Interview: CadFaster of Finland talks to Architosh about BIM and Mobility

When most people think of Finland as a technology leader one name comes to mind: Nokia. However, the Scandinavian country’s spectrum of innovation spans much farther than telecommunications. For many years now Finland has been one of Europe’s best hot beds for software innovation, and some of its brightest companies have been in the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) industry.

And there is a reason for all of this. Finland–like Sweden–as a nation spends roughly 3.5 percent of its GDP on research and development (R&D). Most EU countries are shooting for just 3 percent. And they have been investing in education for decades, preparing vigorously to compete in high-end niche innovation markets as a pathway away from more cut-throat technology competition from Asia.

Since awarding CadFaster | Collaborate the “BEST of SHOW” award, in Mobility Category, at the 2012 AIA National Convention for architects in the US last year, we have been excited to talk more deeply with this Finnish software innovator.

Tuomas Holma is a vice president and heads their global marketing and sales. He is also the guy you may meet on the show floor when CadFaster is attending a conference and exhibit. Over the past few weeks I’ve had an opportunity to discuss with Tuomas many facets of CadFaster’s business, products and views on their industry .

The Interview

Anthony Frausto-Robledo (AFR): Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of CadFaster the company, who are its main creators and what are their backgrounds?

Tuomas Holma (TH): CadFaster was established in 2009 but its founders have worked together for more than 10 years in the area of 3D visualization. The original idea was to apply advances made in gaming technology to the domain of CAD visualization, which was far from “real time” and “fast.”

The company wanted to make CAD visualization (user experience) faster. Thus CadFaster. There were some serious attempts to cooperate with CAD vendors in the very beginning, but without success. Therefore CadFaster focused on its own products.

AFR: Did CadFaster’s technology have some of its beginnings at the University level in Finland? Are there any connections to Academia?

TH: CadFaster core technology was developed in-house utilizing the latest available component technologies developed by open communities, universities and commercial companies. Our founders have some university connections and have received some government grants for R&D (research and development) in the past.

Product Orientation

AFR: What target market did you guys start with CadFaster? Was it AEC or did you do the Solidworks (MCAD) market first?

TH: We started in MCAD market. Our first product was CadFaster | QuickStep, which has now been downloaded over 350,000 times since 2010, and we have over 50,000 active users for the free version. QuickStep is an ultra-fast viewer for STEP, IGES, DWG and DXF files.

We have largely neglected these users for the past three years due to our focus on the AEC market. That is about to change as we have just released a new product for our MCAD users. The new product is called MyCadbox.

AFR: So that’s a surprise. So tell me a little about that new offering.

TH: It combines the best features of CadFaster | QuickStep and CadFaster | Collaborate bringing in an important new innovation: ease of sharing. We noticed that sharing of 3D CAD models is really difficult whereas products like Dropbox and iCloud have made sharing and syncing of files very easy, automated.

We have now brought this ease of sharing to everyone who needs to access 3D CAD files. Files are also synched automatically between PC and iPad as in Dropbox or Apple iCloud. Our first release supports STEP format.

next page: More on Product Orientation (Screenshots)

AFR: So what is happening now with CadFaster | QuickStep. Did MyCadbox replace it or are they two separate apps?

TH: Although we believe MyCadbox will benefit most QuickStep users, we will have CadFaster | QuickStep as well. Some people prefer software that works completely without an Internet connection so we want to provide them that option to use QuickStep.

AFR: Do you consider CadFaster a BIM application?

TH: BIM is about collaboration, sharing of data and information for intelligent decision making. Although a lot of the BIM debate revolves around BIM authoring tools, many other tools are needed to get the information to use. CadFaster provides an app for sharing 3D related information. It is one piece in the BIM puzzle.

AFR: How influential is the Finland AEC industry on your product’s strategic direction and how does it compare to other markets abroad?

TH: Finland is an interesting BIM country in the sense that Finnish Common BIM Requirements were first published already in 2007 by Senate Properties (government property owner) and then maintained and updated by buildingSMART Finland. So they have very much embraced open BIM standard development and utilization much the same way as in Norway, for example.

Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) are widely used in Finland in BIM collaboration. Finnish software companies such as Tekla, Solibri and Progman (MagicCAD), among others, have contributed to the development of open standards, tools and practices. So I think Finland is a great place for AEC software development. For CadFaster, however, it was crucial to look at wider market possibilities so we have focused on the International markets from the very beginning. One of our key focus markets has been the UK for the simple reason that I am based there. UK has been making great advances in BIM recently thanks to cooperation between industry and the government.

AFR: Speaking of governments, how big is your largest customer or client using CadFaster? Are there governments in Finland, UK or elsewhere who are actively using CadFaster | Collaborate?

TH: We are mostly working with corporate customers but we have cooperated with some universities and given them free licenses. Our biggest customer has about 1,000 architects and they have a firm-wide license for CadFaster | Collaborate. At the other end, we have many customers who are much smaller in size. This just shows how versatile CadFaster | Collaborate is.

AFR: It shows that CadFaster scales. Not all products do.

TH: Yes.

AFR: CadFaster is an excellent real-time communication tool and not just for multi-party real-time model viewing, does this mean your company could promote this to the product design markets? And if so, will you go beyond the Solidworks market?

TH: Referring to my earlier answer on target markets, yes this is very much what we could do and what we plan on doing with MyCadbox. We are initially testing the market with STEP support but plan to go way beyond that with our future releases. Our future goal is to converge CadFaster | Collaborate with MyCadbox in order to bring ease of sharing to AEC users as well.

AFR: Beyond BIM many architects use Trimble’s SketchUp for design models and share these as well. Do you intend to support sharing of SketchUp models either via MyCadbox or a CadFaster product? And if not why?

TH: Plug-in development and support is very time consuming so we want to avoid additional plug-ins. We hope to increase the number of native formats supported using import libraries. Unfortunately, there are not many open libraries for the AEC side.

next page: Understanding CadFaster the Tool

Understanding CadFaster the Tool

AFR: Part of the big magic in CadFaster is your proprietary 3D model format. How much smaller are 3D files under your format once they are exported from their native model file format? Are we talking an order of magnitude?

TH: Yes, typically files are only 5-20 percent of their original size. The compression rate depends on the complexity of the geometry. But we actually want to fade away the need to think about the file size.

AFR: What do you mean by that?

TH: Every model should run smoothly on mobile devices regardless of their file size in the native format. We are pretty close to this already. For MyCadbox we define the user quota as number of models rather than megabytes because users think in terms of models.

AFR: Is there still real opportunity to further decrease 3D model data to the point where it can easily be shared even over 3G networks with excellent results?

TH: Yes. We can do this with the combination of file compression, cloud optimizations and intelligent data transfer protocols. There remains a need to transfer model data to the mobile device. With the help of optimizations and local cache we can limit the bandwidth requirements to a minimum.

AFR: There is little to no latency between the host and guest users of CadFaster through the cloud. Can you describe to us technically what is going on between this multi-party communication? What protocol or protocols are being utilized over the Web?

TH: Our collaboration server pushes limited markup and viewing control datasets to all participants simultaneously. Basically, only information on changes is sent over the Internet to every participant. As we don’t stream visualization data during  the collaboration session, the amount of data is extremely small. The protocols we use are standard Internet protocols.

AFR: When does your company plan to release a native version of CadFaster Viewer for the Mac desktop? With Apple’s growing market share and popularity with mobiles, in particular, I think many AEC professionals’ clients–and the professionals themselves–would benefit from this?

TH: We are already supporting Apple platforms with our two iPad apps, CadFaster and MyCadbox. We think the iPad is the most exciting platform for design collaboration at the moment. People need to make decisions while on the move. We think our competitive edge is in mobile collaboration. But it does not mean that Mac OS X is not in our roadmap. We do get many requests for that. But I cannot give you a timetable just yet. Hopefully within 2013.

AFR: What is the mono framework MRE for when installing the plugin for Vectorworks on the Mac?

TH: Mono framework is used to run Microsoft.NET applications cross-platform. In our case it is prerequisite for installing CadFaster | Collaborate for Vectorworks plugin on the Mac.

AFR: Can you share with me the technical relationship between CadFaster and Google OpenID system?

TH: We started using OpenID in login for security reasons. With OpenID we don’t store user passwords, Google stores the passwords and we just request user authentication from Google through OpenID. For MyCadbox we needed a more flexible sharing schema so we opted for MyCadbox’ own ID, which enables registration with any email address.

next page: Understanding CadFaster the Tool

Understanding CadFaster in the Cloud

AFR: CadFaster is a cloud solution. Can you tell us more about CadFaster and the cloud in general terms? And how your company views the cloud going forward?

TH: First, we want to use the cloud in the same manner as Dropbox and Evernote or as many of the OS X/ iOS apps do; to enable real-time collaboration between people, and automated syncing between different devices. Second, we want to use the cloud to enable fast 3D on mobile devices that are much less powerful than desktop computers. For the end-user it should be seamless and effortless; they should not have to think about whether something happens in the cloud or not.

AFR: Those are good examples you cite above that reflect that experience philosophy. Are the comments being made during the session attached to each users’ device at the end of a saved session or are they getting stored up in the cloud? How does commenting exactly work?

TH: We don’t save comments on individual devices because that would jeopardize real-time collaboration. We push comments in real-time through a collaboration server to every participant. Comments are stored in the collaboration server in the cloud.

AFR: But just to be clear, the models themselves are pushed down to the devices and cached on the device, correct?

TH: If the model is in the cache it will be opened from the cache

AFR: Live Section is one of CadFaster’s coolest features. But it doesn’t appear on the iPad version.

TH: Live Section is not yet available on the iPad version. We will be bringing it there in the future so stay tuned.

AFR: On the desktop you also have the ability to do more things with control of layers…is this too also coming to the iPad at some point?

TH: Eventually, all desktop features are feasible on the iPad but we just need some time to introduce them. Section views and layer control are the biggest differences at the moment.

iPad: What Apple Needs to Do to Stay Ahead

AFR: It is clear Apple has competition in the mobile market, especially from Google. Yet, I am excited to hear you say that the iPad is the most exciting platform for design collaboration at the moment. That last part of your sentiment clearly shows that CadFaster is aware of Apple’s competition. So what does Apple need to do to keep the iPad and iOS the most exciting platform going forward? What does a future iPad have the ability to do that would make things more exciting and possible for the future of CadFaster?

TH: Form factor, specifications well suited for 3D graphics and popularity make [Apple’s] iPad such an exciting platform for CadFaster products. I am sure Apple has a fantastic roadmap for iPad. However, competition from Windows tablets may become harder in the corporate market soon. Hopefully, this strives Apple to introduce even more advanced products. These are exciting times for software developers and end users!

The Future of CadFaster

AFR: And talking about exciting times…where does CadFaster want to go? We have seen the new survey and have read it and there are lots of interesting questions. What are some of the few key things you can talk about that are coming from the industry side on a larger scale that will affect CadFaster over time?

TH:  3D, BIM, mobile, and the cloud are creating very interesting opportunities for us. We want to develop better and better products for the users. We want to partner with other companies and user communities to bring these products to the market. The future looks very bright but we don’t want to think too far; the best product idea might be just around the corner and we have to keep our mind open! Or maybe we already have it in MyCadbox…

AFR: Thanks for talking to us about CadFaster and its unique mobile and cloud-based CAD products.

TH: You are very welcome.

Learning More

Architosh will be publishing a review of CadFaster for iPad next week, as part of a special series on the iPad in architecture. In the meantime, you can learn more about CadFaster | Collaborate and MyCadbox here.