The manufacturing future
Harold Meyerson writes about China and Germany’s ability to ride through the current economic conditions in a relatively good position: What sets them apart from the world’s other major powers, purely...
View ArticleFour short links: 13 September 2010
Open Source Community Types (Simon Phipps) — draws a distinction between extenders and deployers to take away the “who do you mean?” confusion that comes with the term “community”. Sparklines —...
View ArticleFour short links: 26 August 2011
911 Footage — the Internet Archive has published a great collection of video from Sep 11 2001. A tremendous boon to researchers. Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful? (Smithsonian Magazine) — not sure...
View ArticleFoxconn and Ford, Emerson and Jobs
This post originally appeared on The Question Concerning Technology. It’s republished with permission. To borrow a line from Chuck Berry, it goes to show you never can tell. I embarked this week on a...
View ArticleFour short links: 26 June 2012
SnapItHD — camera captures full 360-degree panorama and users select and zoom regions afterward. (via Idealog) Iago (GitHub) — Twitter’s load-generation tool. AutoCAD Worm Stealing Blueprints —...
View ArticleFour short links: 24 July 2012
The Future of Big Data (Pew Internet) — A doubtful anonymous respondent observed, “Apparently this ‘Internet of Things’ idea is beginning to encourage yet another round of cow-eyed Utopian thinking....
View ArticleFour short links: 20 September 2012
The Shape of the Internet Has Changed — 98 percent of internet traffic now consists of content that can be stored on servers. 45% of Internet traffic today is from CDNs, and a handful of them at that,...
View ArticleInvestigating the industrial Internet
Consumer networks have revolutionized the way companies understand and reach their customers, making possible intricate measurement and accurate prediction at every step of every transaction. The same...
View ArticleListening for tired machinery
Software is making its way into places where it hasn’t usually been before, like the cutting surfaces of very fast, ultra-precise machine tools. A high-speed milling machine can run at 42,000 RPM as it...
View ArticleInvestigating the growth and influence of professional Makers
The growth of the Maker movement has been nothing if not amazing. We’ve had more than 100,000 people at Maker Faire in San Francisco, and more than 50,000 at the New York event, with mini-Maker Faires...
View ArticleWhere will software and hardware meet?
I’m a sucker for a good plant tour, and I had a really good one last week when Jim Stogdill and I visited K. Venkatesh Prasad at Ford Motor in Dearborn, Mich. I gave a seminar and we talked at length...
View ArticleRadar podcast: the Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that...
On this week’s podcast, Jim Stogdill, Roger Magoulas and I talk about things that have been on our minds lately: the NSA’s surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology...
View Article$20,000 and a trip to Shenzhen
Manufacturing is rapidly becoming more accessible to people whose expertise lies elsewhere. The change is most apparent at the small scale, where it’s become easy to order prototypes made on...
View ArticleSoftware, hardware, everywhere
Real and virtual are crashing together. On one side is hardware that acts like software: IP-addressable, controllable with JavaScript APIs, able to be stitched into loosely-coupled systems—the mashups...
View ArticlePodcast: the democratization of manufacturing
Manufacturing is hard, but it’s getting easier. In every stage of the manufacturing process–prototyping, small runs, large runs, marketing, fulfillment–cheap tools and service models have become...
View ArticleBuilding a Solid World
This is an excerpt from Building a Solid World, a free paper by Mike Loukides and myself about the convergence of software and the physical world. Our new Solid conference is about the “intersection of...
View ArticleThe crowdfunding conundrum
There is widespread consensus that crowdfunding is a boon, an egalitarian means for bringing products and services to market without relying on banks, venture capitalists, or established financial...
View ArticleWhat’s a tech company, anyway?
John Deere’s Field Connect system logs soil moisture data from probes installed in customer fields and transmits the data to a website for customers to access remotely. Uber has encountered a series of...
View ArticleInnovation requires a new mind-set: The O’Reilly Radar Podcast
Editor’s note: you can subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast through iTunes, SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed. I recently lamented the lag in innovation in relation to the speed...
View ArticleFour short links: 12 December 2014
Do Artifacts Have Ethics? — 41 questions to ask yourself about the technology you create. MDBM — Yahoo’s fast key-value store, in use for over a decade. Super-fast, using mmap and passing around...
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