VentureBeat

A few years ago, it was still a subject of regular outrage. Jobs were headed to Mexico. Factories moving to China. Everybody hated globalization, without quite understanding it. But with a flood of news coverage — the slightly nauseating peak being an all-too-popular book about the world being flat — people finally figured it out: The manufacturing jobs were gone. Get a job banking, or flipping burgers, but don’t expect to be building cars or making clothes.

The idea is that we should switch to a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. And Silicon Valley, for one, long ago pinned its hopes on brains over brawn. Just take a look at the companies that get funding. But now that everyone’s getting used to the knowledge economy, manufacturing may make its comeback.

Here are the primary factors driving a manufacturing renaissance: The rapid growth of middle class consumers in countries like Brazil, China and India; a shrunken dollar and the loss of economic pre-eminence by the United States; less easy credit for overseas goods for consumers in the US; and, potentially, rising transportation costs that cut into cheap goods sent from overseas.

Those details are outlined by the CEO of the Manufacturers Alliance, Thomas Duesterberg, in this Industry Week article. There are a few more that could be added to the mix, though.

The first is our bid at shifting energy usage at home off foreign oil. Companies like Ausra, Nanosolar and Tesla are basing not only their research, but their plants in the United States. They have plenty of reasons to do so. States, eager to win back jobs lost long ago, are offering hefty incentives. Materials like solar mirrors and wind turbines are expensive to ship, and solar panels often break during long voyages. And for Tesla, there’s an additional prestige to having a car manufactured in the U.S., even if some parts are made overseas.

Another good example is Infinia, a solar company that is reducing its own startup costs by using existing manufacturing capacity in the country, much of which has been idle for years, to builds its solar dishes. And finally there are the many biofuel startups, many of which have no choice but to place their plants near the sources for their fuel. As the market for renewables grows, more will certainly be built here.

The need for specialized work will also become more prominent with the rise of next-generation materials, especially nanomaterials. Although fabless manufacturing in the semiconductor industry proved that high-tech work can be done overseas, the first generation of manufacturing will be at home. And with costs for overseas labor rising, the new nano industry may choose not to move elsewhere.

There are also opportunities for less commercial production. As the online marketplace Etsy has shown, there’s a nascent industry of crafters who are are eager to sell their goods. Ponoko, for one, wants to help those people create their goods, with online tools and a relatively inexpensive production process based on laser cutters.

And for the professionals, the small design firms and build shops of the world, cheap rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing technology are on the rise, a subject that I wrote about a year ago.

Whether physical production can ever dominate the American landscape again is doubtful. But the conventional view into the future, which suggests that we’ll make our way as a pure knowledge economy, is likely also off the mark. The future is never quite what you expect.

Here’s the latest action:

Yahoo has a bad day, but it could have been much worse — The Internet giant announced its earnings today and fell short of expectations, but only by about a penny-a-share. Net income was down 19 percent from the same quarter last year. Still, considering it no longer has a Carl Icahn-led hostile takeover to worry about, the company can — and more importantly, will live with these numbers.

Icahn’s wild weekend — While Yahoo was busy breathing a sigh of relief now that the Icahn takeover “distraction” (as Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang called it on the earnings call today) is behind them, Icahn got back to writing about Yahoo on his blog. His new post is entitled “How I Spent My Weekend” — no, really. He’ll be here all week folks, try the veal.

Shuffle at the top of Etsy — The online marketplace for handmade things has announced that Maria Thomas, its former chief operating officer, will now be its chief executive. Founder Rob Kalin will now be the chief creative officer. It also announced Chad Dickerson as its new chief technology officer. Dickerson leaves his job as the head of the Yahoo Brickhouse special projects group. Yes, that’s another Yahoo exec who is leaving.

Sugar ends its relationship with NBC — The female-oriented blog network has decided to take charge of its own advertising. Too bad that Lauren Zalaznick, president of Women and Lifestyle Entertainment networks for NBC Universal, just played up its partnership with Sugar in announcing the BlogHer deal last week.

GigaOM scoops up a mobile blog — jkOnTheRun joins the Giga Omni Media network of blogs. Read about it from Om Malik himself.

MySpace announces support of OpenID — If you have an account with MySpace you can now use it to login to any other site supporting OpenID.

Ryan Block leaves Engadget — The editor of the popular gadget blog (left) is leaving to start an undisclosed new project with another former Engadget editor, Peter Rojas.

Google walking directions — In the spirit of summer, Google now allows you to get directions tailored for those who may not want to drive or take public transportation to a destination.

Joost goes to China — Maybe it’ll fare better there than it has in the U.S. NewTeeVee has the details.

Twitter acknowledges spam issue — The micro-messaging service is fully aware that marketers and others are signing up for accounts and mass-friending people. It does not like that, as it writes in its blog.

Ever gone to eBay in search of something — an iPod, say — and had to comb through an endless array of half-literate, confusing and possibly inaccurate listings?

Or perhaps you’re a seller on eBay, and angry at its policies?

Either way, Wigix, the “Want it, got it Xchange,” hopes you’re annoyed enough to switch. The company, which launches today, offers an online marketplace modeled on stock exchanges, aimed at reducing inefficiences.

When an item is listed on Wigix, the seller won’t need to go through the task of describing it and posting pictures. Instead, they find the item in Wigix’s database, select it, and choose a price, with an eye to the average price.

Buyers, likewise, need only find the item they’re looking for through a single search on Wigix. Once they’re on the page for that item, they can see last prices it sold at, how many buyers and sellers there are, descriptions, reviews and more. If they want to buy it, they put in a bid price; when a seller meets the price, the transaction will be made.

The product pages are to be vetted by “category experts” who will take a tiny percentage of sales for their efforts, while sales fees have a set rate: Zero fees for items under $25, a fee of $1.50 each for the buyer and seller for items up to $100, a 2 percent fee to the seller for $100 - $1,000, and a one percent fee for every dollar over $1,000. Those prices are calculatedly much lower than eBay’s seller fees, and there is no listing fee at all, nor do listings expire.

As you buy items they’ll be automatically listed on your “portfolio”, or you can manually add those you already own. You’ll be able to see your portfolio change in price over time, just like a stock portfolio, and can choose to sell items anytime, or receive notifications of sudden price shifts (in case your dingy old pair of Converse suddenly acquire cult appeal).

The two founders that I met, former Charles Schwab traders James Chong and Bob Lee, have plenty of additional ideas for how to monetize and run the site — more than I can fit here. What’s perhaps more interesting is an anecdote they had to pass on about Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which has $5.34 million invested in the company.

While I’d assumed a million eBay competitors must have been launched over the years, Lee said their initial pitch to DFJ for funding immediately got the attention of Draper, who said that out of the many thousands of pitches he’d received over the years, only three had been for competitors to eBay. Along with the investment, he joined the board of the company.

When I tried for myself to think of eBay competitors the only that immediately came to mind was Etsy, which has created a successful market for unique, hand-made items, many of which would have otherwise ended up on eBay. In a sense, what Wigix wants to do — become the marketplace for standard, mass-produced items — covers the other half of that equation. And yes, eBay irritates me enough to switch.

Wigix is based in San Francisco, and was founded in March 2007.

Etsy, a site for buying and selling hand-made crafts, has raised $27 million in a round led by Accel Partners, with Accel’s Jim Breyer joining the company’s board of directors.

Think eBay’s e-commerce site, but for arts and crafts, and also more tastefully designed. Etsy’s crafts range from handmade furniture to bracelets (sample below).

The vision behind the company is that it can help small-time craftspeople find customers and make a living, while reducing society’s reliance on mass-produced consumer goods. “We believe that the world cannot keep consuming the way it does now, and that buying handmade is part of the solution,” founder Rob Kalin writes in this post about the funding, and the company’s future plans.

Etsy charges sellers a $0.02 listing fee per item and 3.5 percent commission on any sale, as well as letting sellers pay a small fee to showcase their goods in prominent locations on the site. It is making money and at break-even.

The site also offers a feedback system, a Paypal payment option, online forums, online sessions on craftsmaking aired live from the company’s headquarters, and even street teams that help reach out to local users.

It has around 650,000 registered members, including 120,000 craft sellers, and lists nearly 1 million items. Most site visitors are in the US, Europe and down under, by the looks of this map (pictured) on the company’s site, although it has sellers in more than 127 countries. The site had more than a million unique visitors in December, according to Comscore.

Previous investors Union Square Ventures and Hubert Burda Media joined in this round. The company received angel funding from Flickr co-founder Catarina Fake and other individuals. Previous funding totaled $5 million. Note: Investors have apparently been drooling over the company for years.