But there's more. The element of random good fortune has been replaced by the award of the prize being dependent on the recipient's actions. No more of this 500 lucky gift certificate winners randomly selected from a pool; now the free shoes are going to the first 500 netizens who forward the message to 50 of their best friends. (Holy e-mail overload!) This small change elevates the lure from a contest you might or might not win to a guarantee of a pair of free sneakers provided you act quickly and decisively. Like I said, it's a more attractive packaging of the hoax. No search term specified. Showing recent items. Search or use up and down arrow keys to select an item. . Asset Liability Mgmt. Sign Up For A Free Webinar Or Schedule A Demo! AutoCAD for MAC. 27:10 Russ: Yeah, that's a bonus. And of course, a lot of times people want features on their phone, their computer, their car that I don't want. But some of what you are talking about allows for personalization, customization that would have been unimaginable 5, 10 years ago. So talk about how this potential for personalization, customization ties in with your work in The Long Tail, how those dovetail, if I may use a bad phrase. Guest: Yeah. Well the long tail, just to remind people is: is there a life beyond the blockbuster. It's what's happened, especially in the digital world in the last decade or so, as we went from limited distribution capacity to unlimited distribution capacity. So, as music went from being transmitted as a physical object in stores to a digital object in databases, suddenly we had no limits to shelf space. And the economics of distributed something no longer required mass excess-it was scale agnostic, to use the technical term. But the point is the marketplace had as much room for the niches as it did for the blockbusters. That created, in digital culture, an explosion of choice; and we now have, anything you could want is out there. Music, film, games, texting, and beyond. So that's what digital did to distribution. But physical has always been more constrained, in the sense that there's real costs associated with physical production. What we're seeing here, now, is that increasingly objects can take on the characteristics of digital objects. So, let me just give you an example. I have a coffee cup in front of me. Right now, if you want to buy that coffee cup, you can probably go to Crate and Barrel or whatever, to Ikea, and buy it. It was probably mass produced. There are some real costs associated with its production and transportation and storing, and all that's reflected in both the choice and the price of that coffee cup. But now I want to take up my phone. I'm pretending I've got an iPhone in front of me. Actually, I've got an Android. I'll take an iTablet. I really do have an iPad. I'll pick up my iPad and open up an application, a free App called 123DCatch. It comes from Autodesk. And this App is a reality capture app. It's basically a 3D scanner. And I'm going to go click, click, click, click, click around the coffee cup, and take a bunch of pictures, and then send those pictures to the cloud, and just pushing a button, and a couple of minutes later down will come a 3D design. It's basically been scanned. And digitized. And now that physical object, those atoms, have taken on the characteristics of digits. Now it's a digital object. And now I can upload it to a service; I can distribute it; I can copy it an infinite number of times. Now it's really easy to modify-you just bring it into one of those CAD programs we were talking about earlier and I'll make it longer, or I'll change the material it's made out of or I'll put a cool design on it. And now, if I want to return it back into atoms I can do so on my local 3D printer if I want it made out of plastic. Maybe I don't want to drink coffee out of that one. Or I'll send it to Shapeways and have it be made out of an even better material than it currently is-I want it made out of stainless steel or out of titanium. And so now it has basically taken on the ability to do-when Apple released the iPod, they had a motto: rip, mix, burn. And 'rip' was to take a physical object and make it yours, make it digital. 'Mix' was to change it. And 'burn' was to bring it back to atoms, to put it back on a CD, to burn a CD, essentially to manufacture your own music. Or modified music. Well, Autodesk, with their combination of apps, like 123DCatch, has a motto called 'rip, mod, make.' And it's the exact same thing. You digitize an object, you modify it, and then you fabricate it, you make it real again. And these web innovation characteristics, this ability for anybody to create their own culture, to modify culture, to personalize culture, which was so powerful in the digital space over the last 20 years is extending to physical stuff. Russ: And the cost of that is a huge part of it, the fact that it's so-if I said to you, again, 10, 20 years ago: Let's make a-we've got a coffee cup and it's made out of some ceramic material; I'd like to know what a stainless steel coffee cup would taste like, feel like, hold like. So I'm going to go make one. It would cost you, I don't know-hundreds, thousands of dollars? Guest: Oh, at least. The old model, you'd have to get a mold made and work with pros and they won't work on a scale of one. Thousands. Russ: They'd laugh at you. Maybe your uncle would do it for you. What you're talking about now is done at-we can talk about the car example in a minute, but it's a fraction of what you'd imagine it would be. Which allows you to customize if you really like it your way. Guest: Yeah. And that's exactly-one of the risks that a lot of these examples seem a little trivial. Coffee cups and such. But I kind of live on both ends of the spectrum. The reality is that the tools that Maker movement have allowed me to create an aerospace company, which is proper manufacturing. They've also allowed my children to personalize their dollhouse furniture. And I can't tell you which of those is more important. I think in some sense my children is more important, because my children and any other child who grows up with a 3D printer and CAD tools-and I think increasingly that will be put into schools. What they've learned is perhaps more important, which is they've learned that they have the power to make stuff. That anything, any idea they have can be made real through a relatively simple screen process which they are already familiar with, through video games. I used to have ideas. But I didn't have any way to make them real because I didn't have machine skills. I didn't know how to work a metal lathe, to say nothing of access to a metal lathe. The fact that you've taken that skill requirement out of the equation, it's simply a matter of-a word processor, you go to the File menu, you pick Print, and something kind of magical happens: bits on your screen turn into atoms of ink on paper. A complex computation process, fonts, PostScript, rasters, vectors, all sorts of scaling; you don't need to know anything about it. All you need to know is you click that button and out comes the paper with text on it. To take manufacturing, and if you go to any one of the CAD tools I've described, rather than 'Print' they have 'Make.' And you just click on that button, and it walks you through this little quick Wizard, a little bit like a printer dialogue, that walks you through some 2D versus 3D, material selection, strength, weight, cost considerations; do you want to do it locally, do you want to do it in the cloud. And you click, click, click, click and then you press okay. And out it comes. As a physical object. All that complexity abstracted away. I think if anything the big transformation is that kids-a generation is going to grow up thinking that making stuff is as simple as publishing a blog. And increasingly it will be. Russ: Yeah, that's very cool. By the way, I want to make it clear: your drones, your factory-you said you are running an aerospace company. They are not armed-is that correct? Guest: Not all aerospace companies make weapons. No, ours are not armed. Ours are small and they weigh less than 4 pounds. They tend to be about 3 feet in size. They have cameras; they are designed for things like Hollywood, agriculture, search and rescue, things like that; a lot of action sports-they get used for that. They cost like $600, not $6 million. And they are very much designed for the civilian drone market, which is just now emerging. We very explicitly avoid the military market. Russ: I hear you. ' Show Weekly discussion by freelancers and professionals about running a business, finding clients, marketing, and lifestyle related to being a freelancer. .