Marcelo Coelho and Colin Raney on 3D printing and the digital manufacturing revolution

The O’Reilly Solid Podcast: Lessons from the Pop-up Factory.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Solid Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

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In this episode of the Solid Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Marcelo Coelho, creative director of Marcelo Coelho Studio, and Colin Raney, chief marketing officer at Formlabs.

Coelho and Raney worked with Cranor on the Pop-up Factory, a production line that manufactured connected devices on the floor of the Solid 2015 conference. The four of us reviewed the process of spinning up the factory (which took just two months from beginning to end), and the impact of live fabrication on attendees at the conference.

Discussion points:

  • Manufacturing as a creative process, and as an input for designers
  • How 3D printing reduces iteration time and enables design and production to occur simultaneously
  • Manufacturing as deployment
  • Why the Pop-up Factory is analogous to the Hollywood model of film production

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Robert Bodor on digital fabrication

The O’Reilly Solid Podcast: Software intelligence in the manufacturing process.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Solid Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

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In this episode of the Solid Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Robert Bodor, vice president and general manager for the Americas at Proto Labs, a rapid-prototyping service that’s been able to digitize large parts of the fabrication process.

Discussion points:

  • Proto Labs’ contribution to the Pop-Up Factory at the Solid 2015 conference
  • How Proto Labs infused software into the injection molding process, enabling 24-hour turnaround on tooling
  • 3D printing vs. injection molding (that old battle)
  • Parts of the process that defy automation
  • The pros and cons of in-house prototyping

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Yancey Strickler on Kickstarter and public benefit corporations

The O’Reilly Solid Podcast: Kickstarter’s CEO on different models for viewing a company’s success.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Solid Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

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Kickstarter is one of just a handful of large companies that have become public benefit corporations — committing themselves legally to social as well as financial goals.

In making the transformation, Kickstarter’s leaders have taken a pragmatic, active position in promoting social good — neither purely philanthropic nor purely profit driven.

In this episode of the Solid Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Kickstarter’s co-founder and CEO, Yancey Strickler, about his decision to take the company through the public benefit process and his promise not to go through an IPO.

Strickler will be among the speakers at the Next:Economy summit, November 12-13, 2015, in San Francisco.

Discussion points:

  • Kickstarter’s reasoning behind its decision not to go public. Why not just sell the company and devote the proceeds to charity?
  • The difference between a B corp and a public benefit corporation
  • The “public good” principles in Kickstarter’s Benefit Corporation charter
  • Determining metrics that can quantify public benefit goals
  • Strickler’s thoughts on how Kickstarter’s PBC designation might influence a corporate model “different than hyper-growth, hyper-capitalist models that aren’t good for anyone other than people investing money”

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Dialects of the IoT

How intimately we talk to our stuff depends on what it’s done for us lately.

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In the first post in this series, I mentioned that we’re getting used to talking to technology. We talk to our cell phones, our cars; some of us talk to our TVs, and a lot of us talk to customer support systems. The field has yet to settle into a state of equilibrium, but I thought I would take a stab at defining some categories of conversational interfaces.

There is, of course, quite a range of intelligent assistants, but I want to consider specifically different types of conversational interactions with technology. You might have an intelligent agent that can arrange meetings, for example, figuring out attendees’ availability, and even sending meeting requests. Certainly, that’s a useful and intelligent agent, but working with it doesn’t necessarily require any conversational interaction.

Classifying conversational interfaces

As usual with these kinds of things, the boundaries can be fuzzy. So, a particular piece of technology can have aspects of multiple categories, but here’s what I propose.

Voice interfaces: Understand a few set phrases

The most basic level of speech interactions are simple voice interfaces that let you control devices or software by speaking commands. Generally, these systems have a fixed set of actions. Saying a word or phrase is akin to using a menu system, but instead of clicking on menu items, you can speak them. You find these in cars with voice commands and Bluetooth interfaces to make phone calls or play music. It’s the same kind of system when you call into a phone tree that routes you to a particular department or person. Some of these systems allow for variations in how you say something, but for the most part, they will only understand words or phrases from a predefined list.

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Tobias Kinnebrew on robots as paint brushes

The O’Reilly Solid Podcast: How using robots for artistic purposes changes the way we perceive art.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Solid Podcast for insight and analysis about the Internet of Things and the worlds of hardware, software, and manufacturing.

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The short film Box caused a sensation in 2013 by effortlessly blending industrial robots and projection mapping — physical and digital. Bot & Dolly, the studio behind Box, specialized in robotic cinematography until it was bought by Google in 2013, becoming part of Google Robotics.

Sometimes overlooked amid the spectacular effects it developed in-house was the significance of Bot & Dolly’s software platform: it was an abstraction layer that worked as a plug-in for Autodesk’s Maya design software, putting otherwise arcane industrial robots in the hands of any production designer who could wield a mouse.

In this episode of the Solid Podcast, David Cranor and I talk with Tobias Kinnebrew, strategist at Google Robotics and formerly the director of product strategy at Bot & Dolly and principal creative director for HoloLens at Microsoft. Read more…

Helping Things in the IoT speak the same language

We need to build APIs for Things that are interoperable — we need an application layer for the IoT.

Register for our free webcast “Building IoT Systems with Web Standards,” which will be hosted by Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard on December 8, 2015, at 10 a.m. PT.

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When the term “IoT” was first coined, the idea was to move from a model where data is generated by humans bridging media gaps between the physical and the virtual worlds to a model where data is gathered by the Things themselves.

Fifteen years later, we’re moving in the right direction to make this a reality, but we still have several challenges ahead. One major challenge is interoperability: many Things do talk using the Internet, but they don’t talk the same language. Having been involved in the IoT for about as long as it’s been around, I’m pretty sure of one thing: a universal networking protocol for the IoT will never exist — and for a good reason! The IoT is a vast world where the needs of one field (e.g. Industry 4.0) to another (e.g. the smart home) are fundamentally different. As a consequence, the list of automation protocols is actually growing, not shrinking.

A consequence of these different needs is the focus on the connectivity aspect of the IoT. This is not unusual, but as we ascend the pyramid of IoT needs, we must think about the data interoperability of Things. We need to build APIs for Things that are interoperable; in short, we need an application layer for the IoT.

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