Internet-related Resources

How Baby Boomers use technology

The new normal in the age of social media

Microsoft Bing announced a new feature named Linked Pages. The purpose is to make the search results for you and your friends more personalized as well as richer. If I am friends with you and you do a search in Bing for [barry schwartz] you will see the following search result at the top: Linked...

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Conversion testing is the holy grail of ROI on the Internet. Every day, more of our customers start picking up their phones, asking what new test we are planning for their website. Or may that be a result of sales people “incidentally” dropping Conversion Optimization and in doing so, providing the...

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Due to the agile and complex nature of paid search, managing a paid search program can often degenerate into a constant barrage of fire drills and ad hoc report requests. I have been there and it is not fun. I have also found that there is a way to dig out of this chaos and [...]

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Yandex, the Primary Russian Search Engine, Aligns with Twitter

2012 Sports Illustrated Cover Girl Kate Upton ramps up the debate about Supermodels and their impact on society.

Google announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog that they are now adding video support for schema.org. They are doing this in combination with Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search as a “joint effort.” Google says using the schema.org video markup is the “recommended way to...

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Today is the 155th birthday of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the German physicist who was able to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. To celebrate his contributions to the world, Google has a special animated wave logo on their homepage. He built an antenna that was able to detect and measure...

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Google+ Pages have sparked a lot of discussion in B2B marketing circles. The ability to add multiple management functionality, site verification, and easy to integrate Google+ badges have leadership teams asking whether this truly is the next social media platform B2B marketers must focus upon....

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Google employees claim a secret project will turn sunglasses into an Android device. Seriously.

Politics as usual evolves into a war of impossible ideologies.

New LG Optimus 3D Cube Officially Announced

Apache HTTP server 2.4 version has been released by Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

The actor opens up about his upcoming film roles working with Eddie Murphy and Beau Bridges

A Weekly Review Of Dark Horse Comics' Newest Releases So You Don't Waste Your Time

News leaked yesterday about a new premium advertising platform on Facebook.

Faceplant on the Ground

Finding the Matsu Pilgrimage

When I was a kid, I dreamed of a machine that would spit out Barbie clothes that I designed with a push of a button. I thought I had a wild imagination, but little did I know that in a few decades toys-on-demand could be a reality.

The technology is 3D printing, a process of turning a digital file into a physical, 3 dimensional object layer-by-layer, similar to how an inkjet printer works. And while it doesn’t print tiny textiles (yet), there are a number of methods and materials used in 3D printing today, and it’s possible in the future that 3D printing could become so sophisticated and could replicate many more products in virtually any material.

It’s currently in use in various industries, including engineering (“rapid prototyping”), manufacturing, biomedicine (a woman recently had a prosthetic jaw “printed”), the food industry and architecture. There’s even an eBay / Etsy style marketplace where 3D designers can sell their digital CAD files or 3D printed physical goods called Shapeways.

CAD models can be constructed from scratch, or captured by scanning any object – even your own head.

While some of the industrial machines cost a mint, you could own your own SeeMeCNC for $350, the Printrbot for a pledge of $499 or the MakerBot for $1700.

If industrial or consumer at-home 3D printing takes off, and products could be sold as digital downloads instead of physical objects, what would this mean for ecommerce?

1. Physical products may become digitized, enabling the producer to design once and sell an unlimited number of digital files, potentially reducing the cost of production, inventory warehouse, shipping, damaged goods, returns, etc.

2. Consumers or retail partners could purchase goods at a lower cost and “receive” the item faster. Instead of waiting weeks or days for shipping, the item could be produced in hours.

3. Manufacturers could continue to offer “long tail” goods that are out of production but still valuable to consumers (such as old car or appliance parts).

Awesome. But this technology also opens up a can of worms regarding piracy and digital rights management.

Anyone with a 3D scanner could produce a file that could be resold, or anyone with a working knowledge of the software could modify a digital design and pass it off as their own. This is already a problem with Amazon’s self-publishing platform.

With media like mp3 files, ebooks, movies and TV shows, entitlements control who can access a digital product, how often, from what device, and what can be done with the content.

Even with DRM baked into a digital file containing a 3D image of a physical good, once the object is printed, it could simply be re-scanned and reproduced to get around the DRM.

If the world moves this way, piracy and illegal reproduction of intellectual property could become a bigger problem for physical goods than it is for digital. We’ll have to wait and see.