Well, SolidWorks WORLD 2011 is over for another year and it did not disappoint. I have heard many in the SolidWorks community that were there that this was the best one ever, and I can honestly not disagree. The event staff did an outstanding job with everything at SolidWorks WORLD this year.
Wednesday morning General Session is usually the technology preview time of the show and this year did not disappoint. The day started off with Mike Puckett and Avelino Rochino introducing Matt Perez of SolidWorksLessons fame. Matt discussed his concepts behind some of the unbelievable car modeling that he has used SolidWorks for. I would definitely suggest that you check out his site to learn more about him.
Jeremy Luchini then took control of the main stage and was quickly joined by a special guest.
That’s right! Kevin Bacon was in the house. Kevin talked about what is was like making the movie Apollo 13 (recognize the connection to Monday’s special guests) and also spoke about his website sixdegrees.org.
Mark Schneider was up next and announced the winners of the popular Model Mania contest. Below you will find a picture of this years model and also the winners from both the customer and reseller groups.
Neil Cooke then jumped on stage to preview both SolidWorks n!Fuze and also SolidWorks Live Buildings which I will cover more in depth in upcoming posts.
The next chunk of the morning session dealt with the preview of SolidWorks 2012 and also the Top Ten enhancement requests driven by you, the users, in the forums. I will cover both of these in upcoming posts as well.
Bertrand Sicot, the new CEO at SolidWorks Corporation, then came on stage to wrap up the 3 day whirlwind of General Sessions. The announcement was made that on Thanksgiving Day of 2010 the 1,000,000th license of SolidWorks Educational Edition was shipped! What an unbelievable achievement. Tying into that Jeff Ray came on stage and introduced the crowd to an unbelievable 13 year old that is using SolidWorks at an early age to solve some complex problems. Riley Lewis is a 7th grader in San Jose, California that has used the software to design a lock pick, un-pickable locks, and also is currently using it on a project for his dad’s company.
Bertrand closed the session by announcing that SolidWorks WORLD 2012 will be held in San Diego, California on February 12 – 15, 2012. San Diego is a great place for a convention and is something that you should start planning on attending today.
Stay tuned for more in depth coverage of some of the previews shown last week and also for an all around assessment of SolidWorks WORLD 2011.
