July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Making things has deep roots in American culture.

The Founding Fathers were do-it-yourselfers, from Jefferson’s explicit idealization of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer to Franklin’s intrepid experimentation with electricity. Over the centuries, a return to this kind of independent DIY spirit has helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, the radio era of the early 20th century, the hippie movement (the part of it exemplified by the Whole Earth catalog, anyway) and punk rock.

Along the way, America became the greatest industrial nation on Earth, creating airplanes, cars, electronics, computers, and eventually the Internet.

Then we gradually started relocating factories overseas, as we grew to value inexpensive goods made by cheap labor over arguably better-quality products made by skilled (and relatively expensive, often union) labor at home. Americans pursued other, more lucrative and more stimulating careers than factory work.

That made sense, for awhile, as global markets enabled “labor arbitrage” and let the U.S. concentrate on areas where it still held a competitive advantage: design, engineering, software, marketing, advertising.

At the same time, Americans as individuals stopped getting their hands dirty. Fifty years ago every car owner had to know something about basic repair; today, people who can fix their own cars are rare. (Cars themselves are nearly impossible to repair for the home mechanic anyway, given the profusion of electronics under the hood — but they’re also far more reliable than the cars of 50 years ago, so home repairs are less necessary.) Fewer and fewer people do their own home repairs, plumbing, gardening, canning, or clothes making and mending.

In short, while we stopped making things on an industrial scale, we also stopped making and fixing things at home. Our economy shifted towards software and services, and our personal lives shifted toward the Internet and Walmart.

This is a broad generalization, but the arc of the shift seems clear. America, by and large, has been content to let other people make stuff for us in the physical world, while we concentrate on the bits. No computers are made in the U.S., apart from a few of their components. No smartphone has ever been made here, again, excepting a few components, such as Gorilla Glass (made by Corning in Kentucky).

But there are signs that the trend is starting to reverse.

Bringing jobs back home

Motorola, a longstanding American electronics company that fell on hard times and got bought by Google a year and a half ago, is reopening a phone factory near Forth Worth, Texas. It will assemble the company’s latest phone, the Moto X, which Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside says will be the first U.S.-built smartphone ever. It will employ 2,000 people to do so.

Now, Motorola is a much smaller company than it used to be, with just 3 percent of the smartphone market. But what about General Electric, one of the titans of our industrial economy? It too is starting to look at relocating jobs.

“The era of labor arbitrage is ending,” General Electric chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt said this week at D11, a tech conference in southern California. Thanks to new manufacturing technologies that reduce the amount of labor required, he said, “you can basically make whatever you want, wherever you want.”

And at the same time, the DIY spirit is enjoying a resurgence as a growing number of people, disillusioned with bland, prefab corporate culture, are embracing the joys of making their own stuff. “Maker culture” has become a thing, with hundreds of hackerspaces opening up across the country where people can use tools, learn how to solder, or just hang out and work on projects with others. Libraries are starting to offer similar workspaces. Some towns are getting tool lending libraries. And Maker Media’s Maker Faire has grown from a once-a-year event in San Mateo, Calif. to a franchise that happens all over the country (and the world), with four events in four different cities this year.

There’s even a growing array of startups coming out of the maker movement, as entrepreneurs realize that iPhone apps, photo-sharing sites and ad-supported social networks aren’t the only way to make a business — you can create useful things in the real world, too, and sell them.

In short, many people are growing tired of a world where everything is made (probably of plastic) somewhere overseas, perhaps in wildly unsafe factories, packaged in cardboard and more plastic, hung on a peg in your local big-box store, and brought home in the back of your minivan.

They are realizing that getting your hands dirty is fun.

It’s also good business. If a captain of industry like Immelt is saying that the era of shipping manufacturing overseas is ending, I pay attention. His reasoning is that GE’s real product is not the physical goods, but rather the process that it takes to create them. They can deliver that “code” anywhere in the world.

Making things and making money

Manufacturing, it turns out, is also more of a competitive advantage than many companies previously believed. Apple understood this early on, and forged extremely tight relationships with its Asian suppliers. Coupling engineering tightly together with manufacturing helps make better products.

While Apple was able to pull that off while spanning the Pacific, most companies don’t have its clout. For them, locating factories in the U.S. can actually make them more competitive.

Motorola’s Woodside put it simply: “When your phone manufacturing is thousands of miles away from your designers and your engineers, you lose the ability to innovate.” By putting its factory in Fort Worth, Woodside says, “We think that’s going to allow us to innovate and iterate much faster.”

Motorola’s senior vice president of advanced projects Regina Dugan put it in an even broader context. “I believe this country was founded by makers and creators,” she told me earlier this week. “We are not only consumers. We are also creators. I think it speaks to a very foundational human desire to make things. And I think we have to return to that as a country.”

GE and Motorola are just two examples of how American industry is shifting the way it thinks about manufacturing. But if you put their moves together with the DIY trend, I think there are reasons to be cautiously hopeful about the future of making stuff in the United States.

So let’s get to work.

Top photo: Another American manufacturer: Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, examines robot arms in the Tesla plant in Fremont, Calif. Photo credit: jurvetson via photopin

This story originally appeared on LinkedIn. Follow me there!

SAN MATEO, Calif. — Sean Riley, the host of National Geographic show “World’s Toughest Fixes,” has a message for kids today: Learn a trade.

Speaking with BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin at Maker Faire yesterday, Riley pointed out that it takes four to six years to learn a trade, such as plumbing — about the same amount of time it would take you to get through college.

Yet plumbers, especially in big urban areas, will make far more money than the average college graduate. In other words, if you’re smart and ambitious, and you can’t get a Thiel Fellowship to help kickstart your startup idea, you might consider another alternate path: Getting your hands dirty.

In Riley’s case, his trade — rigging — led him to work with a wide range of interesting projects. He mentioned that he recently helped hang the 50,000-pound lighting equipment at the upcoming Rolling Stones show in Oakland, Calif., for instance. But it also led him to become the star of one of television’s more amazing reality shows. In each show, he travels to a different part of the world to watch (and sometimes help) as engineers, crane operators, riggers, and deep-sea divers help fix a wide range of massive problems, from replacing the engine on an cruise ship to swapping out the gate in a big dam lock.

Even if you’re not interested in the trades, Riley thinks more people should know about the massive amount of infrastructure that it takes to make the modern world possible. There’s a lot of redundancy built into systems like the power grid, he says — but that redundancy is diminishing, since we’ve spent less and less on upgrading and maintaining this infrastructure over the past 40 years.

Repairability is also a disappearing quality in many gadgets we own today. “If you can’t open it up and fix it, you don’t own it,” was one of the themes Jardin and Riley discussed onstage.

Learn how to fix things, and you’ll be more in control of the world around you. And, you will be in a better position to build the next great thing.

Riley revealed that, after four seasons with the show, he would not be continuing for a fifth. “I traveled 350 days out of the year,” he said, and said that while it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting, and took a personal toll. Also, he added, “a show like this is incredibly expensive to produce.”

Photo: Sean Riley with a young fan. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

All the usual writing crew have abandoned me (what, it’s the weekend?).

So instead of yelling at the staff and helping with the odd headline, I’ve actually got to do something useful around here. In other words, I’m going to write a few posts.

But it’s also the weekend that Maker Faire happens in San Mateo, where I live.

Now, I’m not much of a maker, but I do like to get my hands dirty. I’ve got a bunch of half-finished projects all over my house, including two half-finished cigar box guitars, an unfinished Drawdio kit, and an old Nintendo DS that I disassembled in an effort to replace its broken case and could never get to work right again.

You might say I’m more of a breaker than a maker. But I love going to Maker Faire to see what other, more talented makers have come up with.

So I’m going to make lemonade out of this pile of lemons known as the “weekend shift.” We’re going to make VentureBeat into a temporary makers-only zone just for today.

Don’t worry, you’ll feel right at home here. Along with SaaS startups, iPhone apps, and photo-sharing sites, one thing that the technology world is discovering is that making hardware is a pretty good business after all.

It’s easier than ever to make things. There’s a ton of information  online about how to make everything from sauerkraut to sensors. Hundreds of hackerspaces, as well as for-profit workshops like TechShop, make tools and knowhow available to anyone who wants to learn. And once you have a solid idea, electronics manufacturers (in China or even in Oregon) make it easier than ever to go into mass production.

Somewhere between the self-driving couches, the flaming sculptures, and the Arduino-powered blinky light projects, I think we’ll catch a glimpse of the future of tech.

Stay tuned. And if you don’t like maker day on VentureBeat, please send me smoke signal or drum signal stating, “I don’t like learning about people who make things, so I have disassembled my laptop, smartphone, and tablet and am living on a diet of nuts and berries.”

This is a guest post by Jason Cavnar, the co-founder and CEO of Singly.

Over the holidays, I looked around the living room and saw eight adults over 55 sending text messages, having video conversations with loved ones in other cities, and showing each other the new apps they use.

In our living rooms, at the office, in our classrooms, in our cars, and in our pockets, innovation in software has radically changed the world we know. With this has come a shift in what society celebrates and what we value in the technology world. “Geek” is definitely the new cool.

Do you know what is cool?

Consider that across the world, founders like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Kevin Systrom grace magazine covers and television programs as we celebrate their meteoric wealth creation and unique command of the PR machine.

At the employee level, a growing percentage of Silicon Valley engineers are exploiting a red-hot labor market by jumping startup to startup or cashing in on comfortable jobs in large companies that are overpaying to retain workers. Far too many of them are happy to be peddled by recruiters who exacerbate their god-state with terms like “rock stars”, “unicorns,” and “ninjas”. Just as astounding, some are even willing to be auctioned off.

This trend has been evident during interactions I’ve had with many developers during the past year. Many are quick to equate “cool” with wealth, comfort, public recognition, or a combination thereof. They seem far too happy to become a commoditized resource with little regard for their potential to shape the future or ability to take action on issues that truly motivate them.

I am concerned that as we head further down the path of Bravo reality shows, developer-trafficking websites, and tech press coverage that reads more like a tabloid than an industry, we’re perpetuating a false narrative about what motivates technical innovators and what true technical innovation can and ought to be. Fortunately, another class of developer is on the rise, even if they’re not on the cover of Time magazine.

Are you a maker or taker?

For the purposes of this article, I would like to call the class of developers I have described thus far as “takers.” Distinct and separate from them is a developer who is more self-actualized — a “maker.”

Just as Maslow’s Hierarchy would suggest, a maker’s work is characterized by morality, creativity, craftsmanship, and purposed problem solving. They view their work through the lens of service –- what MLK Jr. referred to as “creative altruism.”

Makers don’t need to be valued at the highest end of the market. They don’t need the micro-fame of tech blogs. They don’t aspire to be “acqui-hired.” They don’t ask questions about optimizing their paycheck, their communal fame, or their personal brand. And they don’t need good pick up lines (or apps) at the bar.

Makers choose their work based on impact and happiness. They recognize the truths in the work of people like Daniel Pink and Simon Sinek — that income does not generate happiness or enjoyment, nor alleviate sadness or stress. They concern themselves with doing work that is important. With thinking about what moves society forward. With jobs and startups and weekend hacking and open-source contributions to things that have a real-world impact. They introduce and push fundamentally new technologies.

Makers on the rise

If you look past the noise and the hype, you will find some interesting examples of makers at work:

• The day-to-day altruistic exchange of code is expanding thanks to the sharing mechanics of GitHub.
• Crowd-funding platforms like Indigogo and Kickstarter are empowering people to eschew artificial expectations of investors, or overpaid but underfulfilled jobs and get more runway on more innovative products, based on the merit of their ideas.
• Change.org is giving voice and agency to people who previously would be drowned out in quests for social justice.
• The Arduino, MakerBot, and Drone hacker communities are burgeoning.
• The team at Oblong is re-thinking the way humans interact with computers.
• Sifteo is re-inspiring play that fuels children’s social and cognitive growth.
• Silent Circle’s app is democratizing encrypted file and message sharing.
• Heroic individuals like Ivan Owen in Bellingham, Wash. and Richard Van As in South Africa are teaming up to tackle projects like building robotic hands to help children.
• CodeForAmerica is attracting great talent to play a role in modernizing democracy and data.
• Entrepreneurs like Scott Harrison (Charity:Water) are building purpose-driven startups that attract makers in droves by offering an opportunity for self-actualized work.
• Paul Graham and Y Combinator have also entered the mix by recently funding their first impact investment, Watsi which helps people crowd-fund medical treatment.

The tide is rising for this community of makers, and this work is having a real impact across the world. But we still need more of it.

A Call to arms

A recent study suggests that more than 70 percent of college students and 50 percent of workers are looking for jobs with social impact. Imagine if the narrative for the technology industry focused on makers, not on takers, what types of things they would easily identify and join.

And it’s not just the press who need to make room for more coverage of the bigger, more important work going on.

Investors need to step up and fund more makers instead of adoringly trying to fashion investments to match the patterns of yesterday’s successes, spraying and praying and looking for quick wins.

Our engineering schools need to consider not only teaching students how to do the work, but to think critically about what work ought to be done. We need to be raising passionate problem solvers, not just overpaid laborers.

Finally — we need more developers to take a step back and consider why they are doing what they are doing.

As Jeff Hammerbacher famously put it when he left Facebook to co-found Cloudera:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

And Alex Payne on why he left Twitter:

“The call for a decentralized Twitter speaks to deeper motives than profit: good engineering and social justice….it’s an architecture that would resist censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing … (that would make) tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email.”

I don’t know Alex or Jeff. But I admire them. And I think secretly, many developers out there do. They took a step back and asked why they were doing what they are doing and who they were working for. And they chose bigger, more creative problems to pursue with their time and talent.

Important problems looking for important choices

We face, as a society, incredible challenges in the coming decades: balancing social justices like healthcare with a disappearing middle class to pay for it; competing in a global market; generating better energy solutions; ensuring clean water access for large populations; solving health issues that shorten life; moving our planet towards a more sustainable environment; creating organizations and systems of management more in harmony with the human spirit; and many more.

These are all issues that countless entrepreneurs and social enterprises are waking up and thinking about. And they have solutions rooted in critical problem solving and accelerated through software.

On the surface, they seem daunting. They don’t currently receive the limelight. And, sure, they might not pay as well as “making people click ads”. But in them is fertile soil that presents the opportunity for a higher purpose, an existence greater than big salaries and social status: the opportunity to use your talents to shape the world we ought to create. And one could even argue, the prospects for larger long-term gains.

If you’re an engineer, what choice are you making? Are you are just a developer? Or a self-actualized maker?

If you’re an investor, press member, founder, engineering school leader, and influential incubator, what role are you playing in history?

How we answer this question — individually and collectively — will make a huge difference in the overriding narrative of our time and industry. And ultimately in the type of future we experience.

Here’s to the makers.

Jason Cavnar is the co-founder and CEO of Singly, founded in 2011 as the app connection platform empowering a new league of extraordinary developers. Prior to Singly, Jason contributed to the development of a number of innovative projects at social reader and search engine company, Nsyght. Additionally, Jason has over 9 years of experience in entrepreneurial environments, leading and advising companies ranging from large family offices and funds, to healthcare clients to technology startups.

Man with his good and bad conscience via Shutterstock

Instead of buying your kid or young-at-heart loved ones a battery-operated gadget for the holidays, why not give them a kit that challenges them to make gadgets of their own?

LittleBits, a delightfully named startup, has just unveiled its 2012 holiday kit, a $50 package of wires, switches, LEDs, motors, and an instruction sheet to get makers started.

The startup’s founder, Ayah Bdeir, makes these lovely little toys not just as unique gifts, but also as a quiet protest against consumer culture.

“Often, marketing departments in large companies decide on the hot new holiday gadgets, and we engage in prescribed interactions that they design,” Bdeir said in a statement on the news.

“littleBits turns this trend on its head. The product is no longer the goal — littleBits is a platform that enables people to bring their creativity to life.”

Here’s a sneak peek at the new kit and its gorgeous gift wrapping:

The Bits of littleBits’ kit are part Lego, part circuit board, and each one has a distinct function, such as flashing lights, sounding beeps, or sending a pulse of electrical current through a circuit. The bits feature magnetic snaps and can be combined to make larger projects.

The Bits in the holiday kit include some new hardware — the Light Wire and the Bright LED — and the kit includes instructions for building a Christmas tree ornament (sorry, Hanukkah/Kwanza/Festivus celebrants), a dancing ice skater, and a New Year’s Eve party hat.

The company is also challenging the tinkerers of the world to show off what they’re making for the holidays. The contest, the company says, is intended to be “a call to inventors of all ages to submit sketches of their dream littleBits projects. The littleBits design team will pick the three most imaginative ideas and the winners will receive all the Bits to turn dreams into reality!”

Today DARPA took a break from funding next-generation weapons systems, advanced hypersonic aircraft, and frickin’ laser beams to put $3.5 million into TechShop, the paradise for “inventors, makers, hackers, tinkerers, artists … and anyone else who wants to be able to make things that they dream up but don’t have the tools, space or skills.” TechShop currently operates 5 locations around the US, giving members access to a vast array of tools, building space, and lessons.

In authentic military tradition, the project has a funky acronym: iFAB. The Instant Foundry Adaptive through Bits partnership between TechShop, DARPA, and the Department of Veteran Affairs is intended to “create a foundry to rapidly design and reconfigure manufacturing capabilities to support the fabrication of a wide array of military vehicles.”

In other words, DARPA wants to create insta-factories for weapons systems and military vehicles. Think a pop-up shop that follows the military through a battle zone: instead of new equipment manufacturing, repairs, and upgrades taking place thousands of miles away, military hardware could be built and serviced near the war zone and returned to battle within days.

“Supporting initiatives that expand the number and diversity of talent contributing to the nation’s defense is critical to DARPA’s efforts in advanced manufacturing,” DARPA director Kaigham Gabriel said in a statement. “The resources made available through this effort enables more people to ‘make,’—the DNA of creativity and innovation.”

According to BusinessWeek, the funding will enable TechShop to open two new locations in Washington, DC, and Pittsburgh, joining locations already in Menlo Park, Raleigh, San Francisco, San Jose, and Detroit.

The Veteran Affairs also gains from the partnership. TechShop announced that, as part of the partnership, 2000 one-year memberships which typically cost over $1000 each, will be made available to veterans. Jonah Czerwinski, director of the VA’s Center for Innovation, said that iFAB supports the VA’s goal of “finding new ways of providing veterans with resources that help them serve an important role in America’s economy.”

Photo credit: cell105/Flickr

Every year, my family looks forward to Maker Faire, a family-friendly celebration of DIY mayhem, with eager anticipation. But when venture capitalists get involved in the maker movement, you know something new is afoot.

One such VC is Brad Feld, who showed up last week at a “Hardware Innovation Workshop” hosted by Maker Faire organizer O’Reilly Media at Xerox PARC, the storied home of many magical inventions.

The “maker” movement owes much to O’Reilly’s Make magazine, which is like Popular Mechanics for a new generation of Arduino-enabled, LED-lit, UAV-launching DIY types. It’s a monthly magazine packed with hobbyist projects: Everything from making your own homemade cigar box guitar to building a laser CNC router for fabricating stuff. With last week’s day-long workshop, O’Reilly was making the case (pardon the pun) that making can be a business, too.

It was a small but focused gathering of about 150 people, some of whom had come from thousands of miles away. Makers, product designers, artists, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and venture capitalists talked about bridging the gap between home hardware hacking and building a real hardware business.

“We don’t give a shit about hardware, and we don’t do hardware investments,” said Feld, whose Foundry Group has invested in several hardware companies, including MakerBot Industries, Spheero, and Fitbit. “What we love is software wrapped in plastic.”

Later, Feld moderated his statement, acknowledging that he does care about hardware. But what matters to Foundry, in this case, is whether the company fits into one of its major themes: In this case, human-computer interaction, or the ways in which humans feed data to machines. For that to work, hardware depends on software to help it interface with its human users.

For instance, Fitbit is at first glance a pedometer, but it’s the software and web-based tracking tools that make it stand out as a tool for managing your life, improving your fitness, or even playing games.

Similarly, Sphero makes a rolling robotic sphere that you can control, remotely, with your smartphone, to make it go whatever direction you want. Inside, it’s got some fairly complex electronics, derived from military missile-guidance technology, Feld said. But it’s the intuitive smartphone control that makes it really engaging, he said. Plus: It’s a freaking ball you can control with your smartphone!

For hardware hackers, this is encouraging news, actually. If you can master the hardware and figure out the complexities of outsourcing your production to China, it’s your ability to develop software that will help you forge connections with customers and really stand out.

What’s more, you can make products that your customers can modify, by tweaking the code or writing their own code that works with your APIs.

“The maker movement … has really shifted this dynamic,” Feld said. “Users can create stuff that they care about.”

I suspect for many people, making stuff is mostly a hobby. But for a few über-makers, like MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis, making stuff turns into a fulltime obsession, a career, and a company.

Feld told the story of when his firm was first checking out MakerBot, with an eye towards possibly investing in it. Before he’d even met Pettis, Feld got so excited about the idea of 3D printing that he ordered a MakerBot of his own, had it shipped to the office, and spent a weekend setting it up and testing it out. By the time he met Pettis in person, he was already a customer and a fan.

That, Feld says, is a good test for entrepreneurs: “When you meet the VC, has that VC bought your product?”

If not — if the VC asks you to ship a free sample so they can check it out — Feld advises you to run the other direction as quickly as possible. You want investors who are excited about your product as more than just a chance to make money.

MakerBot went on to raise about $11 million in capital and now employs more than 125 people and will soon be moving to Brooklyn’s spacious MetroTech Center. Not bad for a project that started in a hackerspace.

So for a small number of increasingly dedicated entrepreneurs, the maker movement is turning into a platform for innovation and entrepreneurship — and VCs are taking note.

That, I think, is the key to revitalizing the industrial economy in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Related Dylan’s Desk columns:

• When craftsmanship meets tech, magic happens
• Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer

Photo credit: Jake Spurlock/Flickr

Flexible screens, wearable computers, conductive ink, wires that move like muscles: These are the materials that will make up the gadgets of the future, and they’re being dreamed up and developed in do-it-yourself hacker labs and garages all around the world.

Sure, large manufacturers are working on these kinds of materials, too, but openMaterials co-founder Catarina Mota says the real innovation is coming from the bottom up as makers, hackers, and DIY enthusiasts figure out how to do “the future” for themselves in their own home labs.

Smart materials have one or more properties that can be changed by external stimuli, such as temperature, moisture, a magnetic field, or an electric current. And these kinds of materials are changing how we think about hardware and what hardware is able to do.

At a hardware-hacking workshop sponsored by Make magazine today in Silicon Valley, Mota said she and a partner began looking for these kinds of smart materials for an art installation, but they ran into more hurdles than expected.

“We quickly realized the materials we wanted weren’t available in quantities or prices for makers like ourselves,” she said, noting that when they could get their hands on the materials, they couldn’t figure out how to use them, nor did they receive any instructions from the manufacturers, who were used to dealing with large-scale OEMs.

So, Mota concluded, she’d have to make the materials she wanted by herself.

“The only way to go about this was trial and error,” she said. “We’d make our best guess and change one thing at a time until we got the material to do what we wanted it to do.”

Eventually, the art installation fell by the wayside as Mota and her cohort became more and more fascinated by making and using these materials of the future. openMaterials is the result of their efforts, which include research and workshops on DIY smart materials.

Mota said that in 2009, she was only able to track down two or three manufacturers of smart materials. Today, there are many manufacturers of all sizes — and better still, the web is replete with information, instructions, and community resources for makers.

Here’s a gallery showing handmade smart materials and where you can find out more about them (or even learn how to make them yourself):

Top image courtesy of luxorphoto, Shutterstock

Some companies cater lunch on Fridays. Some throw in gym memberships or childcare or chair massages. Not Ford.

These guys are going big: They’re giving invention-focused employees TechShop memberships so they can tinker and make to their hearts’ delight.

TechShop is a space for those immersed in the maker/DIY movement and hardware hacking. It gives members tools and equipment for prototyping, classes in relevant topics, large workshop spaces, industry-specific software and computer stations, storage space, and plenty of hot coffee.

Ford’s newest employee perks program is intended to beef up the company’s investment in inventions and patents as well as bring more fuel to Detroit’s sparks of creativity. The memberships will be available to any Ford workers who submit inventions to the company’s Patent Incentive Award program.

The auto maker estimates around 2,000 Ford employees will benefit from the TechShop partnership this year alone. Already, dozens of Ford-employed inventors have taken advantage of the TechShop perk. The ideas they’re working on, Ford said, “may be incorporated into future Ford vehicles or licensed to other companies.”

“Ford has a portfolio of more than 17,000 patents around the world and, as a technology company, needs to be at the very forefront of automotive innovation,” said Ford reps in a release. “With TechShop in close proximity, Ford’s employees in Dearborn will be able to easily and quickly build prototypes for almost any inventive solution they can conceive.”

The brand-new TechShop facility in Detroit is located in a Ford-owned business park. The new TechShop includes 17,000 square feet of workshop space as well as classrooms, a brainstorming lounge, and a store full of materials. Check it out:

Top image courtesy of Nomad Soul, Shutterstock

To predict the future, look at what really smart people are doing for fun.

That’s the advice from Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and a proven futurist and coolhunter. O’Reilly started making manuals for Unix long before Unix was cool, got into the PC revolution early on, launched one of the first commercial websites, and launched Make magazine long before the “do-it-yourself” movement had taken off.

“You look at so many industries, and it begins with people having fun,” O’Reilly said.

For example, the PC revolution began with a bunch of smart nerds (and a few college dropouts) hanging out at the Homebrew Computer Club, showing off things they’d hacked together in their spare time.

Now the really smart people are probably building 3D printers from Makerbot kits, or else creating their own high-powered lasers or animatronic, flame-breathing dragons. Sure, these devices aren’t practical mass-market devices. But then, the Apple I computer that Steve Wozniak put together with a wooden case he built by hand in his shop wasn’t a mass-market device either, and look how far that idea got.

O’Reilly spoke at a panel this week, cosponsored by General Electric and Monocle magazine, about the convergence of craftsmanship and technology. About a hundred people gathered to hear a handful of experts talk about craftsmanship, apprenticeships, mass customization, and the art of making delightful products that “romance” the customer. The audience was heavily weighted towards designers, to judge from their eyewear alone (lots of glasses with chunky plastic or wood frames — but, alas, no actual monocles).

Another of the day’s speakers was Carl Bass, president and chief executive of Autodesk. Bass said he is himself a maker, having dropped out of college 35 years ago to work on boatbuilding, among other things. (He eventually completed a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Cornell, so he’s no slouch academically.)

“In some ways we’re rewriting the fundamental economic equation of the industrial revolution,” Bass said. In other words, the premise of the industrial revolution was that you could radically cut the prices of consumer goods, while maintaining their quality, through high volume production. Now, thanks to 3D printing and other “mass customization” technologies, you can have high quality products in small volumes — even one-offs — without exorbitant prices.

“There’s no difference when I make one and when I make 1,000,” said Bass. “That was never true in craft.”

Mark Hatch, the chief executive of TechShop, concurred. TechShop offers a giant workshop full of tools that you can use for a single monthly membership fee, sort of like belonging to a gym. The company has five locations around the U.S. and is opening five more this year, Hatch said. The company also offers classes to train people in how to use equipment in its shops, such as precision lathes and CNC machines. Essentially, it makes very high-end industrial tools accessible to a wide variety of people — and that’s only possible because these machines are controlled by increasingly sophisticated software.

“The combination of software tools with cheap, powerful, easy-to-use capital tools is completely remaking industry,” Hatch said.

Hatch told me after the event that the interest in hardware goes deep. Last year, he said, U.S. universities awarded more degrees in mechanical engineering than they did in software engineering, in contrast to the usual ratio.

Hatch and Bass are not the only ones excited about the resurgence of hardware hacking and the prospects for tech craftsmanship. Charles Chi, the executive chairman of digital imaging startup Lytro, said the combination of sophisticated overseas manufacturing and the accessibility of social media branding tools makes it unusually easy to start an electronics company today. In the past, you might have had to spend millions building a factory and millions more buying Super Bowl commercials. Now you can outsource production (and even much of your product’s engineering) to Chinese “original design manufacturers” (known as ODMs) and do aggressive branding on Twitter and Facebook for a fraction of the price.

“It’s almost the golden age for consumer electronics,” Chi said.

But back to the 3D printers. You may wonder what anyone does with a 3D printer, and it’s a thought I’ve had myself many times. Well, here’s one answer: The Free Universal Construction Kit is a set of 80 different widgets that kids can use to connect different kinds of toys together: Lincoln Logs to Lego, K’nex to Duplo blocks, Zoobs to Bristle Blocks. There’s even a universal adapter brick, a fist-sized monstrosity that lets you plug in one of every supported toy. (Even more awesomely, it appears to be based on the shape of an isocahedron — also known as a d20.) Needless to say, I would have loved having this kit when I was 8 years old.

The people behind this kit are giving it away for free. (And they’ve made an excellent 30-second commercial for it, which wouldn’t be out of place on Nickelodeon.) But here’s the catch: They’re not selling physical objects at all. Instead, they’re making .STL files available that anyone can download and use with their 3D printers to create these doodads. If your kids want this kit, you need a 3D printer.

If you don’t have one of your own, may I suggest TechShop?

The print head of the MakerBot creates plastic objects, like this green thing, layer by layer.

Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of a spool of plastic and some electricity?

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that 3D printers offer levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of.

“We have a consumer product that’s anti-consumerist,” MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis told me at CES 2012, where I captured the short video below. “When you get a MakerBot, you have an alternative to buying things. You can download them … or you can design something and make it custom yourself.”

The new MakerBot Replicator is a $1,750 box that can print three-dimensional objects by melting and fusing bits of plastic line, layer by minuscule layer. A version that prints objects in two colors costs $2,000. It’s one of several new, affordable 3D printers that are hitting the market this year.

If you can dream it, and if you can create a 3D representation of it in an STL file, a desktop 3D printer can create it in a few hours. Provided it’s small enough, that is: The Replicator can only create objects smaller than 300 cubic inches, or about the size of a loaf of bread. Not quite big enough to assemble a cotton gin or a replacement plough blade, but certainly large enough to make toys, chess pieces, gears, artwork, cups, bowls, and a lot of other things.

“This is kind of magic, because there was nothing there, and now there’s something,” said Pettis.

Also, unlike the Star Trek Enterprise’s replicator, MakerBot can only create things in inedible ABS plastic or biodegradable PLA, so it won’t be able to make you a cup of tea — Earl Grey, hot. Sorry.

Still, 3D printers are making a whole new field of creativity accessible to computer geeks. In the same way that laser printers enabled people with computers to become publishing experts in two dimensions, these printers are opening the doors to creative, computational expression in three dimensions.

I’ve been fascinated with the “do-it-yourself” movement since I went to my first Maker Faire. Subsequently I investigated the growing world of hackerspaces, where people gather to work on code, learn how to solder, teach crocheting classes, borrow a welder, slice things into strips with a bandsaw, use a drill press, or work on projects that involve all of the above skills. The MakerBot emerges from this world, as Pettis was one of the telegenic evangelists of the DIY ethic and is a cofounder of NYC Resistor, one of the earliest U.S. hackerspaces.

I’m convinced that the people who have embraced the DIY movement have tapped into the core of what makes the United States great: Self-reliance, experimentation, innovation and a non-dogmatic reverence for facts. Over the decades, innovators tinkering in metaphorical (or literal) garages have played important roles in the development of electricity, radio, computers and, now, the internet economy.

DIY, or at least a willingness to take initiative for doing things on one’s own, outside the usual structures, has also played a role in political life, with grassroots organizations like MoveOn.org and loosely organized movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street drawing much of their strength from people’s iconoclasm and sense of self-sufficiency.

But one thing that hasn’t emerged from the DIY movement — until MakerBot — is a major venture-backed business. MakerBot Industries might change that, as the company has now raised more than $11 million in investment capital and employs 75 people in its Brooklyn headquarters. Not only that, Pettis told me the company has openings to hire another 30 people. He didn’t say whether the company is making money now, but he did point out that Makerbot did about $8 million in revenue on its seed round investment alone, which was only about $75,000, so the business has promising roots.

What about competitors?

One of the biggest players in the 3D printing space to date has been Shapeways, which VentureBeat has covered previously. Shapeways lets designers print objects not only in plastic, but in ceramic and metals as well, and it allows you to print larger objects than you can with the MakerBot printer. But you can’t buy a Shapeways printer; you upload your design to the company’s site, and it ships you the finished product. Shapeways, by the way, counters my assertion that DIY product-printing is an American phenomenon — the company was founded in the Netherlands. But its $5.1M funding came partly from New York’s Union Square Ventures (the rest came from Index Ventures in London), and the company has now moved its headquarters to New York.

Another ship-to-your-door 3D printing company is Sculpteo, which I also ran into at CES. Sculpteo prints in ceramic.

But when it comes to consumer 3D printers you can have at home, MakerBot’s main competitor seems to be 3D printing pioneer 3D Systems. I spent some time at CES ogling the company’s Cubify Cube printer. Cubify prints plastic objects in different colors, and has a more clean, iPod-like industrial aesthetic compared to MakerBot’s hacker-y, DIY aesthetic. The Cube is also cheaper, at just $1,300. (Check out our video of the Cubify below.)

Pettis’s response to the competition was cheeky geek macho.

“Our machine makes things that are twice as big as their machine,” Pettis said.

And that’s another really American thing: Competition. Let’s hope it helps make 3D printers cheaper every year, until everyone has one of these strangely anti-consumerist consumer devices in their own kitchens, right next to the breadmakers.

Shapeways offers 3D printing in glass, steel, plastic and a high performance composite (a powdery, sand-like substance) that hardens like a cement to produce full-color objects. The company targets both users who are familiar with 3-D modeling tools such as Solidworks and general consumers. The latter can buy objects generated from ready-made models or use the Shapeways co-creation platform to customize an object created by a designer.

3D printing is done in a printing machine where a digital file is converted into a physical object by building up the object layer by layer.

Shapeways is at the vanguard of a group of companies democratizing physical production in the same way that new technology has allowed millions of people to create and share digital content like videos or podcasts. Other examples include Ponoko and 100K garages.

The current funding comes from Union Square Ventures in New York and Index Ventures in London.

Shapeways CEO, Peter Weijmarshausen, says the company will use the money to make the co-creation platform more powerful, enrich the feature set of the shops and make uploading your own designs even easier than it is today. The company also plans to add new printing materials and reduce manufacturing lead times.

Shapeways was originally funded by Philips Electronics as a spin-off from its Lifestyle Incubator program and, until the current round, has not received any external funding since its foundation in 2007. The company has 10 employees.

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According to Ponoko, no other “maker” company offers this feature. The offering broadens the customer co-creation trend VentureBeat has written about to a wide range of manufactured products. Creators upload their designs and select flat sheet materials. Then they have the option to add electronic hardware to their order at the same price as buying direct from SparkFun.

I suspect that Ponoko’s new electronics features are not for everyone but if you can use design software and are handy with a soldering iron (you need to assemble the screen and electronics pieces), this could definitely be something for you. Manufactured products can also be offered for sale via Ponoko’s website.

Ponoko is part of a wider DIY product movement which includes companies like 3D printing service Shapeways or T-shirt maker Threadless where users design and manufacture their own products. This democratization of manufacturing parallels the user-generated content explosion unleashed by content-sharing sites like YouTube. Ponoko users have made 60,000 items to date covering everything from steam-punk couture to furniture.

Ponoko was founded in 2007 in Wellington, New Zealand, is privately funded and has 6 employees.

Getting noticed is a challenge for everyone building apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010, and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Go here for conference details, or to apply to the “Needle in the Haystack” business contest. Early-bird tickets are available until September 15.