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1st Pricing Close to Patent on Automated BIM Pricing

Posted on Friday, December 14, 2007 11:17 AM
Software firm 1st Pricing says the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued it a “Notice of Allowance” based on their automated pricing technology application for building information modeling (BIM) software. A “Notice of Allowance” is generally the immediate precursor to the issuance of a patent where the application is approved but not yet issued.

The 1st Pricing vision is to "streamline the building material supply chain for the entire building industry” said Douglas Lopez,  1st Pricing founder. “Imagine passing an automatically generated bill of materials, complete with comparative, line-item pricing for real-world products through the entire supply chain process without ever having to re-type the data and virtually eliminating errors."

The idea is to offer a search engine specifically designed for CAD and BIM that operates as a closed-loop supply chain solution that searches for specified building materials originating from the architect’s desktop. Today, the Company is focused on building materials for residential construction but plans to add commercial building products in the future. 1st Pricing refers to the supply chain as the fifth dimension of CAD, or 5D, a phrase others have started to use as well.

1st Pricing currently offers free plug-ins for users of AutoCAD and TurboCAD. Plug-ins for AutoCAD Architecture and ArchiCAD are in beta and expected to be released in the first quarter of 2008.

 

  --RSN

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# re: 1st Pricing Close to Patent on Automated BIM Pricing

1/1/2008 5:35 PM by MRB
What exactly is BIM? I saw this topic on a blog on CE NEWS' website as well...is this an emerging technology for the industry?

MRB
www.CivilEngineeringCentral.com
building teams . engineering careers

# re: 1st Pricing Close to Patent on Automated BIM Pricing

1/3/2008 8:38 PM by Brian Myers
MRB-

BIM stands for Building Information Modeling. While often it will be described as a "software product" in reality the software is designed to support the BIM concept. BIM is the process of embedding real information into the building model, in essence creating a real building with real walls, doors, windows, materials, etc only in an electronic environment. Its the direction the Architectural profession will be/currently is heading in its design process and these designs will be used downstream to coordinate building construction and lifecycle simulation and management of the structure.

This software (by 1st Price) is geared to make use of this real building in digital form (the BIM model) to expedite the process of cost estimating and ordering of materials.

# re: 1st Pricing Close to Patent on Automated BIM Pricing

1/11/2008 2:07 PM by Douglas Lopez
MRB and Brian,

1stpricing is set up two bring back information such as pricing back to the architects desk top. We will also be bringing back other information that will be announced soon. In addition to providing “buy it now” pricing we also automatically build shopping carts that can be used by entering a reference number we give when we send back the pricing to the plan drawer. So in essence we send back the pricing to the architect and it builds a list that can be put right on the plans and we send back a reference number which you can access pre-built shopping carts that have been generated from the construction plans.

# re: 1st Pricing Close to Patent on Automated BIM Pricing

1/13/2008 6:28 AM by Douglas Lopez
(Please forgive my typo in the above article. I have re-submitted here)

1stpricing is set up to bring back information such as pricing back to the architectural desk top. We will also be bringing back other information that will be announced soon. In addition to providing “buy it now” pricing we also automatically build shopping carts that can be used by entering a reference number we give when we send back the pricing to the plan drawer. So in essence we send back the pricing to the architect and it builds a list that can be put right on the plans and we send back a reference number which you can access pre-built shopping carts that have been generated from the construction plans.
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