Last week, we discovered we hadn’t won a prize in the final of the Apps Star Awards 2. Based on our success in previous competitions, and the enthusiastic support we are getting for our beta programme, I can’t deny there was a glimmer of hope for our entry, and a pang of disappointment when the winners were announced. There are, however, a number of positives we can take from this exercise.

The first, and one that proves the success of our online use of social media as a marketing tool, is that we received by far the most ‘thumbs up’ votes for our category. It may sound like a relatively unimportant accolade, and clearly wasn’t a key factor for the judges, but it does validate the time we have spent nurturing an online community who are genuinely interested in Woobius’s progress.

The second benefit we gained is exposure to the judges – a formidable bunch who included Mike Butcher (TechCrunch), Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and even Robert Scoble. Each in their own way, the 30 judges exert a unique influence over the future of App trends and recognition from them can only be a good thing.

Lastly, we found the third positive aspect of entering the competition, and the one that is least obvious, came about through our response to the requirement of producing a 30 second movie to explain what Woobius Eye is all about.

You might have noticed that in previous blogs we have been asking our readers to suggest novel uses for the application. This is not because we don’t know ourselves what it can be used for, rather there are so many potential uses that we don’t believe we have thought of them ourselves. The challenge, therefore, was to condense this plethora of uses into one key message that is holistic in its explanation.

The competition schedule gave us little time to develop this train of thought and the result can be seen here. I think it’s a great little video combining the drawing skills of Bob and the musical talent of Cliff, but I wonder (and the competition result backs this up) if we have quite cracked the message yet.

What is great, though, is that entering this competition has made us think further about how we portray the Eye, and how we can condense its essence into a format that allows the viewer to instantly recognize its purpose, simplicity and usefulness. This is of course all part of developing the brand message, and if now the brief for the Eye has switched, from an emphasis on the construction industry to a potential multi-purpose tool for all walks of life, we have an interesting challenge on our hands. I’d love to hear any ideas you might have on how we should achieve this, so please do leave a message below.

(I would also like to congratulate Bob on learning how to animate his sketches over a sleepless 24 hours prior to the competition. There is nothing like a deadline to increase productivity and learn new skills!)

As this blog goes to press I’ve heard the Eye has been nominated in another award. This time it’s the MEX award – an international design competition for cutting edge mobile and multi-platform experiences. We have qualified under the category ‘innovation’ despite not yet being launched as a commercial product. Please have a look , and should you feel our nomination is worthy of a prize, feel free to show your support by clicking on the 5th star under the title.

Last week, James and I sat down to a black tie dinner event at the Tower Hotel in London, a yearly affair called the Construction Computing Awards (and also known as “The Hammers”). On the surface, few things seemed to have changed since the previous year. A similar set of people turned up. It was still a black tie event, with a three-course meal, a comedian and some music. It was even held in the same conference hall. Walking through the crowd, it would have been hard to tell whether the year was 2009 or 2008.

Yet, underneath the surface, there has been a sea-shift in the world of construction and construction computing, as in most of the business world. I’m not referring to the recession and its unpleasant side-effects. The last year was about the rise of something very different and much more positive: social media.

One Year Ago

One year ago, we sat in the audience, but nobody knew us. Whobius? People noticed our unusual name on the seating plan. They chatted to us politely but disinterestedly. The event was about the same companies that had met for years, winning the same awards again.

One year ago, no one at this event talked about Facebook. Sites like LinkedIn were just a growing nuisance that companies had to firewall off and do their best to ignore, lest their precious employee time be squandered on “things that aren’t work”. Most people thought social media has no relevance in the corporate world.

One year ago, I didn’t use Twitter (I had an account that Daniel had made me create, but I didn’t use it). I wasn’t alone in this ignorance – there was no community of architects on Twitter, one year ago. We were all new to this. One year ago, I didn’t think we’d be able, so soon, to win an award. One year ago, we weren’t connected to the architecture community online, because there wasn’t much of a community to connect to.

This year

How quickly things have changed.

In just one year, Twitter has become the word on everyone’s lips. Famous and less famous people left, right, and centre are using it and doing something useful with it. The BBC has adopted it. There’s a popular, successful Architects League on Twitter. There’s a Twibe. There’s a growing Architecture subreddit. A thriving online community, in just one year.

In just one year, many organisations now have Facebook pages, blogs, youtube channels. Even in construction, which is predictably slow at adopting these technologies, people are aware of the changes, aware that they need to join in or be left behind, and they are beginning the motions to open up their organisation to this irresistible wave of progress. The problem is not to lock everyone in anymore, but to manage the incredible flow of information that permeates the modern organisation. The focus is (slowly but surely for some, and yet much more quickly for others) shifting from control to power and versatility.

And in just one year, our little young Woobius has gone from being unknown, the new kids on the block, to winning multiple awards this year, notably the “One to watch” company award last week. This didn’t happen through the traditional means of simply growing and being a large company. It happened because of our passionate users, who nominated us, voted for us, fought for us. Thank you, all of you who helped us. It means a lot to me.

Next year

As unimaginable as it might be now, I think that next year, the format of the Hammers event will change, evolve, and become better, larger, and more important than anyone might have guessed.

Here’s what I would like to see. Here’s my challenge, to all concerned.

It is unthinkable that the leading lights of AEC Social Media could be absent from next year’s award ceremony. The coming year must bring together the old and the new, the traditional and the revolutionary.

Similarly, the format of the event must evolve. Tomorrow’s business events are not three-course black tie dinners. Take a leaf from the tech events: set up an event where people can network, can meet each other, talk, build great connections, and learn new things. Throw in some excellent speakers (if Be2camp is anything to go by, there are plenty of great talks waiting to be made), speakers that can convey things that are important and relevant to the audience. Tickets for this kind of event need not be expensive. This model is effective, successful, and profitable within the tech industry, so why not within construction tech?

It sounds implausible that so much could change in one year, but then, how likely would today’s realities have seemed a year ago?

This year was year zero, the transition between the old and the new. Let next year be year one of the modern world of construction IT.

The Woobius team is keeping up the pressure at the Vodafone Mobile Clicks. Two more blogs have been posted with James and Bob performing superbly in front of the camera. If you you have not already seen these on the Vodafone website then please read on.

Woobius – A taste of Magic

Why has information technology had such an impact on our world? The one-word summary would be “automation”. Information technology has enabled us to automate many tasks which previously took a long time. It started with basic things like calculations, but progressively has evolved to encompass every area of human activity, whether personal, like making and keeping up with friends (via social networks), or business-related, like keeping track of accounts and logistics. At first, the benefits of automation seem obvious – it used to take an hour to perform task X, and now it takes a fraction of a second. But this obvious benefit masks a deeper, more transformative quality of automation.

When you turn a sixty-minute task into a fifty-minute task, all you gain is ten minutes. But when you turn a one-hour task into a sub-second task, you gain the ability to do things that were simply not conceivable beforehand. Communication is a great example of a human activity that’s been transformed in this way, thanks to technology’s magic touch. It used to be that to send a piece of information to someone in another town would take at least a few hours, if they were relatively close, or it might even have taken weeks if you were sending that information to someone in another country. Communications technology transformed this reality: today, we can send messages instantly around the world. The result? Internet forums that span the globe, and enable people to collaborate on work that they would previous have had to do on their own.

Any time you reduce the time cost of a task by a factor of a hundred, there’s going to be this kind of qualitative change in the air soon.

One of the processes that Woobius enhances is what’s known as the “issue” process, whereby an architect issues newly updated drawings to the design team, the contractors, or another entity involved with the project. A long time ago, before the internet, this would have taken a couple of days, to print out the drawings, sort them, mail them, and wait for them to be delivered. Ten years ago, some collaboration tools were developed that cut down this time to an afternoon or so. That was an improvement that enabled larger projects to be conducted more efficiently. Today, with a tool like Woobius, this process has been cut down to a matter of minutes.

In this video below, Bob Leung and James Goodfellow, two architects, take you through the simple steps of issuing a set of drawings. It’s so simple, one might wonder how it could ever have taken so long to do it in the past – much like today’s teenagers probably wonder how the world ever functioned without mobile phones.

Woobius – One small step for man…

Yesterday, 40 years ago, man landed on the moon for the first time. 20% of the world’s population tuned in to watch grainy images of Neil Armstrong and listen to those famous words ‘just one step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’

A team of 400,000 specialists worked to make the project happen. That’s a great deal of people transferring a lot of information between each other. What’s more, when Apollo XI left earth there were no cell phones, no laptops, not even pocket calculators, and the primary media for information transfer were blueprints, ink pens, and slide rules.

Fast forward 40 years and our cell phones are capable of more computing power than the biggest computers that put man on the moon. That’s a phenomenal thought.

Applications to harness this power, however, are still in their infancy and it is up to the bright minds of today to apply the technology available to create solutions for each and every one of us.

NASA’s specialism is space flight. Our specialism is construction. Whether it is 400,000 people working on a project or 40, what we have in common is the need for successful teamwork to realize a project. A key ingredient to this is the management of information flow between all parties involved.

As you will see in our third blog post, the construction industry is prone to delay and error, because of the impracticalities of transferring information from the architects office to multiple paper copies at the construction site, and vice versa. It is a familiar problem, and no doubt something suffered back in 1969, but we have the advantage that mobile technology provides a platform on which a solution can be developed.

Currently, Woobius satisfies the need for a collaboration link between one office and another. The introduction of the ‘Woobius Eye’ takes this one step further into real time, on the move, mobile collaboration.

Last Thursday, some of the Woobius team attended an event called The Hammers III, a “construction computing awards” dinner.

The point of the evening was to give awards to industry leaders amongst software firms that provide construction-related software, to recognise their contribution to the creation of great architecture. As a provider of such software ourselves, we (the Woobius team) wanted to attend, if only to become better acquainted with how the industry thinks.

Take-aways and insights

First of all, the construction computing community is small and tightly knit. There were not a great number of people at the awards ceremony, and everyone knew about everyone else (except for us of course). People were very open and friendly, and willing to discuss almost anything. There was very little competitivity on display.

This matches with what we discovered during our market research: the industry is very entrenched, almost an old boy’s club of companies with strong client relationships, servicing the top tier of the industry (large practices with large projects).

Everyone was of course worried about the coming recession and its impact on construction, but not overly so. There were some slightly snide remarks about such and such firm having mostly banks as clients (with obvious implications), but beyond that, no one seemed to feel that the recession would overly affect them.

An understated event

Another important point, immediately obvious when we arrived and looked at the seating plan, was how small the event was in comparison with typical architectural awards such as the Leaf awards or the FX award. There were, all told, at most 120 people there. Most of them came with two to three colleagues or clients. There were about twenty awards. Simple maths implies that most of the guests were there to receive awards.

Part of the evening involved a stand-up comedian lightening up the mood after dinner. Opinions vary about whether he was funny (I thought he was!), but one of the recurring themes of his jokes was making fun of the industry – from the lack of female attendance to the inescapable “not fun” factor of the intersection between corporate IT and construction. Both of those industries are traditionally regarded as “boring” – male-dominated, not very dynamic, a bit stodgy, etc, and our comedian exploited this thoroughly.

In many ways, he made the event smaller than it was and than it deserves to be, encouraging the industry’s least flattering stereotypes, downplaying its impact and importance, and making everyone feel like they should be slightly embarrassed to be there at all.

The most important

This is a mistake. Computing underlies almost all of architecture today, and much of construction. Many of the iconic buildings of the past decade were only possible by harnessing the power of computers. The construction computing awards ceremony should be the biggest and most exciting in the industry. The future of architecture is driven by computing, and these awards should reflect this fact.

If there is one constant driver for the evolution of the construction industry, throughout history, it is technology. And over the last half-century, much of that evolution has been driven by advances in computing technology. CAD software, as unexciting as it may seem on the surface, has made possible architectural prowess that could not have been dreamed of in the past. Collaboration technologies have allowed companies large and small to collaborate across geographical boundaries. Rapid prototyping tools are revolutionising the creative process by allowing architects to evolve their designs much more rapidly. Even new materials and fixtures have become achievable thanks to advances in computer modelling tools.

Of all the awards ceremonies in the construction industry, this should be the most important one. We sincerely hope that in the future, it will be.