My father has been in the commercial construction industry for 30+ years. I am an iOS developer that runs a contracting company where we write software for niche professional markets. Let's just say I've spent a long time thinking about iPad projects for the construction industry, none of which are active projects. Let me tell you why.

The construction industry operates with a margin that reasonable people think is insane. If you're a software developer, it's a total paradigm shift. Companies do $500M in construction and post $500k net profit. One mistake and you're so far in the red you will never get out.

If you think software development has competitive pressure e.g. from overseas, you ain't seen nothing. Unless you are designing Apple stores, you are doing bid work. Although construction is composed of many expert disciplines, each of which have competitive protection, on a broad level one general contractor is as good as any other. You may have two master electricians serving an area that are basically insulated from competition with other electricians, but they may contract to 10 general contractors who interface with the client, companies that have no real competitive differentiator from each other than price. This forces the 10 general contractors to compete for the client's business, often comprised of an overlapping set of skilled trade personnel, essentially on the basis of how many corners they can cut and still pass inspection.

And you want these people to buy a bunch of iPads? While they are debating the merits of breaking the building code to save costs? You can sell this to specialty contractors, to the people who build Disney parks and Black Mesa, but not the vast majority who answer RFPs.

Yes, this product has the potential to prevent mistakes, but contractors carry insurance for that. Unless they get a break on the E&O rates that exceeds the cost of deploying the iPads, it's not going to happen. Not in an environment when "sue me" is your standard conflict resolution mechanism.

Next problem. A general contractor's job is like herding cats. You're lucky to get a drywaller who shows up on time and works 8-hour days. Never mind reads a set of paper plans. Never mind goes to training to use an iPad. You have some shot at getting the office people, all five of them, using a system like this, but five seats per job site at $50/seat doesn't sound like a business model to me.

Next problem. Architects like to plan fancy IP games with blueprints. Want a third copy of that blueprint? You must take it to our specialty printer who kicks us back a royalty on every blueprint plan they print. Not everyone is like this, but the low-priced architects are. And now you can't get the plans to put into your iPad system.

Kudos to these guys for trying, but there's a lot more to be solved here than just "hurr durr put a PDF on an iPad" product. There are fundamental realities of the construction business model that have to be hacked to make writing iPad software for that market into a sustainable business. I certainly hope these guys prove these problems are solvable, because there are many niche products I've been thinking about doing in the same market, but the TechCrunch writeups I've seen so far don't really explain how they are going to solve these problems (perhaps deliberately; if it was me I wouldn't want to tell everyone how to solve these problems if I knew).