GrabCAD, Collaboration and Dropbox

One of the companies I’m watching is GrabCAD. Earlier, I was talking about GrabCAD’s idea of open CAD library and community for engineering. Another topic I discovered with GrabCAD in addition to be an open library was “crowdsourcing”. Navigate to the following link to read Manufacturing Crowdsourcing and Cloud PLM. The ideas of crowdsourced engineering projects are getting more and more popular. With companies like Quirky and Local motors, the interest to community-based development is growing.

With such a background, I was listening to GrabCAD webinar about new features that will be developed in GrabCAD soon. Here is the video from that webinar. It is a bit longish, but you can watch first half only, since the second half is Q&A.

http://vimeo.com/36968411

The following topic GrabCAD folks discussed is interesting – integration with DropBox. GrabCAD founders Hardi and Indrek mentioned that “collaboration” between GrabCAD users is one of the functionalities they have been thinking about long time. The story of collaboration seems to be interesting. In one of the early blogs about GrabCAD, Deelip Menezes mentioned that GrabCAD would be “more than just CAD library“. Navigate to the following link to read more. Here is a very interesting passage:

The plan here is not to limit GrabCAD to small CAD services like paper to CAD conversions, 2D to 3D conversions and the like. The plan is to offer a complete end-to-end solution which will include conceptual design though to manufacturing.

I’m looking forward to seeing GrabCAD / Dropbox integration release. Until now, I wasn’t able to see it released on GrabCAD (maybe I just miss dates and emails with the announcement).

What is my conclusion? “Collaboration” together with the “design though manufacturing”. What does it smell like? What does it look like? In my view, it smells and sounds like PLM. Is it a direction GrabCAD is going?  I don’t have the answer. I know, GrabCAD is very dynamic and young company. So, everything is possible…

Best, Oleg

Freebie. GrabCAD didn’t pay me to write this post.