The MSC Supply Company is one of the biggest suppliers of industrial equipment, tools, and materials to engineering offices. Like McMaster Carr or DigiKey, they offer an encyclopedic range of goods from highly specialized tools to lug nuts.

They have a comprehensive website, but I was amazed to see that on the cusp of 2012 they still print a book of wares so large that it is easy to visualize the tree it once was.

It is hard to believe an engineer today would rather wade through this trove than search for items online, but still it persists a decade and more after Amazon changed the retailing world.

I wonder when it will go out of print and when some company will pull a Sparkfun on it?

Rockler, the fine woodworking supply shop has to my knowledge made history by being the first chain retail establishment to carry a CNC mill (Sears might have been first with the CompuCarve, but I can’t confirm).

It is an interesting milestone for DIY. Rockler is a substantial retailer with 50+ stores across the country and $20MM+ in online sales. For a chain with that stature to develop a CNC product and feature it in their store is a big step forward.

It is also a potential warning sign for traditional DIY retail. Cagey upstart retailer Sparkfun has nearly the same revenue (and is growing much faster) with no retail footprint and no catalog business. Also, what was striking about this mill is how unpolished it looks. It has few differences from readily available kits and no where in the retail display was there a mention of the software or computers it could work with.

As DIY moves increasingly online, hidebound retailers are going face an up hill battle to move to uncertain business models and into new product categories without a clear playbook. Walking through the store a friend and I joked that the tools in the store have finally caught up with the iron age. Unfortunately for the old guard, Sparkfun, Adafruit, iFixit, and others are moving onto the Diamond Age.

Homebrew CNC is nothing new, but a couple videos of CNC machines made out of a LEGO Mindstorms controller and a random assembly of bricks seems to foreshadow interesting times. DIY is getting smaller, easier, and more task focused.

Lego powered CNC Mill

This model doesn’t actually cut anything yet, but it is far smaller and more approachable than the standard DIY mill. It is also lighter and “friendlier”. Purists may say that this also makes it underpowered and useless to the “serious” DIYer, and they will dismiss it as a “toy“.

Source: TechCrunch

LEGO powered cake cutting machine

The idea of task focused CNC products is very important. If you want to make a general purpose tool it needs to be powerful and robust which generally makes it heavy, expensive, and dangerous. By focusing CNC on something like cake, it allows machine designers to approach things with fresh perspective. You can use less powerful motors, cutting tools, and and structures. You can limit the range of motion reducing complexity and development time. For those who think this is limiting, you only need to follow the example of the Cricut to see how big an opportunity exists in these limits.

Source: Baking Bites

(Thanks Alyssa!)

Amazon has just announced the creation of a new publishing imprint for mystery books called Thomas & Mercer, joining four other imprints they created in a continued attempt to vertically integrate the publishing industry.

Apple’s retail stores are celebrating their 10th anniversary this month, a notable achievement as retail was Apple’s last step in the vertical integration of the computer market. While many analysts predicted Apple’s failure, the stores have been instrumental to the launch of Macs, iPods, iPhones, and iPads and helping make it the largest tech company in the process.

These two news stories dovetailed with an idea a friend hypothesized, that we may be entering a phase where we see a “Moore’s Law” for atoms. The analogy between general purpose computing devices and general purpose 3D printers breaks down pretty quickly, but it is apt in another way.

The first computer was designed on paper. The second computer was designed partially on the first computer, the third on the second, and so forth. The history of the last 30 years of technology has been self-reinforcing with each previous generation of technology enabling a faster and better delivery of the next.

This phenomena is especially apparent in the last 5 years of web innovation where Amazon’s Web Services platform has enabled entrepreneurs to permeate every nook and cranny of the consumer web because the technical infrastructure details have become almost trivial.

In the “Maker” world we are beginning to see “EC2 instances for atoms”. Services like Ponoko let you get started with a CAD file and a credit card. Once you have a product ready to go to market, Protomold can make a proper injection mold for less than the cost of a big screen TV.

My guess is that the increasing availability of small scale manufacturing tools will lead to more vertical integration. Product inventors will be able to fund their designs via Kickstarter, produce them at Protomold, create a store front using Shopify, and send products to customers using Amazons “Fulfillment By Amazon” service.

This vertically integrated approach will increase the margins of product creators and allow them to produce and sell more unique offerings. More SKUs will be introduced by smaller and smaller vendors. There will be more friction than with web innovation, but I have a feeling we will soon see a Cambrian explosion in the physical world as CAD, production, and fulfillment become available to anyone with an idea.

Shutterfly, CafePress, Blurb, Moo, and a bunch of other Print On Demand focused companies could be thought of as a “1.0″ phase of printing digital photos. All of these services (and more) let you upload photos and have them printed as books, cards, calendars, and coffee mugs.

With a variety of new mobile based photo sharing apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic making wavers there are some interesting new Print On Demand companies coming up to service them.

Printstagram is one company trying to commercialize social/mobile photo sharing. Their products seem largely undifferentiated from other providers, but neat none the less.

BlaBaBooth is a company with a lot less buzz, but a more interesting approach. They take the traditional photobooth concept and add a digital sharing element. You get a physical artifact in the form of the photostrip, but can also share them on the big social networks.

The user experience of Photobooth 2.0 leaves a lot to be desired, but it shows the potential for “Bits & Atoms” especially when it comes to the world of photographs and memory preservation.

Related articles

• With Tilt-Shift And A News Feed, Instagram Is Ready To Rock SXSW (techcrunch.com)
• Is DailyBooth’s Photo Sharing the Next Big Thing? Investors Say Yes (mashable.com)

My company has been on a hiring binge recently and as I’ve interviewed a number of candidates for product focused roles a few common traits have popped up. One that I’ve seen is a nerdy enthusiasm for parts of their craft that goes beyond a professional interest.

My co-worker Tim is a great example of this, able to tell you where every badge on his sports car is located. Another colleague, Alyssa, is a research maven and has a handle on every new development in our and adjacent spaces faster than most professional analysts.

Some designers can talk at great length and with surprising enthusiasm about plastic composites, others are acoustical aficionados, or have a need to build custom tools to perform the job they want, but most of the talented folks I know geek out on some odd aspect of their profession.

This exchange from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation sums up Clark’s personality nicely:

Bill: “What’s that new thing you got over there at food and drug?”

Clark: “Oh the Crunch enhancer? Yeah it’s a non-nutritive cereal varnish. It’s semi-permiable. It’s not osmotic. What it does is it coats and seals the flake, prevents the milk from penetrating it.”

Bill: “Yeah it’s a beautiful product.”

Clark: “Yeah I like it.”

Robot Chess – Building on the Shoulders of Giant (Robots)

There are a lot of interesting robot projects that you can find in Make: or other blogs and magazines. I remember a couple years ago, a Lego powered robot made the rounds on blogs because it could autonomously solve a Rubik’s Cube. This project takes the the same problem solving concept to a whole new level. More robots, interaction with the environment, and multi-robot communication. This seems like the product of ambition combined with the bedrock that has been formed by all the amateur robotocists that preceded it.

KopyKake Projector

People are going NUTS about the MakerBot and 3D printers generally. I’m a huge fan of both, but their ability to reshape the way we make things is dwarfed (in dollars and lives touched) by the development and impact of crafting technology. The CriCut personal paper cutter is a $250MM a year product. Now specialized technology is starting to move into the kitchen. In this case a projector that shines designs onto cookies which can then be traced by confectioners. Even if the designs aren’t your cup of tea it is hard to argue with the quality of craftsmanship in these cookies.

Core-Toons

Core77 is the best blog on industrial design and a recent addition to their content have been very funny cartoons (Core-Toons) lampooning design culture, products in particular.

Johnson & Johnson Donates Garbage to Make Custom Made Footballs

Johnson & Johnson is one of the largest companies in the world, they make health care/wellness products that could make a difference in the lives of millions of the world’s poor, and are bragging about giving them garbage instead. In their JNJBTW blog they use the World Cup as a way to bring up how many people in developing nations make their own footballs out of trash so they can emulate their heroes and play the beautiful game. I thought JNJ would be talking about providing real balls, maybe Band Aids to help cover up the inevitable scrapes, but not their waste materials! It is better than nothing, but I would not be bragging about it if I was a corporate citizen of their size. While JNJ’s actions aren’t classy the story of the world’s poorest using waste material to build products is inspiring. We shouldn’t forget that “personal fabrication” was a common event for people across the globe prior to the industrial revolution.

Hershey’s Customization

Mass customization holds a lot of promise, but hasn’t been an engine for a lot of high growth companies, yet. Part of this is due to the fact there is still a lot of experimentation with business models going on. Hershey’s is channeling Disney by making a customized chocolate bar creation station part of their factory tour. The economics of mass customization aren’t as good as mass production, but charging for the experience might close the gap.

The world of mass customization is expanding so quickly there is enough link worthy content for TWO consecutive Link-O-Rama posts!

Virtual Pottery Wheel

Patrick Swayze made pottery wheels sexy for the first time since the bronze age. It can’t be a coincidence that the year he passes brings us the coolest innovation in pottery since the time of Caesar. A laser scanner tracks the hand movements of a user and outputs digital data in the form of a spun pot. The digital data is then transferred to a 3D printer and the virtual data is made real.

Intro to 3D Scanning

RepRap and the State of Open Source 3D Printing

The great Erik de Bruijn provides an overview of where open source 3D printing stands now, what developments have been made recently, and more importantly where its going. 49 slides to enlightenment.

4×6″ photo prints are a commodity. Digital images are almost a pollutant. I wanted to make portraits with a physical/material dimension that adds value on top of the image. I took a few photos of my lovely wife, added graphic effects like halftone patterns to make the graphic qualities pop,  and produced a few portraits with plastics and metals on a laser cutter.

Design 1

This design combines a quirky frame with a brushed aluminum substrate. A cute design with an industrial metal material.

Design 2

This design is larger than the first with a gold frame and a blue portrait for color contrast.

Created formal contrast with a biaxially symmetric pattern for the frame and a dynamic line pattern for the portrait.

Design 3

By stacking the layers of material you get a bit of depth and can also make use of more color combinations.

I used a fairly large halftone pattern, but the laser can etch at a much higher DPI for more detail.

The laser is capable of etching very fine details. The flower was based on an etching and the detail holds up well.

These designs are simple prototypes, but in a world where scrapbooking is a $3B business there is a lot of room for innovation in personalized photo products.

The reaction to the iPad has been wildly varied. It has been criticized widely as being a blown up iPod. Antonio provides a more nuanced view with his chief critique being that it is a content consuming device, rather than a content producing devices. One of Apple’s biggest critics is excited about the device’s potential. My take is similar to O’Reilly editor Edd Dumbill who calls it “Real Life Social“.

The iPod touch changed computer usage by making it fit in the hand and by proxy the couch, bed, bathroom, and many other places 1 and 0′s were never intended to go. This trend is going to continue and explode as entrepreneurs continue making software, but more importantly, develop accessories for the iPad and its tinier cousin. I look at the iPad less as a stand alone device and more as a computational module that can be inserted into a variety of environments. Accessories might be simple holders or electronics that augment the iPad’s capabilities, but the computer is going to become integrated in places that were impossible with previous form factors.

The Kitchen

Photo Credit: LifeHacker

A computer that works in the kitchen has been the subject of many weekend projects/concepts that painfully port the keyboard and mouse experience into a bustiling and dirty environment. The iPad will be a smooth solution. Imagine being able to watch cooking instruction videos in context. Cookbook creators, gourmet food retailers, and culinary content providers all have a new opportunity for interaction.

The Game Room

Smart toys like Lego Mindstorms are handicapped by the realities of retail. $300 is the upper boundary for a toy. The retailer needs ~$150 of that, and the manufacturer has marketing expenses and margins to maintain, so the costs are driven down leading to crappy products like those made by Wowee. The “iPlatform” has the capability to change this equilibrium. By utilizing the computational power of an iPod or iPad, toy manufacturers could forgo the need for embedded electronics and focus on accessories that tap into the pre-existing hardware. Instead of buying the Mindstorms with their expensive processing brick, you can buy the wheels, sensors, and structural elements which are far cheaper and pair them with an iPod. Parents can amortize one electronic device purchase over several toys

The Art Studio

Some frustrated and talented designer is going to make a pen accessory that gives the iPad true tablet capabilities. It will transmit pressure data via Bluetooth or dock connector and then it is game time for artists/designers. Stand by apps like Brushes or Sketchbook Pro will be fine, but we will also see instructional apps that teach people to draw, or animate, or paint. They will create on the iPad and share to the web. A simple input device could lead to a Renaissance in artistic instruction.

The Workbench

Crafts and hobbies are a $30B market in the US, compared to retail sales of music which are worth ~$9B. We have hundreds of start ups and purpose built devices dedicated to  listening/storing/enjoying music. The iPad is the iPod for the workbench. Instead of having a wrench laid across an issue of Make: or a laptop open to an Instructable, now you can have a special screen for displaying content in a dynamic fashion. This will be the perfect platform for companies like 5Min or HowCast. Laptops and television are both imperfect solutions for this opportunity, but the iPad fits perfectly.

The really exciting opportunity will be hooking the iPad up to popular personal fabrication devices like CNC sewing machines that are driven by digital designs. The iPad will enable a true meeting of bits and atoms.

The Gym

FitBit, Nike+, WakeMate, and many others are trying to augment exercise with contextual data and instruction. While each has a proprietary dongle to collect data, there needs to be a central dashboard. The small (and easily cleaned) iPlatform is the best solution available.

The Classroom

The iPad is going to allow publishers to reinvent books. The first wave will be simple translations with some embedded video in place of a static picture. However, think of what the possibilities are just a few years on. Text books created with open ended curriculum in mind could be incredibly powerful tools. Apply the editorial guidance of professional publishers and the hypertext capabilities we love from the web and there is tremendous opportunity for learning.

The Doctor’s Office, The Trade Show Floor, Training Programs…

There are dozen of other markets that the iPad could serve. Any interaction not yet mediated by the computer is fair game. Wherever there is paper or a sales brochure the iPad can probably improve the experience. The device has a lot of intrinsic faults, but luckily they are less bothersome than the  annoyances and missed opportunities found in the physical world.