New Post

There are 104 days of the year that most of society takes off, fully up for grabs even if you’ve already got a full time job and those 104 days are called the weekend.

Admittedly I work for myself so there are some Saturdays I drive 16 hrs to film and some Mondays by the pool where I’ve hit 300 pages and 30 laps by noon. It wasn’t always this sweet! When Automate Construction started I spent 2 years couch surfing and sleeping in the back of my car to make sure I could visit every 3D printed construction project in the world in the very early stages of the industry. Now the number of projects around the globe has exploded to a number I could never hope to take on myself.

Bittersweet, I know… but I have a plan! Automate Construction will be introducing new journalists with the same inquisitive truth seeking nature I have and a bunch of other skills that I don’t.

I need one person from the Middle East, one person in Asia, and one person in South America. We already have someone in Europe who you will meet in a video soon, if you are a construction automation company in Europe and you want a visit from Automate Construction let me know! It is much more efficient to travel within a constrained region than visit projects internationally. I am not in a hurry to find someone when the right person comes along I will know.

Automate Construction never accepted money from 3D printed construction companies for our videos, that is still the case but to enable a team of international journalists I will start allowing the many companies that kindly offered to cover my travel or accommodations the opportunity for an Automate Construction journalist to come out for a small fee for travel and day rate for the journalist. By sticking to one region the travel expenses will be substantially reduced, perhaps under $500 per visit. This is far below what any other content platform with a 1.5M audience would charge, it’s probably even cheaper than the company would be able to produce it internally but that’s because it’s not a sponsorship deal.

The company in the video will not have production control but as I do with every company I visit now they will get the chance to review the footage prior to release to request only cuts not edits.

Automate Construction will earn profit by ad revenue from the videos but not the startups featured in them. The startups will only cover the journalists expenses and day rate which goes 100% to the journalist. I will continue to loop around North America at least twice per year producing tons of content myself and lucky for those companies I will continue to charge no fees. This is largely because I am able to travel so cheap within the USA. By driving my Tesla 50,000 miles a year there are decent gas savings especially when I am in Texas where I have home charging for 7 cents per KwH. That means a full charge is about $6 and I can get anywhere in a 100 mile radius from Austin and back. On a drive to California I would stop in Pheonix, Vegas, and CA cities so the $200 in electric expense would be split between 5-6 filming opportunities.

Like I said I am currently looking for one person from the Middle East, one person in Asia, and one person in South America. You must be open minded without obvious bias. This role is about tech not politics, I talk to people from countries America is or was at war with all the time, that is what good journalism is all about. Do some of them hate me for being American? Perhaps, but so far they always seem kind and respectful. Automate Construction presents the world through a construction tech lens, nothing else matters.

Brazil has started printing with Geopolymers in a university setting. Here is a clever professor poking fun at the clickbait nature of the 3dcp industry.

Are human hands the best form for robots to navigate the world? My intuition says yes because that is what everything is designed to accommodate but that is not obviously true. Here is someones attempt to beat evolution in object manipulation.

Another Humanoid Robot company has launched out of China from a company called JAKA which is well renowned for their collaborative robotics skills.

First layer of the last home out of 3 units by New Standard Homes in Shiner Tx. The thin line is a dual bond epoxy to join the printed layers to the slab.

automateconstruction

View more on Instagram

That’s it for today! Can you tell there are no ads in this? Who else is sending daily emails with no ads? Nobody thats who! I will probably put some cool ads in here eventually to products I am either involved with producing or would use myself. No ads for construction automation startups though you know the rules! For now just forward this email to a friend and I promise to keep tomorrows post ad free too!