Wow, if you want to get started in the 3D printing business, MakerBot Industries of Brooklyn, New York are making it easy for people no matter what your background or pedigree.

MakerBot has over 25 job listings open at the moment. I did a quick check and that is actually more than the big 4 3D printer companies are hiring for – COMBINED. By the numbers:

Publicly traded Stratasys (NASDAQ:SSYS) is adding 11 new jobs to a current workforce of 510.

Publicly traded 3D Systems (NYSE:DDD) is adding 9 new jobs.

Zcorp is adding 4 jobs.

Objet has 0 openings.

LinkedIn shows MakerBot with 11-50 employees so they are growing somewhere between 50-200%. They are looking for seasoned sales execs and manufacturing folks with no formal training, blue and white collar alike. It is a great “human capital” story they can add to their PR arsenal.

Disclosure – I own a small amount of 3D Systems stock

There is a saying that “Hardware” should really be two “four-letter” words in the context of building products, especially electromechanical gizmos. This adage seems to be borne out in the struggles of some high profile hardware/software companies.

Orbotix makes a cool remote controlled ball called “Sphero” that you can control with your iPhone or Android handset. It looks like a fun toy, but they were overwhelmed by the complexity of producing it in volume and had to cancel Christmas for a lot of nerds.

Jawbone has been around for 6 years and has raised $162 million dollars in VC money and they still have trouble producing robust products. Their new health monitoring device debuted to great fanfare, but was pulled from the market due to technical issues.

MakerBot has been manufacturing and distributing 3D printer kits for nearly three years, based on an open source hardware design that is even older and they still can’t fulfill demand for their systems.

The scary thing is that all these companies seem to be really well run, are amply funded, and well connected to people with deep manufacturing expertise. They are all basically startups and presumably have the passion that comes along with that kind of culture. Hardware is just REALLY hard.

My company makes a hardware device and even with 100+ people and 100+ years of cumulative manufacturing experience, it is a challenge to bring physical products into existence. The founders of all these companies deserve a lot of credit for taking on terrifically challenging products and I hope others follow in their foot steps. There is something pretty exciting that happens when you combine bits and atoms.

We are living in a golden age of DIY TV. There have never been more shows about making stuff on at one time than now. Between the Food Network, Discovery Channel, TLC, DIY, HGTV, you can see shows about making everything from cakes to cannons. The problem is most of the content has low production values and is often stretched to fit 30 and 60 minute blocks.

Car maker Cadillac has decided to ride the DIY trend, but at the same time raised the bar to an amazing level. They have released a series of 3-5 minute web ads called “Business Unusual” that highlight interesting small businesses, usually with a quirky or DIY bent.

The companies are interesting, the pace is brisk, and they are snappily hosted by nerd comedian Chris Hardwick, but their production values set them apart. They are all high def, and each shot is lit and composed like an amazing picture on Instagram. Many of the keyframes would fit perfectly into a photography coffee table book. Industrial switches and CAM machines are lit like fine works of art. These are a joy to watch and I highly recommend that you check them out if only to reward Cadillac for taking such a risk and producing such amazing content.

Some great examples of “Business Unusual”:

MakerBot

Ferra Designs – Custom Metal Work

CrushPad – Custom Wine

It’s a short holiday week in the USA, but it has been one of the most interesting and news filled in recent memory.

1. The Economist takes on 3D Printing again comparing the MakerBot to the MITS Altair, the Ultimaker to the Apple II, and the new PrintrBot to Sinclair ZX81. The rest of the article is the usual content of

2. Speaking of the PrintrBot, this is a new low cost 3D Printer that costs ~1/3 the market leading MakerBot while producing comparable results. It raised is entire $25,000 goal at KickStarter in <48 hours and is close to breaking $200K with 3 weeks remaining.

3. In Boston there was an interesting bit of entrepreneurial symmetry. Two MIT Media Lab students have raised funding ($500K) for a venture called “Form Lab” which is building a new low cost 3D printing system. From what I’ve heard this printer uses a variation on the Stereolithography technique and will provide much better accuracy than other kit based systems.

On the other side of the coin another venture that came out of MIT, Burlington, MA based ZCorp was acquired by 3D Systems. The acquisition price was $137MM which is kind of disappointing for a company that has been around for 10+ years, has a unique technology, and a well established commercial presence.

Hopefully the lower pricing and broader appeal of these kit based systems will allow the entrepreneurs who take risks with these ventures to be appropriately rewarded in the future.

If you visit any seaside town in the northeast of the USA you will likely find an old time commercial district with a board walk, games of chance, and a candy store that is making fresh saltwater taffy in the front window. This demo, where the candy is repeatedly stretched using a civil war era mechanical contraption never fails to draw crowds and sell otherwise underwhelming candy.

I wonder if the MakerBot and laser cutters could serve the same purpose for a next generation of DIY shops? A glittering lure to bring people through the doors where they could be sold all the DIY tools they could need. Salt water taffy is an inferior product by any metric, but millions of pounds of it are sold each year because of these gravity defying machines that make the process look magical.

Current DIY retail is a waste land. Michael’s owns suburban art supplies and generates $4B a year in revenue in cavernous, but uninspiring stores. New breed retailers like Ponoko help people make custom products, but all the magic happens behind closed doors and requires weeks of waiting. There seems to be an exciting opportunity to fill that gap with a store or service that provides all the staples you need to build things with the wizardry of next gen DIY tools.

Nick Bilton of the New York Times posted a provocative story about 3D printing. He does a good job outlining the novel legal challenges posed by 3D printing and how they are shaking out in the early days of this technology. In the article Bilton correctly points out that copyright doesn’t apply to the utilitarian aspects of physical goods, but misses an opportunity to discuss utility or design patents. These legal mechanisms protect the functional and aesthetic aspects of designs and could have helped the person in this cautionary tale:

But it [3D Printing] could turn design and manufacturing into the Wild West. That’s already happening on Thingiverse, a free online site that offers schematics of more than 15,000 objects. Thomas Lombardi, a 3-D printer owner and regular contributor to Thingiverse, uploaded a free design for a “Lucky Charms Cereal Sifter.” This brilliant piece of American engineering is a cup with several holes in the bottom. When you pour Lucky Charms cereal into the sifter and shake it from side to side, the cereal falls through the holes and the marshmallow charms — clearly the most sought-after part of the product — stay in the sifter, leaving you with nothing but marshmallowy goodness to pour into a bowl.

After Mr. Lombardi posted his invention on Thingiverse, someone else downloaded the design and began selling a finished Lucky Charms Cereal Sifter on a competing Web site for $30.

Because the sifter is a useful object (although some might argue otherwise) and not simply decorative, there was nothing Mr. Lombardi could have done to stop them.

Mr. Lombardi could have filed a utility patent on the device and if granted blocked the sale of the imposter Lucky Charms sifter and sued it’s retailer for damages. Patents don’t block someone from copying a design, to the contrary, they disclose the methods by which you can. They do prevent anyone else from commercializing them without the patent holder’s permission. Mr. Lombardi could have done these things, but patents are expensive to file (e.g. $1-10K) and much more expensive to prosecute ($10K++++). It is unlikely that this design would ever prove lucrative enough to pursue these means.

The “Wild West” analogy is a great one. The nature of this technology is so great that it could have a profound impact on our legal system and require innovation in the legal apparatus.

In any case I think we will see some new and interesting ideas emerge over the next few years:

What is “Commercialization - Our patent system is predicated around the idea of commercialization. If you want to build a replica of a product for your own use, you can. You just can’t create a production line and sell them. The thought is the time and effort required to copy and produce a design would make buying one from the patent holder the more economical choice. However, if the plans are free, and the build tools are automated this might not be true. Suddenly “Commercialization” could mean the absence of needing to buy something.

Meme-based Product Design – The imposter saw a commercial opportunity to make some dollars based on the amount of free media the novel idea was generating. As new ideas are spawned in social media they will increasingly be productized. We can get a taste for this tracking the way a novel cookie recipe exploded, was distributed, and remixed online and in a matter of days.

Long Tail of Products - Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory has proven to be correct with media and will have interesting applications in physical products. Very few people might want a cup like this, but if a couple thousand did, it could provide a nice bit of revenue for the creator.

Freemium Products - Will plans like this be given away in an effort to generate reputations or as loss leaders for bigger, better, harder to replicate products? Will we see some exciting new business models emerge the way they did with online content creation?

I completely agree with Mr. Bilton that 3D printing is going to have a profound impact on manufacturing, but I think the best predicate isn’t the recent history of the music industry, but rather the changes brought forth by Craigslist. A multi-billion dollar revenue stream for publishers disappeared in under a decade and led to a flowering of innovation from Airbnb to Zipcar. 3D printing won’t follow the arc of desktop printing or digital music, but will profoundly change our culture in the same way those innovations have.

An Economist Takes on 3D Printing

One of my favorite blogs, Marginal Revolution, takes on 3D Printing.

That all said, 3-D printing is unlikely to end up being a transformative technology; transportation costs for what it can produce are already fairly low.  The printers may in some longer run be cheaper than UPS, truck, and commercial rail, but that’s a moderate savings only, albeit a nice one.

Looking Glass – How it’s Made for Kids

Neat looking subscription app that helps kids understand the built world. The creator references the famous Mr. Rodgers crayon manufacturing videos which has to be one of the most influential videos for makers born between 1975-83.

Looking Glass Children’s Videos is a video subscription service that lets your children explore the world around them in a whole new way. Three to five minute videos use engaging images and music to introduce your children to everything from ice cream factories to roller coasters to horseback riding – and everything in between. Fun and informative, these charming videos captivate children of all ages . . . and their parents, too!

SkyNet is Coming

Tim O’Reilly talks about weaponized UAV’s being purchased in Texas and the Fraunhofer Institute creates autonomous jumping robots to help find people trapped in wreckage. Hard to imagine how things could go wrong…

One of the best design firms in the world is sharing it’s technical tricks for free online. Art School will barely exist as we know it in 10 years. Oh and currently for profit, online art education is worth ~$2B/year.

QVC is the second most profitable channel on television with revenue in excess of $5B. YouTube is now offering a tech platform that will let tens of thousands of bands (and other folks in the future) create their own QVC/HSN channels.

With increasing access to machines that can produce production quality goods at quantities of 1 we are going to see more high quality product satire like these cereal box mock ups.

Combat robotics seem like the natural evolution of UFC and NASCAR, but are currently limited to the world of fantasy at this point (Unless you count the BattleBots that look like toasters). However, this behind the scenes feature from the movie Real Steel talks about how the robots are made for the silver screen.

The blog “Unclutterer” has a fun feature called “Unitasker Wednesday“. Based on TV Chef Alton Brown’s belief that kitchens shouldn’t have many “Unitakers” (Gadgets with just one function) the author lampoons ridiculously specific inventions like the Dipr, a plastic tool that makes it easier to dip Oreos in milk.

While it is fun to chuckle at the sheer volume of inventions to make S’Mores at home, there is a moral dimension to this. With production tools getting more accessible via web-based services, what will spam look like in the physical world? XKCD has another humorous (and slightly NSFW) take, but while spam email/blogs waste electricity, this kind of product has a bigger environmental footprint.

In the end, I think the market and the real cost of production and distribution will limit the scope of 3D spam and lead to some really interesting niche products that could spawn new industries.

Davison Product Design and Development is a design firm with a unique business model. Instead of designing products for the Fortune 500 like IDEO or Frog Design, they run commercials and banner ads appealing to garage innovators. Their sales pitch is simple, for $800 dollars they will help conduct a preliminary IP search around your idea. Starting at $12,000 they will help you produce a model of your product. New services include product animation and commercial production.

Their office space is also highly unusual among design firms in that it is modeled more after Disneyworld than the Bauhaus. This video shows off some of the themed “InventionLands” that their designers work in, including a pirate ship, race track, and tree house.

Davison has run into claims of fraud and recently lost a case which would force them to return money to a number of their customers. That said, their new marketing materials, including the one embedded above, make clear declarations that most new inventions do not succeed.

Davison is a strange entity combining design, Walt Disney, and infomercial-esqe marketing, but their success is staggering. 100-300K people visit their site every month and 55K+ call for info. This represents a staggering amount of entrepreneurial energy and one that disruptive companies should jump on.