Construction industry looking to Tablet PCs

As indicated by Motion Computing’s announcement yesterday, Tablet PC technology continues to very successful in vertical markets like medical, field force, sales, and construction. It is also why you see firms like Forms2Base and Active Ink Software selling forms based software that high successful in vertical markets.

In this article, sent to us by GBM reader Christopher Coulter, one person founded his own construction firm, Fast-Cat, around the management of construction drawings, and tablet pc technology is playing a major role in that.

From the Journal Gazette:

A casual comment three years ago launched Ray Steeb on a journey to develop a product that could dramatically reduce both the time and the cost of building construction.

Knowing of Steeb’s 20-plus years experience in the construction industry, most of it with Turner Construction, Jared L. Cohon, the president of Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that it would be great if Steeb could capture his experience in a way that would make it available to others.

That led Steeb, who founded his own construction firm, Steeb Crawford Construction, four years ago, to thinking about not how to capture all of his experience, but how to eliminate a pet peeve that had dogged his experience: the management of construction drawings.

…

The pursuit of a solution resulted in Fast-Cat — a tablet-style computer that contains portable construction documents.