To BIM or not to BIM?

In their technology quarterly, the Economist has an article on Building-Information Modeling (BIM). The article describes how designers are using technology to design new buildings. Rather than using Computer Aided Design (CAD) to create 2D drawings, these designers are using intelligent 3D models to assemble virtual buildings before the real ones are built.

There are several advantages to designing in 3D

• Complex geometries are much easier to deal with.
  
• Coordination between different building systems are easier to manage - beams and ductwork cannot intersect!
  
• The calculation of required materials and costs can be done at the design stage.
  
• Issues that may lead to problems onsite can be identified and resolved before construction starts.
  

The 3D design process reduces construction costs by providing a more accurate and precise set of documents from which to build. The number of issues that need to be resolved during construction are reduced. 'Extras' charged by contractors for onsite changes should be virtually eliminated. As an additional bonus, the ongoing maintenance of the building will be simplified due to the accurate 3D model that represents all of the systems in the building and includes full specs and parts lists.

BIM was first utilized for highly complex buildings, but is now becoming commonplace for more conventional buildings. Architects are finding substantial cost savings in the design process as well as in the reduction of construction costs.

Now to the question posed in the title of this post: should we create BIM models of existing buildings? There would certainly be advantages to having a 3D model with integrated system specifications. Ongoing maintenance costs could be reduced and the cost of future design changes should be lower if other designers can reuse these models. At Space Database, we have found that there are significant cost savings to be had from the creation and ongoing management of a conventional set of 2D CAD drawings as well as in the indexing and archiving of old technical drawings. Would there be sufficient additional savings to justify the cost of a full 3D model?

A 3D building survey would be expensive and it would require many different disciplines to model all of the various systems. It is unlikely that the ongoing operational cost savings alone would justify the creation of a 'post-construction' BIM model for most buildings.

But the situation may soon change. Software tools are improving, so the creation of models will become cheaper. The availability of ready-made 3D technical equipment and components from vendors will further simplify the process. The emergence of open marketplaces and open standards such as Google's 3D Warehouse will add more value to 3D information.

In the meantime, landlords should find out if any of their consultants are using BIM software for projects in their properties. It would be good to know if there are existing models out there.

For further reading, here is the Wikipedia article on Building Information Modeling.

Google Presentation Widget

Here's an interesting new feature from Google. We have seen how common embedded YouTube videos have become on websites and blogs. Google have now applied the same concept to Google Docs. If you create a presentation in Google Docs (or upload one built in PowerPoint), you now have the option to publish it with a viewer widget.

This is very easy to do:

1. Log into docs.google.com
   
2. Select 'New' from the menu bar and click on 'Presentation'
   
3. The tools are very simple. It's like using a minimalist PowerPoint.
   
4. You can add images either as uploads or as URLs that point to images on the web.
   
5. Click on the 'Publish' tab on the top right.
   
6. Copy the code in the text box and paste it wherever you want on the web.
   
7. You now have a nifty presentation widget!
   

New Google Earth Beta

An amazing new version of Google Earth is now out. It is version 4.3 but it is still in beta. There are some excellent new features that include:

• Time of day. You can select the time of day and the program will adjust the lighting and even create shadows on mountain terrain and buildings.
  
• Weather and clouds. You can turn on layers to show cloud-cover and radar images. When you are at ground level these are realistically rendered above you.
  
• 3D buildings. These are best in US cities. As soon as you zoom to a city simple models appear and then they are rendered with more detail over time. They look very realistic.
  
• Street View. In some cities there are now interactive panoramic photos that you can jump into all along city streets.
  
• Flight simulator. You can now fly around in a jet! I managed to crash mine into the ground.
  

Here is a great video of what it looks like. The original source is the Google Earth Blog. Thanks to the folks at My Tech Opinion where I first found this.

I installed this and my experience was not quite as smooth and seamless as in this movie. In particular I had some issues with the streaming of the images. Detailed images did not appear as I zoomed in. This is still a beta. I would recommend waiting to upgrade until it is fully released.

Audio Blog Posts

Did you notice the little button at the top of each post: 'listen now'? Go ahead, give it a click. This button comes to you courtesy of Odiogo. This is a web based service that reads blog content, converts it to spoken words and delivers it back to the browser. It allows you to listen to my blog as spoken by a robot voice!

It's remarkably simple to set up. You simply sign up at Odiogo, provide your rss feed and your email. An hour or so later you receive an email letting you know that the audio files are complete. It is then very simple to add a button to link the file from your blog.

So is this simply a novelty? Or are there other benefits? One key advantage of this tool is that it also generates mp3 files. You can access these from the 'listen now' button. You can quickly save audio versions of blog posts that you can listen to later.

Any Password

Like everyone else these days, I have a ridiculous number of user names and passwords. I have passwords for a bunch of websites, email accounts, services, network accounts and software. It's really hard to keep track of all of them and next to impossible to remember.
One strategy would be to make all of your user names and passwords the same, but this would not be advisable. What if a website somewhere turned out not to be as reliable as you thought? What if you had typed in the same information as you use for online banking? It is a very good idea to use as many different user names and passwords as possible to keep all of your accounts 'firewalled' from each other.

So how do you keep track of everything? For the last two years, I have been using a software called AnyPassword. There are several versions. The most simple and basic one - which I use - is free.

The program consists of a simple directory structure of user names and passwords. For each log in, you can store your user name, password, a URL, as well as notes. All of this information is protected by a single password. Now you only have to remember one thing. To keep the information safe, the file is encrypted using IDEA/MD5 algorithms.

A word of common sense advice: keep a backup copy of the installation software and always backup the data file!

HotPads

Here's another really cool map based real estate mash-up. In this case the subject matter is rather depressing. HotPads, a residential real estate listing site in the U.S. has created a 'heat map' to illustrate areas of high foreclosure rates. Using map data from Microsoft's virtual earth and combining it with listing data, they have created colour-coded maps to show the density of foreclosures.

This is cool for what they have been able to achieve by putting two data sources together on the web. But it is very depressing when you see what it tells you. Here is a map of Detroit. Most of the city has foreclosures on more than one in 150 houses. Here's a link to this view.

If you click on the houses, you get a pop-up that gives you details on the listing. If the map is depressing, these listings are absolutely alarming. Here's a nice big three bedroom house for $9,900:

And here is a map of the Niagara Falls / Rochester area. This is just across the lake from us. Even here there are regions where there are over 1 in 600 houses that are subject to foreclosure.

Take a look at this nice house in Buffalo: yours for $32,000

I love what they have done technically with this site. They've pulled in a ton of data. The mash-up conveys information in a clear way. It's simple to navigate and drill down to the listings. Unfortunately it creates a very vivid picture of how deep and serious the housing market crisis is in the States right now.

Secure FTP Software

We are testing a system of secure file transfers over the web. To maintain up-to-date copies of servers and data we need an automated and secure system to move new and updated files.

There is quite a wide choice of software in this area so we have had to a bit of research.

At the receiving end - the secure remote server - we are using a product called Gene6. http://www.gene6.com/ This software can accept secure encrypted connections and we are able to set up these transaction on custom, non-standard port numbers. This software has been working very well. It accepts up to twenty five concurrent connections and has several nice reporting tools to monitor traffic and bandwidth.

At the client end we have had to do a bit more work. We originally set up a software that was recommended to us: BatchSynch. This software is designed to first make a secure connection, then analyze the files at either end and build a list of files that need to be transferred. Like Robocopy, it will then only copy new and updated files. The program works well during the comparison stage but it had a tendency to crash during the transfer phase. As these initial copy jobs could be very large: ten to twelve hours, this was very annoying.

I spent a lot of time obsessively watching the band width graphs and restarting jobs remotely. Of course, jobs would inevitably fail as soon as I stopped watching them!
Here is an example. The red line indicates the number of threads running - the scale is on the right. The other lines reflect the amount of data being transferred. You can see that at 10:48 the jobs crashed and had to be restarted. Everything is running fine at 11:15 PM:

And here is the chart from another night. A job I had hoped would run all night crashed just after midnight. It was restarted at nine and then crashed again while I was at lunch!

This was wasting a lot of time and was not a reliable solution. I searched for other software and found Other contenders:

• Acronis: http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/download/ATIESWin/
  
• Backup Platinum: http://www.backup-platinum.com/
  
• Almersoft: http://www.almersoft.com/products/backup/
  
• CuteFTP Professional. http://www.cuteftp.com/
  

Acronis offers a suite of network backup and restore software that sounds very powerful. We could not find a way to make it work over our secure FTP setup however.

Backup Platinum is another backup software. One of the features is that it can send a backup image to an FTP site. But we could not get it to work using secure FTP. It would not log in to make the connection.

Almersoft also provides a backup software. As with Backup Platinum, we could not find a way to configure it to connect to our secure FTP server.

CuteFTP is a popular software that has been around for a long time. CuteFTP Professional was a solution that looked like to could work for us. This software is similar to BatchSync. It can communicate through secure FTP. It does not build a list of changed and new files first, but it can be programmed to skip unchanged files. Functionally, this delivers the same result. So far CuteFTP has not crashed during an upload, but the interface does have a tendency to freeze during long sessions. After it freezes, one cannot get a report on whether the job ran successfully or not.

Both BatchSync and CuteFTP can be scheduled, which is very important for our application. BatchSynch uses Windows task scheduler to run a command line version of itself. It can also be set up to send email reports on the success of failure of tasks. CuteFTP uses it's own scheduling tool. It appears that CuteFTP requires the local user to be logged in for the scheduled task to run.

Both of these tools accomplish the same thing in slightly different ways. We will be using CuteFTP for the simple reason that it is more stable in our environment. Testing before selecting software is economical in this case as all the products mentioned above are available in thirty day trial versions.

Keep in mind that our testing was only on our network and we evaluated these products based on our criteria. You may have different needs and a different environment. You should take the time to evaluate each product for your specific needs.

I would think that this type of software will become more common. Replicating data to a live, web accessible server is a far superior solution to using backup tapes or removable drives. The cost of hardware and bandwidth capacity now make this a cost effective and viable.

Open Office Shortcomings

I've been using open office for about a month now. In general it works very well, but I am experiencing three problems:

Gradient fills in Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent) do not display correctly. When I open a file previously created in PowerPoint, rectangles that contain gradient fills display in the wrong direction. For example a rectangle that contains a gradient of white to grey that goes left to right will display as grey to white. I can make the changes and save them, but when I reopen the file the problem comes back. I have not found a way to work around this.

Connectors in Impress diagrams re-route themselves in awkward ways. If I draw diagrams with connecting lines it seems to work exactly as in PowerPoint. When I

save, close and then reopen the file, the connectors are often moved into rather strange configurations. After I move them back and resave the file, the program still re-routes the lines when I open the file again.
I cannot seem to find the data analysis tools in Calc (the Open Office equivalent of Excel). By default the data analysis tools are not installed in Excel and it is not commonly used by most people. This module is used for statistical work such as regression, histograms, calculating standard deviation and so on. Unfortunately I have to revert to Excel to get these tasks done!

These three issues should not be critical for most people and I believe that the Open Office package would work well for the majority of users - and chance are the existing short comings will soon be addressed.

Open Office Excel & Calc

So far so good. I have been using the open source equivalent of Excel: 'Calc'. I have used it to update a rather complex financial model originally built in Excel. This workbook has several inter-related spreadsheets and complex calculations. I put some care into the layout. I've also used some more advanced features such as conditional formatting and I have several charts. The workbook was created in Excel 2007 and saved down to Excel 97-2003 format.

In Calc, the document opens and displays fine. Even the conditional formatting survives. Some of the charts are formatted awkwardly but they are still meaningful. Editing and updating the file went very well. Menus and buttons work almost exactly the same way as in Excel 2003.

Once my changes were made, I was able to save the file back to the Excel 97-2003 format. When I shared the file, it opened and displayed without any problems on Excel 2003 and on Excel 2000. However - and this is a big catch - when I opened the file in Excel 2007, it did not go so well. I got this message:

(It says: "Excel found unreadable content in [file name]. Do you want to recover the contents of this Workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.")

After clicking yes, the file opens but all of the formatting has been lost and the charts have disappeared!

Interesting… If OpenOffice is able to save a file that can be opened in Excel 2000 and Excel 2003 why would this compatibility not work in the 2007 version? You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that it is not in Microsoft's interest in to allow OpenOffice to freely exchange data with MS Office products. So for the time being if you need to open an OpenOffice in Excel 2007, you will have to open it in an earlier version of Excel first, save it and then open it in Excel 2007!

Living With Open Office

Microsoft Office is by far the most popular set of business applications in use today. By 'most popular' I mean most commonly used rather than 'most liked'. I believe it has become a standard for two reasons. First, there are what's called Network Effects. The value to me as a user of using Office increases based on the number of other people that are using Office. There is a great deal of value to being on the same platform as the people that I work with and exchange data with. The second reason that MS Office is so ubiquitous is due to learning. Once people are familiar with a way of doing things, it is difficult to change. Microsoft has historically benefited from the fact that users are familiar with their tools and have invested in learning how to use them.

I've got the new version of Office and it looks like Microsoft has abandoned the second reason for their success. The interface is not familiar and everything is in a different place! The suite requires a learning period that can be frustrating. The concept of tool-bars has been replaced by the 'ribbon'. In many ways it is an improvement on the interface but it can be frustrating to try and find the tool you need. We have not deployed this to anyone else in the office as I am worried about getting inundated with calls for help and I worry about the wasted productivity as users struggle through the learning period.

The cost of using MS Office is high. Not only is it several hundred dollars for each machine, but it will also be expensive in lost productivity if we are forced to upgrade to the new interface.

So what are the alternatives? There are two that I will be investigating. The first is Google Docs - a free web based suite of programs. The other is Open Office - a free open source set of applications. For the next while I will try to set aside my MS Office and use only these free tools. I will report back here!

We're on Wikimapia!

Well, we made it! We are now listed on Wikimapia. You can find us by searching for 'Space Database' or just by drilling down over the carpet factory:

When we first added this, voting buttons appeared to let other users respond to this listing. Enough users voted 'yes' to keep us on so now it is permanent. It is very easy to add in content. Help make this a more useful tool by putting in your own content!

Wikimapia

Wikimapia is a very interesting 'mashup'. It is a great example of how sophisticated applications can be created on the web using other, existing online technology and just a little bit of programming to customize a unique solution. In this case, the creators have used Google maps to deliver the map content and have layered over their own markup layer. Where available, places on the map are linked to articles in Wikipedia. They have used two existing content services and put them together to create a useful new tool.

The site creators have not had to do any of the data entry. Every day new and interesting places are added. The content and place descriptions are created by users of the site. Anyone can add a place and it becomes permanent once other visitors have given it enough positive votes.

And how is the site supported? How do they make money? Again, they have used an off the shelf solution by incorporating Google AdSense in the detailed place descriptions. Because these ads are content aware they will be relevant to whatever a visitor is searching for, and therefore most likely successful.

With some good ideas and just a little bit of know-how anyone can built really useful web tools - you just have the be the first to think of the idea!

Quintura

Here's a really cool new search engine.It works like a conventional search engine on one level in that it will return a list of pages that match your criteria. But it adds a very interesting and useful layer: a cloud of topics that it believes are related to your primary search. By clicking on each topic, new results are displayed.

And a really cool feature is that it can be embedded! Here it is:

UrbanDB

We've found this to be a great resource for getting basic building information before we start work on a job. It's a website with a detailed database of buildings. It's especially well documented and detailed in the Toronto area. You can find it at www.urbandb.com .

To price and plan a survey job properly we need to know what kind of building we are dealing with. This site gives us the year the building was built, the number of floors and a picture of the building.

The site has details on 3,949 buildings in Toronto. If you search on a Toronto address in Google, chances are urbandb will be somewhere at the top of the list. So is this a large company with a dedicated team of researchers to maintain the site and enter all of these details?- No!In fact it is the part time 'hobby project'of one guy.

Taylor is his name and he has built this site using open source technology. He has opened up the site to anyone who wants to help out by contributing information. He has succeeded in building his own Wikipedia of buildings!

Rod is modest about the success of his site "it takes a large number of volunteers to keep things running. Every little piece of information helps."

UrbanDB illustrates three important points. The first is the power and sophistication of open source technology that exists today. The tools that are now available enabled one person (although technically skilled) to put together an incredibly sophisticated site in their spare time. Secondly, web collaboration - getting users to contribute the content - is a great way to gather data. This site is populated by the work of volunteers that just happen to be interested in buildings. Finally, this project demonstrates how 'flat' the internet is. This site is more popular and probably has more traffic than dedicated commercial broker and building owner sites could ever hope for.

Creeping Elegance

Every year our software can do more and more. We add more features, modules and functionality. It's great to be able to do more and to offer more ways to support our clients. But there can be a downside too. With more features there is more complexity. We now offer training and have help files. These weren't necessary when we were simply hosting lists of files.
There's a lot to be said for simplicity. In some cases, an improvement can be made by reducing functionality. Read what Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Blogger has to say about adding constraints as a way of making tools more useful. The popularity of this tool is in how little you can do!

Web 2.0 Summit: Twitter Founder Evan Williams Preaches Added Constraints October 20, 2007
Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Blogger, believes that developers should be adding more constraints to applications, ...

Traditionally, if you think about the development of desktop software, every new version has new menus and buttons. It feels great because you could do more and more stuff! But pretty soon, the interface becomes so complex that you can't find anything. Extra features impair the user's experience and performance.
In this context a better software has fewer features. I think Google has lead the charge here. Everything they provide is simple and clean and very easy to use. If you consider other tools like Skype, Twitter, Wikipedia and Facebook the common element is a simple uncluttered and well thought out interface.

Our goal in development should be to get rid of the help file. Put a great deal of thought and design into the application and give it a lot of power in the back end, but keep the interface as minimal as possible.

Google Reader

In the previous post I was suggesting that we scan the news for items and issues that are of interest to our clients in order to be able to add more value to the services we provide to our clients. Searching the web for news on specific topics can be an arduous task simply because there is so much content out there.
There are two related technologies that make sifting through lots of content a lot easier. The first one is RSS. RSS stands for 'Real Simple Syndication'. It is a technology that allows us to 'subscribe' to the web content that is often updated.

In IE7 you can directly subscribe to these feeds by clicking on the RSS button in the toolbar. These feeds are then available in your browser next to your favorite links. There are also software programs you can install that will manage feeds. The new outlook can do this for example.
The best tool I have seen for this is Google Reader. You can add all the feeds that you are interested in and you can organize them into folders. It's very easy to scan through the articles and it keeps track of what you have looked at.
Here's a movie of what it can do:

Chris Gadula's friend Jesse Hirsh pointed out a key benefit of this tool that you can share what you are reading very easily. You can then publish this list on a web page or integrate it into other pages. A really cool feature is that your shared list can also be seen as an RSS feed! One of the feeds I am subscribing to is Jesse's shared items. You can see them on a web page here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/00787694365499276274
Here is a link to my shared items page: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/05387315875848305761 And you can also see the same items in the side bar further down on this page.
Play around with Google Reader and keep your eyes open for RSS feeds. I look forward to seeing your shared news items!

Website Optimization

We want to use our website as a marketing tool. We need it to reach the right people. We need it to be found by more people and ultimately we want to be read by more of the right people!

So I've done a bit of research on how search engines determine which are the most relevant results to display for a search term. By its very nature this a is black art - search engines will not tell you exactly how this is done, but here is the basic idea.

Search engines crawl through the web on a regular schedule and read all of the text. They then index all of the words. They have a cached (saved) copy of the entire web in memory and can find the words in websites that match what you are searching for. To make the results meaningful, the search engine will try to display the 'best' results first - at the top of the list. So the big question is - how does it decide?

Keywords - one way to prioritize results that the search engine uses is to see how often in the page text the keyword is used. The more often a keyword appears, the more relevant the page is considered to the topic. Apparently the engines can detect 'keyword stuffing' - it will know if you are intentionally overusing a word either visibly or invisibly on a site!

Our keyword strategy should be:

• Don't use flash! Because search engines cannot read any of your flash content.
  
• Find out what keywords people are using to find your site - we use Google Analytics for this
  
• Use words and terms that are specific to the industry.
  

File names, urls and ALT tags - besides the text content of the site, search engines take into consideration the names of the files and folders of the site. You will find that you often get results based on the address of the page. ALT tags are textual descriptions of the images in a page. This text displays for the user if there are image links in the page.

Our naming convention should be:

• Use relevant and meaningful words for file and folder names.
  
• Include meaningful alt tags on images that are links
  
• Use the TITLE tag to display a succinct description of the page
  

META tags - are not important! At least they are much less important than they used to be. The reason for this is that they have historically been abused to fool search engines. And they have been a primary means for 'keyword stuffing'. Search engines now prioritize the value of text that users can actually see.

Our META tag strategy?

• Keep META tags short and simple and don't get caught 'stuffing'!
  

Links - to your site. One of the ways that search engines determine which site is the 'authority' on a particular topic is by analyzing the links to site. If a site is referenced by other sites, it is considered to be more important - their 'ranking' will increase. If the sites from which the links originate are high ranking sites, then the links will confer even more value.

Our linking strategy should be t0

• get links on relevant directories and related sites.
  
• Avoid links from the dark side of the web and artificial gimmicks that will lower our rank.

Change - the more a site is updated, the more relevant it is considered. If a search engine finds that the site changes frequently, it will consider it more relevant and improve the ranking.

Our content strategy should be to:

• Update the front page at least once a month
  
• Add new content as our development continues
  
• Make the site interesting for our clients!

As we implement changes to our website we hope to see our results improve. We have installed widgets that tell us the Alexa scores for our site and our competitors as well as a tool that gives us our Google rank every day. Currently we are ranked as site 3,851,993 by Alexa and we have four sites linking to us. We are considered a page rank 3 out of 10 by Google.

We've got some work to do - Let's spread the word!

Web traffic

In our recent marketing website upgrade we have taken a serious look at our web traffic. Historically our marketing efforts have focused on networking and selling to individuals can companies that we have specifically targeted. We have not focused on the web as a primary marketing tool but rather as a support where people can find additional information about us.

Now I would like to put this site to use and help it generate business for us. It's time for the website to get to work! But how do I make our site easier to find and more useful to potential clients?

The first thing that I needed to do is study our current traffic. How were people navigating our site? How did they find us? How popular were we?

It used to be that you had to use special software to analyze your log files to determine the behaviour of visitors. This is no longer necessary. There is a free tool from Google - 'Google Analytics' that allows you to automatically track user behaviour by just adding a small piece of code on your pages.

With these reports I could also see what visitors searched for to find our site and how they navigated the site. It is interesting to see what people click on - it was not what I expected! This information was very informative for the site redesign!

The next thing I wanted to know was how we compared to our competitors. Was our site more of less popular than theirs? Again, there is a useful web tool to help us figure this out. Alexa at www.alexa.com tracks and maintains statistics on web traffic for several years back. The site allows comparisons of different sites so we can see how we fare against our competitors.

First of all, the results tell us that we are in a very small niche. In terms of popularity rank on the internet here are some of our clients:

• Traffic Rank for cadillacfairview.com 756,450 - (756,450th most popular site on the web)
• Traffic Rank for oxfordproperties.com: 2,347,908 -
• Traffic Rank for redcliffrealty.com: 4,276,079
• Traffic Rank for dundeerealty.com - insufficient data!
  

And here are the results for service providers - including us:

• Traffic Rank for realnet.ca: 2,587,071


• Traffic Rank for spacedatabase.com: 3,851,993


• Traffic Rank for xmeasures.com: 6,076,412


• Traffic Rank for lasertechfloorplans.com: 8,924,117


• Traffic rank for stevensonsystems.com - insufficient data

As you can see, we are doing quite will without any web marketing or search engine optimization! There are, I believe two reasons for these good results. First, many clients log in to our online system to manager their files. Second, we are embedded in many client sites and serve up reports and drawings that would count to our web traffic.

If we look at the web traffic analysis, we find that less than 25% of our visitors reach us through a search engine. Without our web applications, our popularity would be much lower. We clearly have some work to do if we are to raise our web profile.

The Fragile Advantage of Technology

We have so many new tools to help us be productive. Cell phones, Blackberries and other PDAs, we have ever more powerful computers with increasingly sophisticated software tools. The internet itself has incredible capabilities to speed things up. And yet for every benefit there seems to be a number of risks and drawbacks that threaten to equal or outweigh any benefits. For example:

• Email is a great tool for communication. It lets us stay on top of many projects and maintain threads of communication with many more people than would be possible otherwise. The downside is that there may be too much communication. Overuse of the cc function and other junk clutter up mailboxes to the extent that important messages are missed. Email pop-ups also become a constant distraction. Responding quickly to messages interrupts our concentration which in turn dramatically reduces productivity. So does email make us more or less productive overall? (it's too late now - could you ever live without it?)
  
• Blackberries extend email to wherever we happen to be - and it leverages the benefits as well as the problems with email . The are called 'Crackberries' for a reason - they are very hard to ignore. And if other people know you have one, there is a sense of guilt in not responding quickly - they know that you seen the message! Focus and concentration is reduced even further. We've all been in meetings where several people are present but absent - in a Blackberry prayer!
  
• The internet is a powerful tool for business. For the delivery of our services it has become an essential tool to communicate with clients, to organize data and to manage thousands of update requests. For sales and business development it is a powerful tool to conduct research on clients and competitors. But the presence of a web browser on every desk is a great temptation for goofing off. Countless hours are lost to news - sites, weather, Facebook and various other interests.
  
• Technology itself can have huge hidden costs. Computer crashes, hardware and software problems, printer errors and network problems will bring work to a standstill. A few technical glitches can quickly wipe out all the marginal improvements in productivity that all this expensive technology was supposed to realize.
  
• Finally, just because we have the technology installed and working properly, there is no guarantee that we will actually use it to its full potential. Take AutoCAD for example. It used to be with the DOS version that commands were accessed through keyboard shortcuts. When the windows version came out, toolbar buttons were introduced. It turns out that the keyboard commands speed up drafting significantly - but new trainees aren't in the habit of using them. Another example is word processing and email. These tools can greatly boost productivity - but only if you know how to type at a reasonable speed. If you have to get others to do the typing for you, the benefits of technology are lost.
  

  If we are not careful , technology can significantly reduce productivity rather than improve it. But even if we felt that technology had no net benefits, we would still be compelled to use it. We really have no choice in the adoption of technology. Network effects cause the use of technology to be essential. We have to use it to be compatible with the rest of the economy. We have to use CAD and email for no other reason that everyone else is using it.
  

  Rather than seeing technology itself as a source of competitive advantage (which it is not if it is available to everyone else), we should see the appropriate management of these tools as something that can confer an advantage. The advantage then is really the avoidance of the traps that others fall into.
  

  The promise of technology is to automate drudgery - to do away with repetitive tasks. Technology should allow us all to focus on value creating activities and reduce administration and support costs. So how do we benefit from the upside and minimize the downside of technology? I think the only way is discipline. Discipline to manage our technology and network to minimize problems and downtime. Discipline to thoroughly learn the skills required to leverage technology. And finally, the self-discipline to avoid the temptations and distractions that are inevitably present.
  

   
   

Google Earth Portfolios

At Space Database we have become fascinated with Google Earth. It is a great tool for getting a visual understanding of real estate and the surrounding context. Through our research, we have developed a way to integrate Space Database information so that we can navigate through client portfolios using Google Earth.

This interface represents a fundamentally different way of organizing information. Traditionally building portfolios have been thought of and organized in groups and lists based on building type and region. The tree-view left-hand control is the ultimate result of this conceptualized hierarchy. Google Earth lets us replace this model with one that is much closer to reality - the actual spatial relationships of the buildings themselves. We can use this intelligent map as a replacement for tree and list based organization.

For this to work, users will need Google Earth. It is a free download from Google; you can get it at http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html. It does require administrator rights to install, so if you can't get this at the office right away, you can try it at home. It is a very cool tool!

Once you have Google Earth installed, paste one of these links into your browser:

• http://www.SpaceDatabase.com/GE/RedcliffRealtyManagementInc.kml
  
• http://www.SpaceDatabase.com/GE/Dundee.kml
  
• http://www.SpaceDatabase.com/GE/SlatePropertiesInc.kml
  

You should see an entire portfolio displayed as a collection of icons on the globe. Now if you click on more than one portfolio you will see more icons and overlapped logos. We have not figured out how to 'unload' a set of objects yet.

We have not made a general announcement about this integration yet as it is still in the development stage - I have been emailing a few of our clients at a time to let them know about the prototype.

We will be able to modify the content of the pop-up windows with whatever links and text that we want. Your feedback will be very valuable in helping us design this interface. Please let me know if you have any ideas for how we can make this tool more useful.