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.

Large Format Lego Camera

There is no end to the innovation that tools like Legos enable as demonstrated by this homebrew, large format film camera.

Foursquare enables NFC checkins

Foursquare is gave a glimpse of its future at Google I/O by previewing Near Field Communication based check ins which would potentially make using their service easier. I’m not sure if this will take hold, but it is an interesting marker of the trend of physical devices and virtual services working together.

Plane Finder – Augmented Reality Flight Tracking App

Word Lens was the first amazing use of AR that I saw in an iPhone app, but this app called Plane Finder is equally impressive. You simply point your phone towards the sky and you can see what planes are around you, where they originated and where their destinations are. Not as practical as Word Lens, but a very cool technical demo.

Japanese French Kissing Robot

I’ll just quote Slashdot on this one:

“If you think the idea of french kissing someone over the internet with a robotic tongue is kind of gross, go outside and enjoy your afternoon. For those of you still sitting here, The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo has just what you’ve been looking for.”

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)

YouTube is a cultural force that has redefined entertainment and helped elect Barack Obama president, but the online video powerhouse is just getting rolling in the world of brand/product advertising. YouTube is getting serious about creating original content by sponsoring a program that helps content creators get better equipment and today announcing the acquisition of NextNewNetworks, a company that is focused on creating the TV stars of tomorrow.

In a world where product design is a hobby it is inevitable that innovation in advertising will follow. There are two trends at work, one is that video production equipment costs are approaching free. The other is that YouTube is a perfect platform for experimentation. Small time advertisers can now experiment with weird content, atypical formats, rich interactivity, and a variety of variables to help sell their product.

A great practical example of this is OraBrush, a toothbrush like device that scrapes gunk off your tongue to help reduce bad breath. It seems like a nice product, surely something an entrepreneur with basic CAD skills and a 3D printer could imagine, but the most impressive thing about the company is that they have generated more YouTube views than Apple and BMW. Television advertising wouldn’t be economical for OraBrush, but this tiny company with a niche product can out advertise the greatest brand company the world has over known.

OraBrush is able to have this impact with production values that are no better than what you’d find in a community theater. However, content, format, channel, product and other elements work perfectly together and provide a glimpse as to how consumer packaged goods will be sold over the next decade. YouTube is going to be a huge part of the future of television and ads, content, and product are going to continue to merge.

Consumer products like toothbrushes aren’t usually hot beds of innovation, but between the experimentation that tools like 3D printers offer, the funding potential on KickStarter, and the promotional opportunities via YouTube there is the potential to upend staid old companies like Proctor & Gamble. While it may not seem as exciting as a music startup or social networking site, the last big innovation in the Toothbrush category made its inventors half a billion dollars.

Barbie has gone through a lot of changes going from Stewardess to Astronaut. I’m not sure what career this new incarnation would be suited for, but you can now “design” hair extensions for your doll and have them printed out on inkjet printers using a special “hair” paper.

The printer can print images, words, colors, textures, and a variety of other aesthetic stylings based on what is designed .

and boom your semi-classy Barbie now looks trashier! An you can wear them yourself if you are so inclined.

The product seems tacky, but it is neat to see the profusion of customization and how it is working into all sorts of odd niches.

More importantly, I wonder if this says something about customization more generally. Maybe custom isn’t something that can carry a company on its own (except maybe in some edge cases), but it is something that is added to a mature product line. Customization is cool, but perhaps not cool enough to sustain an enterprise independently?

The iPad 2 is now old news and while speculation is ramping up for version 3 there is still amazing innovation happening on this platform. On Kickstarter there is a project to sponsor a virtual letterpress. This project would allow users to arrange wooden blocks of type on the screen and create “virtual” prints. Ultimately the vision is to allow users to customize a message and have it printed in real life. The project is fully funded and a very interesting application for the platform.

Along the lines of letters and iPads there is a burgeoning class of writer creating a nice living, beyond what a traditional publisher could offer by self-publishing on tablets. Amanda Hocking has made more than a quarter million dollars in her short career. JA Konrath is another writer who started out printing on dead trees, but has seen greener grass in the purely digital world.

Whether it is creating or consuming content, the iPad, Kindle, and other tablets are changing our relationship with the written world. These experiments in print also help us imagine what the future of other product categories will be like.

Earlier this month, Harmonix, maker of the “RockBand” franchise of music games had to lay off ~10% of their workforce. Activision, makers of the “Guitar Hero” franchise announced they would be cutting the entire division. The reason is simple, in the space of two years revenue in the category has plummeted, going from $1.7B in 2008 to $850MM in 2010. It is sad news for employees of the company, will indirectly hurt 3D printer manufacturers who make print avatars from the games, and is unfortunate for fans of the genre.

It should also serve as a warning to all of the hardware developers trying to make a name for themselves in the emerging Mobile Health (mHealth) market. RockBand’s rise and fall is a clear case of  market saturation. Most music game enthusiasts are only going to need one guitar or band setup. Once those are sold the only revenue stream is the sale of low-margin song tracks. Most people who play the games do so at parties so you only need a fairly small catalog to keep the fun rolling.

mHealth hardware could face a similar trajectory. As cool as products like the WiThings scale/pedometer, FitBit, Zeo, Wakemate, and dozens of other devices are you will only need one $150 scale. From what I understand many of these companies are making thin margins on hardware with the hope that they will be able to charge subscription fees or for API access down the road. It is a nice idea, but one without a lot of market precedents. Some of these products will likely be scooped up by larger companies in the health and fitness world, but all should be wary of what happened with music gaming and the related hardware.

These mHealth companies face additional challenges with fragmentation. Right now activity monitoring is separate from weight, which is siloed away from sleep, and not overlapped with blood pressure data or medication adherence. Lets assume people with pay a $15/month fee for this data, they will not pay for 5 and nor will most insurance companies. This is an industry begging for a “Roll Up” and one “Ring of Data” that will rule them all.

3D Printers are amazing and there will probably we an amazing use case for them someday. It is unclear what that will be, but you can start to make out the contours of the future by looking at the present of smart phone cameras and photo sharing services.

A New York Times photojournalist has written a nice article and defense of these apps and the experiences they enable. For instance, he recounts a time when he was embedded with a unit overseas:

“They would have scattered the moment I raised my 5D with a big 24-70 lens attached. But with the phone, the men were very comfortable. They always laughed when they saw me shooting with it while professional cameras hung from my shoulders.”

Project Noah is another case of these wonderful sensors being used in surprising and interesting ways. The project is creating a Wikipedia like service that allows amateur taxonomists to snap pics of flora and fauna and tag them with information that can be used in recall later.

Getting back to 3D printers, maybe the big break though will be the quickness, simplicity, and contextual appropriateness custom products can provide. Or maybe it will be a matter of crowdsourcing, but we are getting a snap shot of where 3D printing will be in 10,20, or 30 years in the form of these cameras.

Related articles

• And For Every Child, a 3D Printer (wired.com)
• 10 year old extols his 3D printer’s virtues (boingboing.net)
• For the baking enthusiast, a 3D food printer (eatocracy.cnn.com)

In 2010 FarmVille has gone from Facebook, to iPhone, to canned vegetables, to Slurpees, and now to ice cream. Farmville Vanilla Ice Cream is now available in over 7,000 7-11 freezer chests. Buy the ice cream in the real world and your virtual world benefits via Zynga credits that come with the product.

It is a brilliant idea and one that will provide a good point of differentiation among commodity products. More importantly I wonder if this provides an alternative to ads, subscriptions, and microtransactions for website revenue?  If your site has sufficient reach among a demographic, will CPG companies and retailers pay you for driving customers to them? Could Zynga’s model be the 21st century equivalent of Green Stamps?

Co-branding like this gives you the visibility benefit of brand advertising, but the accountability of Google AdWords, a win for retailers, customers, and tech providers.

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Photo Credit

Benefits

CPG Companies – Offering these virtual goods as a promotion wouldn’t have to pay until a customer bought something. This provides Google Adwords style accountability and pay for performance. It is an update of old cereal box promotions that offered a free record or toy if you collected enough “Proofs of Purchase”

Customers – would get a “free prize” with a high perceived value.

Tech Companies - that powered these promotions would get a high volume of users, lower customer acquisition costs, and a high, predictable ARPU.

Examples:

Virtual Goods – Buy a box of Cocoa puffs and get the Cocoa tree in Farmville. Would General Mills co-brand Count Chocula with Vampire Wars?

Access to Metered Content - Buy a TV at BestBuy rather than Walmart and get 3 months of Hulu Plus for free. Or spend $100 a week at Whole Foods and get a free electronic cookbook.

Increased Status - Spend $100 at Rockler/Home Depot/McMaster and get a bump up to the Pro Level of Instructables for that month.

Requirements

For companies that wanted to offer services in this manner the key requirements would be:

1. Strong Brand – It needs to stand out on retail packaging/ads to help move product
2. Massive Audience – Relative to the product category
3. Clear product upgrade path, ideally with low/no marginal cost
4. Recurring mechanism to keep people brand loyal and repeat customers

For a company that could pull it off you would get the benefit of consumer scale with the massive volume of enterprise sales.

PhotoJoJo is a popular photography site that has a strong DIY/ecommerce focus. Their interest in physical products even shows itself in their advertising. Instead of buying a bunch of adwords to drive traffic they bought and refurbished a bunch of old Polaroid camera’s instead. It is a smart move as a bunch of hip blogs picked up the story and certainly sent a healthy amount of traffic to PhotoJoJo. This concept of “Web Souvenirs” or “Product as Public Relations” is popping up in more interesting places. I wonder if it will ever go full circle where Instagram will create an iPhone case that mimics the Polaroid camera that its logo is based on?

NB: unfortunately the product is already sold out, but check out their store for other cool stuff.