Stack Exchange is a question & answer service that connects experts and amateurs around shared passions. Newbies ask questions and the more experienced members answer them. Points and status are awarded for good answers. Stack Exchange (SE) grew out of a site called Stack Overflow which was entirely focused on software engineering. The goal with SE was to foster the same kind of community, but around other subject matter. In order to combat spam, ghost town forums, and other blights of user generated content they developed an elaborate staging area called Area 51 where new ideas for sites are born and incubated.

3D Printers

I recently proposed a site around the idea of personal manufacturing tools like 3D printers and laser cutters. All new ideas start as proposals which need to be followed by 60 members to move onto the next stage. In addition the original 60 members are required to create lists of on-topic and off-topic questions to help guide the community e.g. an on topic for this forum might be:

What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of 3D Printers made by StrataSys, 3D Systems, Z Corp, and Objet?

Join the site now (it’s free) and follow this proposal to help move it along to the next stage, commitment.

Lego

Once a topic has sufficient casual momentum members must commit to answering questions and helping shepard the community in the early stages. A community of Lego enthusiasts has recently hit this milestone, the final stage before public beta.

Robotics & Electronics

Robotics and electronics is a wildly popular topic and has garnered enough support to move to public beta which means the site is featured prominently and has new capabilities. If the community stays active it will become a full site and a permanent addition to the Stack Exchange family.

The process is long and convoluted, but it is nice to see a company focusing so much energy and forgoing easy traffic to ensure quality. People interested in the interaction of the digital and physical world will find few better resources to have their questions answered by knowledgeable and passionate colleagues. Visit the site and help support some of these excellent topics!

Related articles

• 3D printing with LEGO (hackaday.com)
• Robot, Build Thyself: Machine Made of Lego Builds Models Made of Lego | Discoblog (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
• How Lazy Men Build Lego Creations – With a 3D Printer (Made From Lego) [Video] (gizmodo.com)

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.

Make: Magazine is always a worthwhile read, but the latest volume #21 will be of special interest to anyone who reads this blog. The focus of the issue is DIY manufacturing and it contains some great articles.

Expert take on DIY manufacturing

Make: polled some of the brightest minds in DIY to see what they saw as the next big things in building (Shapeways, Blender, Thingiverse, etc.) You can get a sneak peek of what people said at Make:.

MakerBot Profile

A nice origin story for the MakerBot crew.

CNC for Mecha Suits

Rep Tab – A CNC plasma cutter capable of cutting steel into any shape you specify. It is like the CutBot, but scaled up to build terminators.

Build Your Own CNC

A feature on the great Book and Blog that details how to build a homebrew CNC machine.

There is also a nice ad for a smaller homebrew CNC kit offered by Lumen Lab.

And a tutorial on SplineScan a DIY 3D scanner.

Neon Lighting 2.0

LyTecr Light by Wire – A thin EL wire that conducts electricity while illuminating its exterior. It can be used to terribly gaudy effect, but it also holds great potential in the hands or a restrained craftsman.

Direct Digital Wedding Rings

This issue covers the steps in making a custom engagement ring with CNC tools, basically a homebrew version of Paragon Lake.

Mass customization doesn’t get a lot of coverage from mainstream media sources aside from the occasional mention of 3D printers. Inc. magazine has bucked that trend in their October 2009 issue by putting Ponoko founder and CEO David Ten Have on the cover and writing about the 3D printer’s ugly cousin, the laser cutter.

If you read this blog you probably know the basics about Ponoko. They give designers the ability to produce one of a kind products by taking a design that is uploaded to Ponoko.com  and producing it for a simple fee. The big vision is the democratization of design and manufacturing. The small vision is that it is a neat service that helps people make fun wooden chachkas.

The article is really informative. At 10 pages long you learn a great deal about the companies origins, the struggles of the founders, and what the future holds. Some interesting facts:

- Ponoko has revenues of ~$250K. Fellow customizer CafePress has revenues of ~$100MM (One of the founders of CafePress is an investor and board member).

- If you order a product from Ponoko, it is very likely the CEO who laser cut it for you.

- Traffic does not equal sales. The press wrote glowingly about Ponoko, but customers didn’t buy. It sounds reminiscent of BugLabs which was a press darling at launch, but doesn’t seem to have a great deal of traction in the developer community yet. This might be instructive to customization entrepreneurs, if you let your customers make anything, they might not know where to start.

Overall, the article doesn’t paint a pretty picture for mass customization. Ten Have and Ponoko have slogged through tough times, face massive challenges, and are operating in an environment that doesn’t fully understand/appreciate what they are doing.

Read the article, it is inspiring and will leave you rooting for Ponoko’s success. Their team is trying to do something transformative and deserve all the support they can get.

Singularity Hub has a fascinating article about the implications of a “post-scarcity” future enabled by “programmable matter“. Details about time lines and use cases are fuzzy, but the premise is that in the future we will have materials that are able to reconstitute themselves into new forms based on the desires of the customer. An example the videos provide is a cellphone that could “reform” itself into a laptop and back into a cellphone again.

The main technology that the article highlights is called Claytronics. The research on this technology is being conducted at Carnegie Mellon University and is being funded by Intel. The vision of the research is to create miniature computers roughly the size of a BB that can connect to each other using an electrostatic technique. The following video provides the background of the technology.

Claytronics Tech Overview

Sales Demo

What would you do with the technology? This video shows one interesting use case where Claytronics are used to model a car, refine the design, and preview an animated demo of the car. The Terminator 2 liquid metal aesthetic is indisputably cool and the technology would be very useful if it existed.

Claytronics Prototype

The big question is when will Claytronics be available? If the prototypes in this video are any indication, not soon. The demo is impressive, but the the current resolution is more “dots per feet” than “dots per inch”. This technology will change the world when it is ready, but manufacturers of 3D printers have nothing to fear in the short term from programmable matter.

Artful 3D Printers

Boing Boing Gadgets has a nice roundup of projects where 3D printers are being used by artists. This sintered phone holster shows off how 3D printing tools can create “preassembled” parts. In this case all the links are formed together and are removed from the 3D printer fully assembled with all the properties of a chain mail product. 3D printers are an amazing technology and this kind of project demonstrates their most impressive capabilities. via Boing Boing Gadgets

Legos + Transformers + Crazy Fan = Awesome

A Korean Lego enthusiast has built a large model of the Transformers character Barricade that amazingly, actually transforms. Lego is in an interesting position with a sectionally modular building system, specialized CAD software, and a rabid fanbase. If they could work out the licensing it would be amazing to let these crazy fans design models and offer them for sale via Lego’s mass customization service. The community is already doing amazing things for free so an affiliate payment program could only help Lego broaden their offering.

Makerbot_Status…Replicating

The MakerBot project reached a fun milestone when Bre Pettis used the $750 “Cupcake” 3D printer to create an upgraded component for itself. However, the award for “coolest machine approaching self replication” has to be this hexapod that can mill parts. Fortunately, it can only handle styrofoam at this point so the human race is safe. For now…

Speaking of Terrifying Robots…

This robotic snake looks like an early ancestor of the droid outside of Jabba the Hut’s lair and the Sentinel from the Matrix. Using Objet 3D printers, researchers were able to increase the speed of development and improve their design substantially.

Laser Engraved Lunch Meat

A student at Carnegie Mellon has embarked upon a project to remind carnivore’s of where their meat comes from and used a laser cutter to engrave humble slices of bologna with images of animals. The artist’s statement:

“Ultimately, I would like to show the entire process from animal to ambiguous pink slice of meat over the course of a package of lunch meat, beginning here with bologna. This neat packaged disc of food has always seemed so far removed from its source.”

Via Neatorama

FigurePrints takes World of Warcraft characters and prints them in three dimensions. Game blog Neoseeker recently visited their headquarters. The visit and interview yielded a number of interesting insights. Definitely click through to see the video they have of the production facility.

Rapid Growth

Figureprints is significantly ramping up production going from four 3D ZCorp printers to ten, running 24 hours a day which should let them produce about 5,000 units a month.

It is interesting to see that one of the most advanced production processes around can be executed in a fairly humble environment.

$10MM/year Potential Business?

Demand currently outstrips production and customers must be selected in a lottery to have their character printed. In the last drawing only 25% of the applicants were selected and FigurePrints can produce ~1,200 figures in a month. When they expand capacity and can fulfill 5,000 orders a month at $150 a pop they will be pushing $10MM in revenue, before expanding into higher priced product categories.

Virtual Souvenirs

One idea being developed is allowing your character to be positioned in a victory pose standing triumphant over a fallen enemy. Hardcore WoW players spend hours and days raiding and trying to bring down epic bosses. This service allows you to have a keepsake from an important, if virtual, experience.

Room For Expansion?

A difficulty FigurePrints may have going forward is room for expansion into other games. EA has partnered with ZCorp to launch a service that will allow people to have their Spore or RockBand figures produced in a similar fashion. It seems like the owners of the intellectual property will have the edge and the technology could be outsourced fairly easily limiting options for FigurePrints. In any case, FigurePrints should be fairly well set with a 11.5MM subscriber base and many opportunities for product category expansion

Interesting Shopping Issues

When the new “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion came out and the new Death Knights class was released orders slowed down. FigurePrints only allows you to have your character printed with armor and swords that you have earned. Players only want their best gear represented which leads them to pushing off the purchase. This cartoon from Penny Arcade sums it up nicely:

I’m looking forward to the day that they reach full capacity so my brave dwarven hunter can be produced in full regalia to protect Azeroth and my bookshelf. Until then I’ll await the golden ticket.

Taking software out of the box and moving distribution online was a hallmark of Web 2.0. It was a great advance, helping good applications find an audience without having to deal with the hassles of distribution and manufacturing. However, this had a downside. It became very easy for crappy software to flood the market creating a new competition for attention.

A new group of companies are tying their web based offerings to tangible goods to combat this problem. Interestingly, these companies all focus on the youth market, creating solutions that allow them to monetize audiences who don’t have access to credit cards and to gain access to the “allowance economy”.

The following examples are aimed at kids, but it is easy to imagine the application of these concepts to more traditional web services. A cardboard box around software is pretty useless, but there are many other product possibilities that can add value to your service, act as a billboard in the real world, and help reduce your customer acquisition cost.

Web Totems

Disney has developed an RFID platform “Clickables“(PDF) that is embedded into toys and provides access to content online. e.g. If you buy a charm bracelet for their “Pixie Hollow” virtual world you get access to special virtual goods. The innovative aspect of this is that if you swipe your bracelet against a friends in real life, you get to share each others virtual goods online. This is a brilliant way to spur virality.

Analog Avatars

WebKinz were the first big hit in this category and are still going strong. Each Webkinz is a stuffed animal that has a unique code associated with it. When you enter that code you can play with a digital version of your stuffed animal. Making the toy a stuffed animal was a stroke of genius because of the emotional bond kids have with them. How many video games would a kid cling to while sleeping? Disney is getting into this area with Cars and Club Penguin branded experiences. Mattel has their BarbieGirls.com offering and UB Funkeys, which is the latest addition to this product category. These plastic figures/USB drives, created in the Kid Robot/urban vinyl style, open up new games or portion of a virtual world.

Play Anywhere

A number of companies have tried to emulate the success of card games like Magic: The Gathering by adding virtual components to the traditional play pattern. WebKinz, NeoPets, Bella Sara, and Chaotic all produce games trying to crack this market. These companies realize kids can only spend a certain amount of time on the computer and combination digital/analog games allow you to play with the cards online or in the schoolyard, extending the reach of the brand.

The Eye of Judgement card series brings this idea to another level by using an augmented reality technology. Each card has a unique symbol that can be read by the PS3′s camera attachment and when it does a monster literally pops out of the card. A very cool technique that brings a new dimension to the game play.

Prepaid Debit Cards

Prepaid virtual goods debit cards were popularized by Nexon in Korea and are used by many US and European based virtual worlds like Habbo, Gaia, Zwinky, and IMVU. This model is so popular that the virtual good/prepaid card product category is now the fastest growing at Target stores. At a base level they are an easy way to process transactions, but they also play into the “dress up” themes prevalent in many of these worlds. An 11 year old girl may not be able to make independent decisions or use a credit card while shopping with a parent, but at Stardoll.com she can choose the exact clothes she wants and model adult shopping behavior by using their own “credit card” to buy them.

Mass Customization

Mass customization is starting to make inroads into the toy market. The Build-a-Bear Workshop is certainly the most famous example, but a few notable companies are enabling kids, with the aid of the web and videogames, to personalize their play experience.

RideMakerz is like a boy focused Build-A-Bear and is launching a new virtual world/custom toy hybrid. Using their service you can build a car online and have it manufactured to your specifications OR you can go to one of their retail locations, build a physical car then play with a cyber version when you get home.

A bit further off in development is using 3D printing services to bring your avatar from a video game to the real world. FigurePrints allows you to do this now and EA has shown prototypes of a similar service that would enable you to have your creation from Spore brought to life.

The Future

The pendulum is already starting to swing back. Start ups are finding it more difficult to get shelf space for their offerings, but this development opens up a world of new possibilities for consumers and opportunities for companies who can tie the two worlds together. The virtual goods market is growing quickly and is highly lucrative (nearly 100% margins). Virtual goods combined with analog artifacts provide a chance for tech focused companies to disrupt the $20B+ toy industry that has been dominated almost entirely by marketers.

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1. Artaic Tiles

Mass High Tech reports on a Boston based comapny called Artaic that is using pick and place robotics to automate the labor intensive process of laying out mosaics. Using their service you can provide an image which is pixelated and the pixelated image is recreated in tile. It is 8X faster than a human, fairly expensive (up to $225/sq.ft.), but looks great in the sample photos and could do wonders to revive an under practiced art.

2. Timbuk2 does carry on luggage

In the “so close, but yet so far away category”, Timbuk2 (manufacturers of fine customized bags) has started manufacturing roll aboard luggage. I love the company, but how can they not offer customized designs? Timbuk2 and checked luggage has chocolate meets peanut butter potential. Imagine how cool it would be to see your bag coming down the claim belt immediately and not have to double check the luggage tags? I’m sure it is more expensive to produce, but customization in this context would add significant value beyond aesthetics. Even some Zazzle-esqe embroidery options would go a long way.

3. Intuitive CAD on the way

The always enjoyable SolidSmack reported on the latest version of AutoDesk‘s adaptive sketch tools. They really are an amazing approximation of what industrial designers do and the folks at AutoDesk have taken a great deal of care building the software so it expands on traditional skills rather than forcing people to learn a whole new paradigm.

The really amazing aspect is that they are developing a 2D to 3D software package where the lines you sketch freehand can form the basis of a 3D surface model. A huge time saver and boon to the creative process.

If customization and personal fabrication are going to reach the mainstream it is going to happen because CAD tools make it easy for lay people to be designers. We aren’t there yet, but this is a great indication of how close we are:

Autodesk Sketching Tech Preview from DEVELOP3D on Vimeo

4.RideMakerz faces off with Pixar

RideMakerz is like a boy focused Build-A-Bear and is launching a new virtual world/custom toy hybrid. Using their service you can build a car online and have it manufactured to your specifications OR you can go to one of their retail locations, build a physical car then play with a cyber version when you get home. Techcrunch has an article on the service and suggests that they will be in direct competition with Pixar’s “World of Cars“. I’ve had a chance to play with the Pixar version and I think the two companies can easily coexist. The Pixar/Cars aesthetic will skew a bit younger. RideMakerz uses real car brands and seems certain to appeal to an older segment of that audience. No matter what, it is cool to see the lines between physical and virtual continuing to blur.

5. Disney ToyMorrow: Toys of the Future

Continuing on the Disney theme, Disney Consumer Products has a team that focuses on the convergence of toys and digital media called “ToyMorrow”. This article in USA Today give a brief glimpse into what they are working on and how their creative process functions.

6. Custom Invitations – heated market

Pingg is a new entrant into the customized invitation market. I mentioned a company called MyPunchBowl in a previous post and their desire to offer a print on demand invitation service in the future. Pingg has already launched one complementing their “SurroundSend” web technology.

Their base designs are good, but seem to fall within a single design aesthetic consisting of a nice photograph/image paired with elegant typography. It is a fantastic start, but I hope they use their investment from Martha Stewart and others to increase the design options.

It seems like weddings would be a great avenue for companies like these. You could tie in registries, a pre-existing demand for web based and physical invites, and a market that isn’t super sensitive to price.

7. Influential Marketing Blog Reviews Flip Mino

Rohit Bhargava author of the Influential Marketing Blog weighs in on the Flip Mino‘s customization strategy. He does a great job breaking it down the smart decision they have made. I think the for factors he mention are key components of any good customization service:

1. Smart Partnership. Recognizing that users of Cafepress are already familiar with customizing their products, they chose to fulfill this feature with the right partner instead of trying to recreate everyone alone.
2. Designer Models. Some people may want their new Flip Camera to have a personality, but not be into uploading their own image or doing a lot of work to get it. For them, Flip has partnered with several designers to offer ready made unique designs that you can choose from.
3. Personalization. Of course, there are a large number of people who DO want to have their own look to their camera, and for them the ability to upload and use their own image is a big deal.
4. Flat pricing. The final element to the strategy is not charging people a huge premium to do this. All the designs cost the same as a regular camera – so people are far more likely to do it.

I also recommend his presentation on the 25 basic types of blogging. It is a great taxonomy of blog posts.

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I attended the MIT Smart Customization Seminar a couple weeks ago and recapped most of the speakers here. One notable exception was the presentation by Jana Eggers, CEO of Spreadshirt, a company that produces custom t-shirts.

Some notes on the presentation:

- According to their data, 82% of people want personalized clothing, but 75% don’t know it is possible, or where to do it. The first number seems a bit high depending on how it is defined, but the second is in line with what I’ve seen. Even in technical communities most people know Cafepress, but far less know Zazzle, and fewer still know about Ponoko and the options these companies offer. Mass customization has a long way to go before it becomes a household word.

Some info about Spreadshirt customers:

• 30% purchased shirts as gifts
• 25% purchased shirts to express ideas
• 20% purchased shirts for an event
• 75% wear their shirts “regularly” or “every time it is clean”

The majority bought shirts to be worn like an off the rack garment. It is interesting and encouraging to see that most customers don’t see the services like this as “gimmicky”. In my talks with customers and investors many have the belief that customized offerings are not competition for products found at retailers, but rather niches or glorified marketing expenses. The data collected by Spreadshirt provides some great info to the contrary.

The major concerns of their customers are:

1. High-quality, long-lasting printing

Direct to garment printing technology that enables one-of-a-kind tshirt printing is a notch below the industry standard (screen printing) in terms of quality. Some companies, including Spreadshirt, use different techniques that yield better results, but educating customers on the differences is difficult to do.

2. Having enough time to create

I think this is the big opportunity in customization right now. If it is true that 82% of people want to create, no one offers a solution that makes it easy for a hobbyist to do so. Designing anything from scratch is time consuming and often frustrating. The first company to create software that has built in design/manufacturing intelligence, enabling non-designers to create professional quality goods, is going to find a massive, waiting audience.

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