Stories about: Autodesk

In this groundbreaking awards program, Computerworld US honors 12 user companies and another dozen vendors that are leading the way in green-IT. These green leaders are virtualizing, videoconferencing, turning down the cooling systems and turning off the lights. Top honors this year went to Highmark.

In 2007,we designated more than 90 start-ups as worth watching. After a second look, we picked these 10 as offering what matters most in the enterprise -- agility, seamless integration and pervasive connectivity.

A company that was just awarded more than US$140 million from Microsoft in a patent-infringement suit has sued the software giant again, this time for alleged infringements in Windows Vista and Office 2007.

A federal appeals court has upheld a district court's ruling that ordered Microsoft and Autodesk to pay millions of dollars to a Michigan company for patent infringement.

Goldenfields Water County Council has selected Munsys from Open Spatial Australia to better manage its water assets.

GeoNames is a free and open source geographical database. Primarily for developers wanting to integrate the project into web services and applications, it integrates world-wide geographical data including names of places in various languages, elevation, population, and all latitude / longitude coordinates. Users are able to manually edit, correct and add new names with a user-friendly wiki interface. The data is accessible through a number of webservices and a daily database export.

Autodesk recently announced plans to donate its coordinate system (CS) and map projection technology to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The software, acquired from Mentor Software will help users to more easily support geographic coordinate conversions and allow accurate and precise geospatial analysis. This planned donation joins several previous Open Source donations by the company, including the web mapping MapGuide and the geospatial data access technology (FDO) software, both donated last year.

Blender is a popular open-source software package used for modeling and rendering 3-D images. Computerworld recently spoke via e-mail with Tom Musgrove, one of the 35 active core developers on the Blender project. Besides explaining how the tool is used by 3-D artists, Musgrove also addressed complaints about the Blender user interface and discussed directions for future development.

The Business Software Alliance has collected a record settlement of nearly US$3.5 million from an international media firm that was using unlicensed software, the trade group announced Tuesday.

Open source is making its way into more and more enterprises with cheap, robust alternatives to solutions offered by proprietary software vendors. Read this article to learn about eight open-source companies worth watching in the areas of Web search, server virtualization, data integration, collaboration software and e-mail.

Manufacturing may not be the most tech-savvy, industry but the new trend of digital prototyping is cutting the cost of design and streamlining the entire product development process.