Thursday, October 11, 2012

The Crazy Scifi Future is here.

Almost eight years ago, I got the chance to help bootstrap amazon's development center in Bangalore. One of the things I did was go on a recruiting trip to the Indian School of Business - one of the premier business schools in India.
As an 'out of the box' thinking question, I asked all the candidates: "Imagine that 3D printers become cheap enough to be available in your corner store. How should Amazon react to take advantage of the new reality".

I posed it as a thought experiment; a sci-fi question that seemed completely futuristic.

And here we are today in 2012. The MakerBot Replicator 2 costs just under $2,200. That's about the same price as the early laser printers.

I also just heard Chris Anderson talk about his new book - "Makers - The New Industrial Revolution" at google today and it blew my mind.

We're there. In that crazy sci-fi future.

Some quotes and links from his talk:

The guy who runs techshop is the same guy that used to run kinkos
 If you're a toy company, this should fill you with terror 
Hiring today is not about talent optimization, but about access optimization
and some random links that I want to refer back to later

Ronald Coase's Theory of the Firm
Autodesk123D
Thingaverse
Trimentional
Shapeways
Alibaba
Tinkercad
Lego Digital Designer

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