The always interesting Professor Thomas posted a request to Twitter wondering if there was a “Board game of the month club” or similar offering as a holiday gift. Unfortunately, I know of no such service, but it got me thinking. Subscription ecommerce has been a hot area in the tech world this year with companies like BirchBox coming out of no where. The Christmas season has to be the busiest time for “_______-of-the-month” club purchases, but there doesn’t seem to be much innovation in the space. You can find dozens of services that will ship wine, cigars, chocolate, and other savory treats on a monthly basis, but they don’t do much to expand horizons or educate their audience. Could the “_______-of-the-month” club do more? What about:

Game-of-the-month clubs – This is a great idea. German/hex style board games one month, Dominion/deck games the next, dice games, table top games, and so on. Most clubs of this kind are an attempt to broaden your aesthetic sensibilities, so why not do the same with products that appeal to the intellect rather than appetite?

Fitness-of-the-month-clubs – The spiritual successor to the “Couch-to-5K” program. Every month you get a new supplement, work out tool, diet guide, or other fitness product. A gentle reminder that you should resolve to think about your health every month, not just around new years.

Craft-of-the-month clubs – KiwiCrate and BabbaCo both are approaching this market for kids, but what about adults? Do you have a relative who has always wanted to get into wood working or quilting? What if every month you got a new tool and block of wood to experiment with? Would this make the undertakings seem less monumental?

Chef-of-the-month clubs – What if every month you got a new ingredient or implement and ideas for dishes you could prepare with it? Could you create a dynamic like the Iron Chef competitions where people share their various creations online? Could this ignite innovation in kitchens across the country?

There are a lot of barriers to make these kinds of programs work, but there is a spark of a cool idea here. In the past, the monthly gift did more for the giver by reminding the recipient of who is sending them these monthly parcels, but what if we could use this appointment dynamic to improve the life of the person who receives it?

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.

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!)

A few weeks ago I posted about a LEGO set that was a replica of the injection molding tools that made LEGO sets. I found it via an awesome blog called LEGO EXPRESS, which seems to be written by a LEGO designer, though Tumblr’s informal conventions make it hard to verify. If you aren’t following the site yet, do it now. There is no better site to get a heartbeat of what personal manufacturing enthusiasts do when you give them a flexible kit of parts.

While it won’t map directly to 3D printing or other advanced personal fabrication techniques it wonderfully illustrates the kinds of things “makers” like to make. This topic deserves a longer post and more thinking, but in the short term these are some amazing examples of what’s on offer.

Lego Cassete Tape

Trying to replicate real world objects with the limited palate that Lego provides is a source of great inspiration to many brickheads.

Photo Credit

Lego Weasley’s Burrow from Harry Potter

Creating detailed and well designed versions of pop cultural icons is another favorite past time. I think of projects like this as “cover songs“.

Photo Credit

Lego Orrey

Complex mechanisms mixed with some artistic expression is also a popular meme. Some designers take it to the extreme utilizing the Lego Mindstorms platform to add full computation capabilities to their projects.

Photo Credit

Check out the video

Presidential Homage via Lego

Weird or outré designs are also commonplace. While you may be able to buy a LEGO kit with a knight or race car driver, getting Teddy Roosevelt in full Rough Rider mode is bizarre. The best outputs of this category combine esoteric choices from history with masterful craftsmanship.

Photo Credit

Lego Vignettes

Creating vignettes of pop cultural references or in this case fairy tales has been a hot area of innovation recently.

Photo Credit

There is a lot customizers could learn by looking at the LEGO community and until I create a definitive manuscript on the matter follow Lego Express!

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.

I’m in Germany for a business trip and I was walking around the central square when I saw an outpost of New England institution Dunkin Donuts. The fonts and colors were all the same and it was heartening to see the bulbous font even if the words it spelled out were foreign to me.

The most fun part of the trip was the selection of donuts on hand. There were some classics like the chocolate sprinkle, some obvious local favorites like the Bavarian Creme, but some that seemed entirely bizarre e.g. Pflaumenmus Donut. The name sounds like a particularly nasty chest infection, but the purple icing is something I’ve never seen in the US. Nor the alcohol infused Kirsch-Banae with a smiley face piped on top. All these flavors and colors seemed bizarre to me, but obviously please the local market’s taste and traditions.

This confectionary interlude got me thinking about personal fabrication. All these sweets are variations on a simple theme, but reflect the stories of chefs over hundreds or thousands of years. Currently, we are segregated by geography, but with a new generation of fabrication tools and ways to share, these “Stories” will become ever easier to share, remix, and advance. A baker in Boston could see a post like this, look up a “heidlebeere” recipe, have it translated automagically by Google translate, bake it up, and sell it from their bakery in a couple days. It is a small example, but I look forward to the cultural exchange and innovation which will surely spring from it.

A Lego kit of the injection molding machines that make Lego bricks.

Photo Credit Si-MOCs.

If you are at all into Lego, crowdsourcing, or seeing what creative people do with little plastic bricks, you should follow LegoExpress on Tumblr. Easily the best Lego blog I’ve ever found and I could post every other project on there.

Customization is a semi-hot area in the world of technology. Analyst firms and eminent news magazines write about 3D printing. The most important tech writer in the world is releasing a book detailing the industrial revolution brought forth by the web and custom manufacturing tools.

However, the coverage of this area of tech usually focuses on what will be possible in the future or gimmicky applications of the technology in the present (e.g. custom chocolate bar or dress shirt companies) and not quiet, but large applications.

Custom coinage is an area that is seemingly boring, but based on the number of ads on a Google search for “Custom Coins” is fairly lucrative. The manufacturers of these coins use CNC tools and CAD software to create short runs of metal coins cost effectively (You can get 100 custom designed coins for ~$3.50 each).

Companies like CoinsForAnything.com offer a wide variety of designs and manufacturing possibilities. You can commission coins to celebrate everything from yuppie coffee to military operations and get really nice looking products for low cost.

Part of the reason why these coins and companies that make them fly under the radar is that they aren’t serving traditionally techie audiences. There are corporate customers, but a huge portion of the business on these sites is for “Challenge Coins” a very cool sounding military tradition to help soldiers identify themselves on the battlefield or in a bar.

These coins are finding increasingly cool civilian uses as well. The Monterey Company touts their GeoCaching GeoCoins which are used in web/GPS based scavenger hunts. Coins are struck, inscribed with serial numbers and intrepid game players hide them in remote locations sharing virtual treasure hunts with other players world wide. It seems like a combination of LARPing and the pirate life, but shows how customization is being used to aid an existing market, rather than trying to create one.

These companies aren’t sexy, aren’t usually blogged about, but they are generating more revenue than most of the non-printing customization companies I’m aware of.

Kickstarter is a great company that enables people in creative industries to raise funds from independent patrons to fund a specific project. The company was formed thinking that they would help film makers or musicians release projects, but the platform was discovered and used to great effect by other creative people.

Diaspora tried to take on Facebook with a peer to peer social network project raising over $200K

A team created an iPhone camera adapter called the Glif. The product was very simple, a single injection molded part with a screw threaded insert inside of it. They were one of the first companies to offer a physical product and raised over $120K to fund development.

Famed designer Scott Wilson set the record on Kickstarter when he developed a watch band that turned the iPod nano into a fashion statement. It helped establish Kickstarter as a serious platform for product innovation and in the weeks since Wilson’s product was funded there have been a flood of physical goods projects.

Red Pop – Camera Expansion for iPhone

One of the amazing things about recent projects on Kickstarter is how complex projects are becoming. The RedPop is a device that adds a grip and physical shutter button to the iPhone 4. It is a simple looking project, but in order to make a device that works with the iPhone you need to go through Apple’s Made For iPhone program which is somewhat challenging.

Air Guitar for iPhone

This new Air Guitar game is basically Guitar Hero/Rockband for iOS. A little guitar pick has an accelerometer built in and you can play along with songs or a custom game. I got a demo of the product and it is really polished, fun, and could easily become a best seller at a low price level. The impressive part is that it is being developed by a couple guys in just a few months.

Dice Age – Magic the Gathering meets Craps

Dice Age is considerably less technically complex than the RedPop, but it involves creating a new game system, creating molds for dozens of parts, and a narrative that connects them all. Again this seems easy, but is an order of magnitude more challenging than a tripod adapter.

Kickstarter is an amazing company allowing the development of complex products by small teams and individuals. The few projects above are just the tip of the iceberg of what we’ll see. By unbundling physical (and especially electronics) development from corporate budgets we are seeing an explosion of interesting projects that wouldn’t move the needle at a large company, but will definitely make hardcore fans happy and become springboards for future developments.

There are a group of customization enthusiasts who write about the potential of digital tools to bring about a future where products are shared the way music files were shared in the Napster era. I’m usually skeptical, but a story Sven tweeted about has made me rethink my attitude a bit.

Apparently there is a subculture of counterfeiters that make molds of “Resin Models” which are little statues of popular comic book, anime, or pop culture figures that customers assemble and paint. Using these molds the criminals break the copyright and create a black market for the kits. It is a small market and actually uses old school technology, but it shows how manufacturing technologies can be adapted to fill holes in inefficient markets.

This reaction to a dumb tweet by a Kenneth Cole employee shows the future of digital protests in a “Bits and Atoms” world. A clever protestor with a vinyl cutter vandalized a Kenneth Cole store in a clever way. The application of the tweet looks like something that would be designed by the home office and if I were a store manager I wouldn’t necessarily question it. As custom manufacturing tools get better and cheaper expect to see more of this civil disobedience. It will be like “Adbusters 2.0″.