Lagoa, a cloud-based provider of CAD visualization software technology and solutions, has apparently hush-hushed news to press at the recent COFES 2014 event in Scottsdale, Arizona, that the company intends to launch a SolidWorks rival product entirely in the cloud. The cloud-based 3D MCAD modeler will be based on the Parasolid modeling kernel, something we have written about here at Architosh quite a bit.
MORE: Architosh Talks to Dr. Biplab Sarkar About Parasolid
Roopinder Tara of The CAD Insider broke the story from a few days ago, noting that Thiago Costa, CEO of Lagoa, likely moved his company from Canada to the Boston area a few years ago due to proximity to venture capital money. Indeed, not only is Boston home to venture capital money on the scale of Silicon Valley, but is a bastion of CAD industry players, including Autodesk, PTC, Dassault and a few others. And let’s not forget the influence of MIT and nearby AMD/ATI.
The report says the new MCAD modeler will enable two people to work on an assembly at the same time. When one user moves a part in the assembly the other user will see the update. Sounds a lot like the latest BIM technology available today.
01 – This is a new image provided to us from the Boston-based Lagoa. It replaces an image we had previously ran with from older coverage. We note that the UI work has been updated in the latest versions of Lagoa’s tech.
Architosh has written about Lagoa before, when they introduced a new cloud-based rendering and design collaboration platform with solutions for 3D and design professionals. Lagoa, the rendering solution, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux because it runs through modern browsers instead of a desktop install.
The company’s interface technology is attractive and its “simply for the sake of liberation” is akin to Apple’s early and present era. Lagoa looks to be attempting to do what we thought Apple might venture to do in the world of BIM back in 2010 when we heard a note at a Washington DC event that Frank Gehry once muttered to Steve Jobs (one of Frank’s friends) that maybe Apple should buy Gehry Technologies and liberate BIM? Hmm…
If SolidWorks is just an overly complex Parasolids wrapper, as Thiago Costa of Lagoa makes mention to Roopinder Tara at COFES, then perhaps his instinct is akin to Frank Gehry’s.
Speaking of “liberation” Architosh will be featuring another liberation story soon from a kind of wunderkid in the 3D tech industry…this one LA based. Stay tuned!
[Editor’s note: This story was updated with a new image and we fixed two small typos. – 30 April 2014, 2:12 PM.]