Glif was as of this writing the 5th largest Kickstarter campaign ever which funded a simple iPhone tripod attachment and kickstand to prop up the iPhone. A simple concept that obviously found an audience, raising $147K in pre-orders and financial support. (6 weeks later, the iPod Nano watch raised an astonishing $941K.) But when you read about the post-mortem on the project from the creators, you realize that the ecosystem available to the entrepreneurs made it all possible.

Kickstarter for crowdfunding, Shipwire to handle fulfillment, Shapeways for 3D printing prototypes.

The bringing off of the project relies on conducting a symphonic network of providers and tools that did not exist a decade ago — or were so prohibitively expensive or complex that only established or well funded entities could hope to utilize them.

It’s an amazing thing to behold and I love it.  A tiny team coordinates a world of customers, manufacturers, and service providers to test a design in manufacturing runs of 1, raise funds before a product is manufactured, sell out the first run to its funders with a minimum of marketing and 0 marketing dollars, and offload fulfillment to a fulfillment service.

When it comes to industrially designed products, content and information, software, and online delivered services, lack of resources of any kind cannot be used as an excuse.

They provide a great summary of the tools and services they used to bring this project together:
3D modeling software: Rhinoceros for Mac
3D printed prototypes: Shapeways
Project funding: Kickstarter
Manufacturing: Premier Source
Printer (for packaging): Keystone Folding Box Co
Fulfillment Service: Shipwire
eCommerce Store: Shopify
Domain Hosting: Dreamhost
Payment gateways: Braintree and Paypal
Email campaigns: Mailchimp
Monitoring Internet chatter: Google Alerts
Monitoring Twitter chatter: Tweet Deck for iPhone

Read all about it at The Russians Used a Pencil

The Glif; or, How to create a hit product with no money down is a post from: co>innovative

Buy A Beer Company has secured $214 million in crowdfunded pledges to buy Pabst Brewing
Pretty amazing feat: 2 ad agencies got together to raise the $300 million necessary to buy the fine purveyors of Pabst Blue Ribbon via crowdfunded pledges. In return you get, essentially, the amount you pledged in beer. I question both the legality of this as well as the liklihood that if the total number is reached, pledgers will actually make good on their commitment. However, I still love the idea. If you can’t get enough of open sourced beer, a couple of years back Flying Dog created a crowdsourced beer. You can also make your own using the recipe and label for the open source “Free Beer”.

ThrustFund: A speculative, crowdsourced loan for social entrepreneurs.

Thrust Fund Entrepreneurs are looking for support to put their current ventures on paths to sustainability and to support them as they pursue new ventures. They are matched to Thrust Funders who are looking for meaningful opportunities that pay both social and financial dividends. Thrust Funders don’t acquire a portion of the Entrepreneur’s venture, however. The terms are individualized based on mutual trust and respect.

In exchange for providing funding for a social entrepreneur, you receive, generally, a percentage of the entrepreneur’s earnings over a period of years. Kooky? Yes. Risky? Yes. But also potentially beneficial to the world, so it’s got that going for it.

A new way to buy furniture with MyFab
MyFab squeezes the inefficiency out of the furniture supply chain using crowdvoting to determine what to make next. Only the most popular items are made available for pre-ordering and after a set period, myfab puts in an order for the exact amount preordered by customers. Items are then shipped directly to customers with prices for shipping ranging from $15 to $99 for a sofa (which sounds like a pretty sweet deal). They are only available in CA and several European countries right now but have plans to spread to the rest of the US soon. Not only are they perhaps filling a need for well designed products that customers wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, but also selling these items hyper-efficiently leading to very low costs.

March Crowdsourcing Odds and Ends is a post from: co>innovative

If you want to design a product and have it built you currently have three options — short of contracting with a manufacturer which is complex and expensive.

Slap a graphic design on a commodity product: You might be familiar with Zazzle and Cafepress which allow anyone to upload a design and sell physical products, but these services are limited in that you are stuck simply printing a graphic design on a preselected commodity product which is then shipped from a central location.
Design an object from flat materials that are laser cut. Ponoko is the best example of this. You can choose from a whole host of materials. Designers post designs, Ponoko handles the sale, cuts the material, and either sends it to the seller or directly to the buyer. (Can I interest you in some biohazard coasters, perhaps?)
Design an object in 3D and have it “printed”. Shapeways takes 3D models and creates physical objects from them. (Or would you prefer a small skeleton sculpture?)

Each of these services have been available in the past to people and companies with significant resources, but never before have they all been available and affordable for normal folk. And now, ShopBot and Ponoko have partnered to create 100KGarages. Ponoko is supplying it’s online “click to make” system and ShopBot, which makes CNC routers, brings the distributed digital fabricators who are in 54 countries around the world. Products designed anywhere, printed wherever you are, in runs as small as 1 unit.

This allows for designers and builders to essentially sell a product before it exists! Instead of design->prototype->test->manufacture->market->retail->Sale, the process can look like this: design->market->Sale->manufacture.

The great innovation here is not only the atomization of the process (you can design a product and put it out in the world to see if someone else wants to build it or you can just build other people’s designs) but at the same time the loose coupling of the process (if you want you can take it from start to finish using several services that are tied together). The basic infrastructure is there.

For now it will be relegated largely to hobbyists and, no, it can be expensive (3D printing in particular), but I would imagine within a few years we may see a successful product that comes about through this loosely coupled chain of services… a design student in India uses a free online design tool… a retail site such as Ponoko hosts the design… a buyer in the NY purchases… a 3D printer NY that has the correct materials prints the object and ships it to the buyer.

UPDATE: A few weeks after 100KGarages launched, a similar idea was introduced through CloudFab.com, “a central marketplace to connect buyers and sellers” of 3D printed parts and objects. So, for now, think of this as very similar to 100KGarages, with the main point of differentiation being that CloudFab is focused on 3D printing, and 100K Garages is focused on 2D materials. More info at MadeForOne

Distributed design and manufacturing is here; or How I correctly predicted the future… is a post from: co>innovative

Level 1: Mass customization.
Mass customization puts a certain level of choice in the hands of the customer starting with a base, unchanging object. It allows you to customize a mass produced product to your specification along certain pre-defined configurations. Anyone can do this. There are thousands of examples of it and most people have experienced this in one form or another. Buying a Dell. Uploading an image for a product on CafePress. Designing a Nike shoe. Even your own tea.

Level 2: 2D and 3D printing.
Ponoko is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of personal manufacturing in the 2D realm. Users can upload image files (whether that be CAD or scanned in free-hand drawing), specify any of a number of flat materials, and Ponoko will input it into their magic laser cutters and send you the result. It doesn’t stop there: you can also sell your resulting products through the site. Ponoko has been improving and releasing new features at an impressive clip over the last 2 years or so. Keep an eye on them. Manufacturing as a service.

Going from 2D to 3D: While Ponoko seems farthest along in democratizing 2D printing of objects, Shapeways seems to have the best, most user friendly, option for 3D printing and distribution of objects.

Confused about the various 2D and 3D printing technologies available? Check out this great compendium of videos on much of the tech.

Level 3: Home Fabbing
For the power-geek: home fabbing (with self-replicating machines, of course) you too can build a CNC machine that creates 3D objects or cuts flat materials. Just download the design and let your machine have at it.

Of course, the current adoption of these various technologies stand at about the same level as personal computers in the late 70s: expensive, geared towards geeks, inconvenient, and a small market.

Bringing this all together you have a decoupling of the design, manufacturing, assembly, and marketing of physical objects down to the individual level. As this evolves further the options expand incredibly; here’s a scenario (And Shapeways comes pretty close to this today). I post a design, then there are many paths:

- I can then order a copy for myself.
- Someone else orders the physical object which is printed in a one-off run.
- Another person licenses the design for the right to produce the object for personal use and downloads it to their home-fabber where they can tweak the design and actually create it.
- Someone licenses the design for 100 copies and sells them locally after having them produced at their local personal manufacturing facility.
- A large retailer licenses the design for distribution in their stores.

Pretty rad, right?

Resources and examples:
Level 1:
Mass Customization and Open Innovation News by Frank Piller
Configurator database
Design a Tea
Dell
List of mass customization providers

Level 2:
Ponoko
Design Democracy ’08
List of Personal Manufacturing providers
FigurePrints (print out avatars in 3D)
That’s My Face
Fabjectory: Virtual Objects in Real Life
Shapeways
ZapFab
Design My Idea
eMachineShop

Level 3:
Some Rights Reserved
Fab@Home
TechShop
Breaking the mould
Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop–from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication

Update 1/7/09:An interesting addition to the field: Automake which provides an online 3D modeling tool in the hopes of “combining generative systems with craft knowledge and digital production technologies to create a new way of designing and making objects that blurs the boundaries between maker and consumer, craft and industrial production.”

Part 5: The evolution of mass customization and personal manufacturing is a post from: co>innovative