Day 2 at SolidWorks WORLD 2011 is also in the books at this time and it seems like this year the event is flying by quicker than any of the others I have attended.

Day 2’s General Session was a great time to recognize users helping users with the announcements of the SWUGN awards and also a time to recognize customers that are doing amazing things with SolidWorks.

After Fielder Hiss opened the session with some general announcements the stage was handed over to Richard Doyle who is the User Community Manager.  Being a leader of a SWUGN group I can say that what Richard does day in and day out is far beyond what I could ever put into words and I appreciate everything that he does for the user community.  Every year SWUGN hands out awards for the User Group of the Year, the User Group Leader of the Year, and also a lifetime achievement award which was renamed this year to the Michelle Pillers SWUGN Community Award which is a lifetime achievement award for those that have been involved and dedicated a lot of their personal time to make SWUGN a success.  The 2011 winners were:

• User Group of the Year – Chicago SolidWorks User Group
• User Group Leader of the Year – Ed Gebo of the Connecticut SolidWorks User Group
• Michelle Pillers SWUGN Community Award – Wayne Tiffany

The other thing that happens on Tuesdays annually during the General Session is the spotlight of some unbelievable SolidWorks customers.  This year was no different.  Jon Hirschtick was up on stage to help spotlight these customers this year.

The 1st spotlight was of a customer that was officially customer #1 of SolidWorks.  In 1995 Barrett Technology, Inc. purchased the 1st ever seat of SolidWorks for $1,295.00 and as this say it has been history ever since.  Barrett is a manufacturer of robotic arms and have developed a robot that can run on (5) household 9V batteries.  What an amazing success.

The 2nd spotlight was on a company called MAKO Surgical Corporation which design robots to be used in surgery.  I was blown away with how they use SolidWorks.  What they do is the will take a 3D scan of someone’s knee if a knee placement surgery is pending and then they will take that scan into SolidWorks and model up a replacement knee to match the existing one.  How unbelievable is that.  A recent surgery patient joined the party on the stage and announced that he was walking 2 hours after having knee replacement surgery and was playing golf 3 weeks after.  Unbelievable!

The 3rd spotlight was different than the 1st two but an awesome story all the same.  The company is called Local Motors which uses an open source approach to building cars.  All of the decisions being made during the design and production of the cars are based on a community of everyday people like you and me.  Currently there are roughly 9,500 community members.  Each car has a limited quantity made (2,000) and it takes them ONLY 15 months to go from a 2D sketch to the 1st working prototype.

Unfortunately as the Bionic Builders were being introduced to the crowd I had to cut out to get ready for my presentation which started at 10:30 AM so I don’t have anything to report on them other than that what I did see them doing was great!

After another day full of technical training sessions and meetings with Partner Products we wrapped up the day at the conference off site event.  I will detail this event in a separate post because I feel that the SolidWorks Event Team deserves more the 1 sentence.

Stay tuned for all of the Wednesday happenings as more live coverage from SolidWorks WORLD is coming your way!