We live in an age of network effects and disruptive technologies. Cases in point: the music industry, magazine publishing, publishing, advertising, television… Transactional processes, ephemeral moments, audio, video, text all are now cheaply reproducible, impossible to keep under lock and key, and changing (slowly) our view of what, naively perhaps, we thought of as “the way things are done.”
We’re on the cusp of a further transformative set of tools and technologies, and like the early internet some of us are already living in the future disrupted world: cheap, fast reproduction of THINGS.
This kid’s ready for that world:
This woman is constructing a company that lives in that world:
(her husband also wrote a book that could serve as a Rough Guide to that future.)
What’s particularly fascinating is that all the public movement in this field closely follows the technology ur-revolution: the personal computer revolution.
Jobs and Woz started something huge in their garage, and the established entrenched players soon followed suit because there was a new demand. Demand that was created by a bunch of die hard hackers and fan boys, and two guys
in a garage.
Basically, same as these guys
The MakerBot story is fascinating.
Right now the cost of entry is higher than ‘one in every home’. Though the actual cost of making a 3-D printer, whether a kit or self sourcing your parts, is comparable to a mid-range computer, the skills needed to assemble are (sadly) not necessarily considered common, and the range of uses and social expectations of just having one aren’t there, yet. No killer apps for those who aren’t just jazzed at the idea of printing their own action figures.
Parallel to the personal fabricator trend are sites like Thingiverse, which is a clearinghouse of things to print on your fab. It’s the software for the machine, the model for a potential source of killer apps.
And of course, this is all now OLD NEWS
So aside from raw materials, what packaged goods will we actually buy or sell? What industries start to fade, and what dependent ecosystems does that disrupt?
