The Jobsite of 2025 | Construction Today

Published on the Construction Today Blog
June 15, 2012
By James Benham, President of JB Knowledge Technologies, Inc. 

Who doesn’t enjoy a good tennis match on the Wii? And the Kinect/XBox combination is also pretty cool (even if the voice recognition software could use a little fine-tuning.) But a recent development announced by San Francisco startup Leap Motion has officially made both the Wii and Kinect look as technologically advanced as Lincoln Logs in comparison.

The newly announced Leap 3-D Motion Control system is accurate to a hundredth of a millimeter. It’s “200 times more sensitive than anything on the market” and “creates a ‘three-dimensional interaction space’ of four cubic feet and is more precise and responsive than a touchscreen or a mouse,” reported CNET.

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The Must-Have Technology Tools, Part 3 – Staying Social and Mobile | Construction Today

from SmartBidNet.com

This is the final part of a three-part series.

By James Benham, President of JB Knowledge Technologies

Previously, we’ve discussed Google’s suite of useful freeware and solutions that are revolutionizing preconstruction and BIM. Now I’d like to wrap it up and discuss social and mobile tech, as they are quickly finding their way from your personal life into your work day.

Social Media

For those of you who had hoped to avoid the ever-growing social network scene, it’s probably best you give in now. Not only do sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ help you connect with industry personalities and brands that could lead to business opportunities, they are also very powerful project management platforms. LinkedIn Answers is a human-powered search engine, ready at all times to poll the architecture, engineering, and construction professionals you need insight from, both inside and outside your personal network. I’ve used it to gather opinions on everything from which software providers we should team up with to which apps everyone is most excited about.  Facebook Groups and Pages give project teams an online space to share events and discussions, whether in the design, bid, construction, or follow-up phase of development. Twitter can be a powerful jobsite, project, news and job notification tool to reach internal and external stakeholders. And if you haven’t tried a Google+ Hangout yet for a project team video conference, I highly recommend you do so. With 70 percent of daily mobile device use being social media, it is one of the best mediums to communicate with employees, clients, and prospects alike.

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The Jobsite of the Future | Construction Executive

from SmartBidNet.com - a product of JBKnowledge

Construction Executive Magazine | January 17, 2012 

The Jobsite of the Future  
By James M. Benham  

Thirty years ago, construction projects involved a great deal of snail mail, phone calls to landlines, stacks of blueprints and a few Rolodexes. Today, microwave-sized desktop computers are a fading memory, and customized project management software comes to the rescue at least once a day. There’s also a 40 percent chance readers will view this article on their smartphones.  

The construction industry wasn’t always so progressive. During the last 10 years, industry professionals started to see the benefit of paperless plan rooms and automated systems. Now imagine what technology will be used in the next 50 years. From holograms to self-sufficient robots, developing technology suggests what a construction site of the future might look like...

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