below to get your copy:

The research elaborates the technical feasibility of his thesis project. His argument was that by clustering housing and using natural systems such as vegetation and wetlands, residential development at the same density as current suburban developments could be made environmentally self-sufficient. These proposed communities would be able to treat and clean their own waste water. More trees and wilderness could be preserved within the community. And finally, energy consumption would be drastically reduced.

These were ground breaking ideas in the early nineties. Today the environmental impact of buildings is more widely appreciated and the need for sustainable alternatives is more generally appreciated. The ideas and research in his report are just as relevant today as they were when John wrote them.

We've also added some other content about John's life outside of work. Read about the other sides of John Zsolt.

MindMeister: More Features

I posted earlier about the web-based mind mapping software MindMeister. 'Mind Mapping' is a very useful organizational tool. It's perfect for managing small projects and tasks where to-do lists are inadequate but where full blown project management tools would be over-kill. I continue to use MindMeister and find it very useful as a simple project and task manager.

I described how we used this tool as a team to coordinate an office move. I've continued to use it as a task and project management tool and I've discovered a couple of new and useful features. (not sure if they are new or just new to me!) I'll list some of theme here:

• You can email ideas to your map. MindMeister provides you with email addresses that let you either add single items to an existing map or create an entire new map. (sub-items are indicated using indents) Read more about it here here
  
  
  Your emailed items are automatically added to the map
  
  
  
• You can assign tasks to items. This feature has a couple of benefits. First, you can use this feature to divide tasks up between yourself and your team. Next, you can set up the task to send email reminders. And finally you can subscribe to a task 'feed' enabling you to see your tasks in other applications. (N.B. This feature does not work very well in Outlook as the tasks show up as calendar items rather than task items and all the due dates are at midnight which puts them outside the default view)
  
• You can work with the maps offline. If you'll be without an internet connection, MindMeister lets you sync a copy of the map to your local machine. You can work on it and then re-sync it when you have your service back.

MindMeister is free to use in the basic version. Some features are not available but you can create up to six three maps and collaborate on other peoples' maps. The Premium version is reasonable at $49(US) per year and gives you access to all features and you can create any number of maps.

If you ever feel overwhelmed by all the tasks and ideas you have to keep track of - then give this a try.