Fresh off his appearance at the SolidWorks World 2008, the largest conference of its kind, Dean Kamen is in the news again. Kamen, who invented the Segway, has been back at the drawing board again for the last couple of years and this time he was working on a project for the government. He has now invented a prosthetic arm that weighs as much as a human arm AND has the same range of motion and the same sensitivity as its human counterpart. Check out this feature on him from the Yahoo! tech ticker section to get all of the details on this awesome new invention.

At SolidWorks World 2008 Dean encouraged all of those in attendance to participate in yet another one of his handiworks, US First. It was a great presentation and I know that if excited a lot of attendees who heard him and could feel his passion for this program. If you are interested in getting involved in this program check out all of the details here.

Over the past 1 or 2 weeks there has been a lot of discussion across a majority of the blogs about SolidWorks and their attempt or desire to build a full fledged SolidWorks Community. Over the past couple of years social networking in general has taken off in directions that I never even imagined. There are sites like MySpace, Facebook, Pownce and Twitter. Even a site like Plaxo, that I use to manage my contacts, calendar and tasks across multiple computers now has a social networking area that you access through your account. I am sure there are probably hundreds more that I don’t even know about which blows my mind. The only social networking sites that I am a full participant in are Facebook and I am starting to use Twitter more and more.

Facebook has really taken off over the past couple of years now that it is open to anybody and everybody. I believe when the site first started it was only open to students of different levels but they soon opened it up to all and it has really taken off since then. I was never a member of MySpace so I have no idea of what it is like but I heard 1 person say it like this “Facebook is for the higher class of the social networking community compared to MySpace”.

Because of the big Facebook push lately I have been noticing a stronger contigency of SolidWorks related stuff on the site lately. Whether it be familiar faces from the blogs or people that I have met at SolidWorks World or SolidWorks employees, they seem to be popping up everywhere. What this results in is more “Groups” and “Events” and other things that pertain to SolidWorks within the Facebook site. I did a search for SolidWorks in Facebook and it gave me 194 People that mentioned SolidWorks in their profile (jobs, interests, likes, dislikes, etc.), 39 Groups that you could join that deal with SolidWorks (good and bad) and even 2 events (study groups) and 1 page.

Here is what all of this tells me. The SolidWorks Community is alive and strong as it is. People are already networking with other users through sites like this and others. Look at Josh Mings post last week about the SolidWorks Community that he has on Twitter. That is users interacting with users, on their own. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that SolidWorks needs to stay away from all of these type of sites but what I am saying is that I think the way it is now with users finding users and then finding a common ground between them, all on their own, is what builds a community, not a bigger company trying to do it for them. I love what SolidWorks has done RIGHT now for a community, things like SolidWorks World, Regional Tech Summits and User Groups.

They have done a marvelous job thus far and as the old saying goes “don’t fix something that isn’t broke”.

It sounds like SolidWorks 2009 Beta is right around the corner for everyone. Mike Puckett seems to have gotten the inside scoop in this years beta program during his visit to Concord, MA this week (Day 1 Report & Day 2 Report). It sounds like SolidWorks 2009 Beta will launch in early June 2008 and has a tentative scheduled release of early October for the new version of the software.

Mike did a fantastic job laying out all of the details that he found out concerning this years beta including some of the changes that you may notice from previous years. He even gave you a tip to get all kinds of points in his post so you better check out his post Official SolidWorks 2009 Beta Information.

I have never been a part of the beta program in the past but I am really looking forward to participating in it this year after seeing some of the cool features that were previewed to all of the attendees this year at SolidWorks World. I encourage all of you to take a little time to participate in the beta program because the more users that participate now will reduce the number of issues that the software comes shipped with in October.

So in order to get ready make sure you have an account for the SolidWorks Customer Portal, your computer is fine tuned for some crashing, your padded room to work in is ready to go and then wait to see that little link appear announcing that SolidWorks Beta 2009 has gone live.

Mike Puckett is on the road again, or in the air I guess would be more accurate. Mike is making an appearance to the SolidWorks Corporation headquarters in Concord, MA this week for the quarterly meeting that was held yesterday along some other meetings that he was able to attend. To see what happened (along with pictures) on his first day at SolidWorks headquarters check out his blog post SolidWorks Headquarters Visit Day 1.

I also believe that he will still be there today for some interviews so if you have any questions that you would like him to ask someone at SolidWorks add a comment to his post Questions for SolidWorks and hopefully he can try and get an answer for you.