Question
What will the big trends be after social and mobile?
Answer
It will start with the Apple iFab in 2017.
It will be a little brushed-aluminum box with a clear hard-glass top that has both a touch display and transparency to see what's beneath. You'll log on to iTunes, download a $0.99 design and the fabber will 3D print the thing in the hidden part of the box and pop it into the bay when done. It will be impossible to change the battery or the fab material cartridge. Instead, you'll take it to the Genius Bar for refills. The thing will cost $1500. Paris Hilton and other celebs will conspicuously carry the thing around, printing designer sunglasses in public view.
This will be followed by Google Maker, a set of open source specs and libraries for 3D printing that will spawn a whole universe of crappy home-made 3D printers, each running a version of Maker that is incompatible with everybody else's. The Maker Store will contain tons of dangerously violent robot designs that will leap out of the fab machines and kill you if you try to print them.
Amazon will then step in with Amazon Forge for $99, based on Google Maker 3.2 and a very controlled design store that will eliminate the killer robot problem, but squeeze designers dry. With Amazon Prime, you'll be able to rent Forge designs for $0.10 instead of buying them for $0.99, and get automatic shipments of refill fab material cartridges every month.
Microsoft will offer WinFab which will be utterly crappy but be rapidly adopted by enterprises. Soon unused WinFabs will be all over corporate offices, next to the coffee machines. There will be empty Sharepoint repositories that are supposed to have the official corporate designs to be 3D printed. Nobody will print them. Instead, bootleg designs will be printed on hacked Google Maker machines without letting the IT department know.
IBM will release a whitepaper titled "Fabrication Oriented Enterprise Architecture" and make billions integrating useless corporate fabbing networks.
Facebook will launch Social Fabline. People will post pictures of their 3D printed objects and like each other's crap with furious intensity. They'll release an API that allows people to create FApps (Fab-Apps) that can talk to each other and humans.
Combined with a rogue version of Google Maker (3.23), and a FApp virus that posts pictures of itself on people's Fablines, and an innocuous-seeming Zynga game, an army of fabbed killer robot bunnies will take over the world and destroy it.
It will be a little brushed-aluminum box with a clear hard-glass top that has both a touch display and transparency to see what's beneath. You'll log on to iTunes, download a $0.99 design and the fabber will 3D print the thing in the hidden part of the box and pop it into the bay when done. It will be impossible to change the battery or the fab material cartridge. Instead, you'll take it to the Genius Bar for refills. The thing will cost $1500. Paris Hilton and other celebs will conspicuously carry the thing around, printing designer sunglasses in public view.
This will be followed by Google Maker, a set of open source specs and libraries for 3D printing that will spawn a whole universe of crappy home-made 3D printers, each running a version of Maker that is incompatible with everybody else's. The Maker Store will contain tons of dangerously violent robot designs that will leap out of the fab machines and kill you if you try to print them.
Amazon will then step in with Amazon Forge for $99, based on Google Maker 3.2 and a very controlled design store that will eliminate the killer robot problem, but squeeze designers dry. With Amazon Prime, you'll be able to rent Forge designs for $0.10 instead of buying them for $0.99, and get automatic shipments of refill fab material cartridges every month.
Microsoft will offer WinFab which will be utterly crappy but be rapidly adopted by enterprises. Soon unused WinFabs will be all over corporate offices, next to the coffee machines. There will be empty Sharepoint repositories that are supposed to have the official corporate designs to be 3D printed. Nobody will print them. Instead, bootleg designs will be printed on hacked Google Maker machines without letting the IT department know.
IBM will release a whitepaper titled "Fabrication Oriented Enterprise Architecture" and make billions integrating useless corporate fabbing networks.
Facebook will launch Social Fabline. People will post pictures of their 3D printed objects and like each other's crap with furious intensity. They'll release an API that allows people to create FApps (Fab-Apps) that can talk to each other and humans.
Combined with a rogue version of Google Maker (3.23), and a FApp virus that posts pictures of itself on people's Fablines, and an innocuous-seeming Zynga game, an army of fabbed killer robot bunnies will take over the world and destroy it.