U.S. Patent Goes to 1st Pricing for Automated Pricing Solution
12 Dec, 2007Company earns Notice of Allowance prepatent award for its automated pricing application for AutoCAD and TurboCAD.
Southern California-based e-commerce and technology company 1st Pricing announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company a Notice of Allowance for its automated pricing technology application for CAD programs. A Notice of Allowance is the immediate precursor to issuance of a patent.
"Being awarded this patent is an important step in 1st Pricing's plan to streamline the building material supply chain for the entire building industry," said Douglas Lopez, founder of 1st Pricing. "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 retype the data and virtually eliminating errors. At its core, it is a search engine specifically designed for CAD that is a closed-loop, supply-chain solution that searches for specified building materials originating from the architect's desktop."
With the click of a button, the 1st Pricing technology accesses an Internet portal and pulls comparison pricing of multiple brands to fill out a detailed bill of materials with all related content on demand, the company reports. At the same time, an online shopping cart is created for fulfillment from a local material distributor based on the project's zip code. The company is currently focused on building materials for residential construction but states that it plans to add commercial building products in the future.
"Our technology transforms a set of plans from an interpretive document to a declarative statement," said Thomas Kemp of 1st Pricing. "By adding multiple brand solutions from local suppliers to precise architectural specifications, we are empowering the homeowner and their contractor with a number of fulfillment choices complete with delivered-to-the-job-site pricing."
1st Pricing currently offers free plug-ins for users of AutoCAD and TurboCAD. Plug-ins for AutoCAD Architecture and Graphisoft's ArchiCAD are currently in beta and are planned for release during the first quarter of 2008. 1st Pricing technology initially was released in TurboCAD in 2003.
