Wed 17 Jan 3:00pm: It did snow in Vancouver, but that didn't affect my flight. It did affect me when I, walking through Concourse B of Chicago airport, suddenly wondered where my notebook computer might be. Racing back to Concourse C, I was so relieved that the United staff had found it on the airplane.
Arriving at Boston’s Logan airport, it was bitterly cold. The 21F (-8C) cold with 25 mph wind nearly froze my hand dragging my suitcase fruitlessly among the three long lines of waiting limos. Bizarrely enough, limo drivers have to stay with their vehicles. After several phone calls and an hour of waiting, I find that my “limo” is a maxi-van shuttle bus located on another level of the airport.
I’m now at PTC headquarter's, squeezed in with 83 other media and analysts listening to presenter Professor Joerg Feldhusen of Aachen Germany, speaking of research on product data management. Attendees are here from Canada, USA, France, Germany, China, England, Japan, and Korea. One reason for the overflow crowd (that I overheard) is that a number of analysts showed up last minute, hoping to get advance info on next week’s financial info. No such luck.
I’ll have fuller coverage of this event in next week’s upFront.eZine newsletter. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt:
Preview
Mike Campbell has a tough job. PTC’s vp of product development has to keep our interest, wedged between a dancing Japanese robot and lunch.
Yoichiro Dan of Japan’s ZMP gave a live demo of their Miuro robot (short for “Music Innovation based on Utility RObot technology”), the sixth of a series of educational and consumer robots developed by the company. Miruro is a music player with wheels – and speakers in the wheels. It gets its music from an inserted iPod or other MP3 player, or wirelessly from the Internet. It has a half-dozen dance modes, where it wheels and jitters about in time with the music. Sensors keep it from falling down stairs, off tables, and bumping into people.
Earlier in the day, ceo Dick Harrison boasted of PTC’s progress. He’s pretty thrilled, because his company has nearly accomplished its comeback, after losing its way around 1999-2001. The Pro/Engineer CAD software of the time was getting old; the company was betting on its WindChill PLM software, which was too green. So, PTC spent a $150 million rewriting Pro/E as “Wildfire,” and rewriting Windchill, changing it from a toolkit to an out-of-the-box product.
[Disclosure: PTC provided attendees with hotel accommodation, transportation, meals, and corporate gifts.]
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