How 3D Printing has been Enhancing the Housing Industry

Take away the property bubbles for a moment. 

The use of 3D technology has been spreading. Today, with 3D Printer technology, housing will not only become more affordable, they can be built fast and according to one’s taste or 'custom fitted' housing.

In China a Chinese company has introduced mass housing via 3D printer technology. The said company “3D printed” 10 houses in 24 hours using recycled construction materials for $4,800 (Php 214,000). The houses were printed offsite and assembled at the site location. 

The Chinese company hasn’t been the first to join the race to build 3D printed houses in 24 hours, a researcher from a US based university has been working on such goals too. I believe there are more but have been undisclosed.

In Amsterdam, the world’s first onsite 3D printed house—which is actually intended as a museum and a research facility—is being built. House materials consist of layers of molten plastic which function like LEGO materials.

Three insights. Technology brings about “deflation”—something which authorities and the mainstream—have been deeply averse to. Yet "deflation", for consumers, means more affordability or more goods or services one can buy with a given currency unit—such signifies as an increase in real purchasing power (What money can buy). 

What the mainstream doesn't tell you is that the "deflation" they all so rabidly dread is credit deflation (bubble bust). So they all promote sustained debasement of the real purchasing power of money via bubble blowing or credit inflation policies  

The second lesson is competition. The quest for profits has not just led to the discovery of new technologies, but has also been impelling companies to innovate or to introduce new or improvised uses (applications) for a specific technology in order to satisfy consumers. 

Lastly the potentials of 3D Printing technology remains vast. 3D printing technology is yet in the early phase of expansion in terms of diffusion of applications to commerce and to households. So for me, this an industry worth monitoring.

[Disclosure: As of this writing, I have no equity holdings in 3D technology stocks]

From Smartphones to the Internet of Things

The team at Lux Research foresees a transition from Smartphones to the Internet of things: (hat tip Lux’s founder/Forbes contributor Josh Wolfe) [bold original]

“Smartphones plateau and decline.” It could be the title of a scary summer shark flick for the electronics industry, but it’s a reality that a mounting body of evidence supports: handset sales, profits, app downloads, and even innovation itself are flatlining, hitting financials at Samsung and Apple (which both now spend more on patent litigation than R&D) while RIM, HTC, and Nokia struggle to survive at all. In the same process that desktops, notebooks, feature phones, PDAs, and every other information appliance in history has passed through, smartphones are poised to peak and then plummet between now and 2016, leaving electronics industry execs scrambling for the safety – the next big thing

So what are the next big things?

-Wearables includes Smart watches and glasses

-The Internet of Things (IOT) which comprises Low-cost computing, communications, and sensors

-Industrial IOT such as Smart buildings, water management and more

-The Lux team calls the “blue ocean strategy” the biggest promise of all. This is the networking things in motion. The things that move – from smart-textile garments and self-driving cars to robots and satellites

Read the rest here

The information age will continue to pave way for radical advances in creative destruction, disruptive- innovation technologies that will reconfigure people’s lifestyles, and thus the economic environment. For investors, these represent as profit opportunities to ponder at.

Chart of the Day: 12 technologies will drive our economic future

The Washington Post cites a chart from a study by McKinsey Quarterly:

Most of the aforementioned technologies can be summed as the entwined functionalites of the ongoing revolutions of big data, communications and smart manufacturing. Such technologies are bound to decentralize the global economy that would intensify frictions with the current state of centralized political systems. 

Yet if central bankers and power insatiable politicians have not been pushing the economic system to Hades, I would dwell heavily on the above technologies.

CNN: 3D Printed Assault Weapons Available by End of April

The technology is there and continues to improve, so applications will also continue to expand to cover wide ranges of products, including controversial guns.

Assault weapons from 3-D Printing will be available by the end of April according to this report from CNN (hat tip lewrockwell.com)

Firearms 3D printer Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed and the Wiki Weapon project has been making wave after wave with every one of his statements, updates, videos and blog posts. He’s been making the circles, with an interview with Vice Magazine and now CNN.

His most recent proclamation is will alarm many, bring hope to a few, but leaves us with our heads scratching. Wilson has said that they will have the technology to 3D print a firearm by “the end of April.”

“Well to have a printable gun — it’s my intention to have that done by the end of this month and we’re at the end of March now so it’s my intention to have it done by April,” he said. This would, in theory, prompt a new era in personal firearm manufacturing and a new paradigm for gun control.

“The assumption is one day the technology will become more ubiquitous and widespread,” Wilson said on “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

“It will fall in price, and materials will be developed in a better place than they are now, so yes, if you were to have one in your home and you have the gun file, you can just click print and have the gun.”

The rate of advance of 3D technology will only render prohibition and other regulatory statutes obsolete. Of course, we expect government eventually to attempt to "regulate" 3D. But again such measures are bound to lag and thus fail.

3D technology in combination with others (mobile computing, nanotech and etc...) will change the way we do things and force us to specialize. A wider adaption of the 3D technology also means the path towards social decentralization.

Classroom-less World: The World is your Classroom

The information age will be more about disruptive innovations or reconfiguring specific social activities via decentralized platforms. 

This should apply to education where online classes may be a transition towards a more decentralized paradigm: ‘Socialstructed learning’ or the world as your classroom.

Socialstructed learning as defined by Ms. Marina Gorbis writing at fastcoexist.com “is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can’t walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past.”

How the possible transition will go about, again Ms. Gorbis

Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us.

MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools. They include a rapidly growing and open content commons (Wikipedia is just one example), on-demand expertise and help (from Mac Forums to Fluther, Instructables, and WikiHow), mobile devices and geo-coded information that takes information into the physical world around us and makes it available any place any time, new work and social spaces that are, in fact, evolving as important learning spaces (TechShop, Meetups, hackathons, community labs).

We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.

The good news is that the radical decentralization of the educational process will translate to its democraticization. With learning resources becoming more “abundant”, this means prices will fall towards zero bound— yes free education. And this means that education will span to cover greater number of people who will have access to specialized learning. This will also mean lesser politicization of the industry.

On the other hand, education service providers will have to discover other sources of revenues.

Also traditional education institutions will need to redraw their business models in order to adapt with the current changes otherwise face extinction.

Here Comes 3D Printed Cars

As part of the deepening of the information age, the 3D Printing revolution will affect large parts of today’s economy.

From Wired.com

Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo.

Urbee’s approach to maximum miles per gallon starts with lightweight construction – something that 3-D printing is particularly well suited for. The designers were able to focus more on the optimal automobile physics, rather than working to install a hyper efficient motor in a heavy steel-body automobile. As the Urbee shows, making a car with this technology has a slew of beneficial side effects.

Jim Kor is the engineering brains behind the Urbee. He’s designed tractors, buses, even commercial swimming pools. Between teaching classes, he heads Kor Ecologic, the firm responsible for the 3-D printed creation.

“We thought long and hard about doing a second one,” he says of the Urbee. “It’s been the right move.”

Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper. The whole car – which is about 10 feet long – takes about 2,500 hours.

Pls. read the rest here.

The problem I see with the competition poised by 3D Printing could be that incumbent companies may lobby to impose regulatory obstacles (e.g. safety and energy standards, etc…) on them.

Nevertheless, 3D Printing seems yet at the fringe of the technology adaption cycle. (chart from evocator.org)

Shale Gas Boom: Australia’s Potential $20 Trillion Discovery

The shale gas boom continues to percolate around the world, this time Australia may have hit on a jackpot.

From the Herald Sun

SOUTH Australia is sitting on oil potentially worth more than $20 trillion, independent reports claim - enough to turn Australia into a self-sufficient fuel producer.

Brisbane company Linc Energy yesterday released two reports, based on drilling and seismic exploration, estimating the amount of oil in the as yet untapped Arckaringa Basin surrounding Coober Pedy ranging from 3.5 billion to 233 billion barrels of oil.

At the higher end, this would be "several times bigger than all of the oil in Australia", Linc managing director Peter Bond said.

This has the potential to turn Australia from an oil importer to an oil exporter.

Technology brought about by free markets has enabled people’s access to shale as alternative fuel. 

Importantly, since Shale gas has been said to be abundant, where reserves are which scattered or distributed around the world, cheap and abundant energy should translate to lower prices and help spur economic growth. Of course there are other benefits of Shale: as previously mentioned environmental friendliness is one. Another is that since shale gas has been mostly driven by free markets this should translate to less onus for taxpayers. Additionally, the dispersed distribution of shale will likely alter geopolitics by reducing dependence on producers governed by despots and the kleptocracy. Finally Shale gas operates on safe technology.

For Asian investors, the impact of Shale so far has been an onrush to Shale related investments in the West, most probably aimed at, not only to profit from the ongoing Shale boom, but likewise to assimilate the technology required for domestic shale exploration.

The Australian discovery may just be one of the latest discoveries not limited to Asia, which recently includes Israel, Japan,  India and even China.

I expect the shale boom to inspire transformative innovation on people's wellbeing. 

Make Way for 3D Printed Guitars

3D Printing has indeed been revolutionary. Many products today are being 3D "printed" such as guns and jaw replacements

Add to that list acoustic and electric guitars

Image from Businessweek/Bloomberg

From Businessweek/Bloomberg,

Scott Summit does unusual things on his vacations. For instance, he just spent a week up in the mountains, taking in the majestic scenery and all that, but also sitting at his laptop creating a 3D model of his ideal guitar. Then he sent the computer design to 3D Systems (DDD), which used its massive 3D printers to transform the graphic model into an actual acoustic instrument that Summit can play.

As far as anyone seems to know, this is the first 3D-printed acoustic guitar on the planet, and it raises all kinds musical possibilities. (As several readers noted, people have already made 3D printed electric guitars.)

As a kid, Summit pined after fancy guitars. “I wanted a $3,000 one like Jerry Garcia would play,” he says. At the time, Summit didn’t have the money, so he spent around $100 on wood and other parts and fashioned his own guitar. “It sounded like crap,” he says.

These days, Summit spends most of his time designing custom body parts and stylish prosthetics that get built from 3D printers. He is, in fact, one of the world’s leading 3D printing and design experts, and he decided to put those skills to use over a holiday, refining his childhood vision.

Yet the difference in quality seems to be negligible…

Since the acoustic guitar would be made from fused plastic, Summit figured it would have some serious shortcomings. If it actually worked, it would probably sound worse than his old $100 model. But chances were the guitar would break under the 200 pounds of string pressure that comes with tightening the strings via a tuning machine. Summit set up a video camera to record what would happen when the stringing process started. “I thought it would at least be cool if the guitar exploded,” he says.

But, no. It worked, and it sounds pretty good. “It’s rich and full and has a great tonal range,” says Summit, who’s been known to play at friends’ weddings and at dive bars.

3D made guitars signifies as a breakthrough with more innovations and product transformations ahead

Summit describes this version as a rough draft. He wants to start experimenting with more radical designs to see how they change the sound. Somewhere down the road he figures people will be able to use software to pick out what sort of treble, bass, or sustain they desire and then print a guitar to match those qualities. “It will arrive in the mail and sound just the way you wanted,” he says.

3D printing will alter the division of labor, production process, investment flows, increase specialization and will likely become a household necessity. Eventually too, 3D printing will become object of politicization from mostly the neo-luddites or even from socialists clothed with environmentalist rhetoric.

Video: The Robot Chefs are Coming

A Chinese entrepreneur has invented the "robot chef" to do his noodle bars. 

I believe this is just an ice breaker, along with 3D printing, I think robots or the automation of parts of kitchen chores will become part of the commerce first, then the household soon. (hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

The World First Genetically Modified Babies

Given that the technology has been existing then having the first genetically modified humans seems of no surprise to me.

From Daily Mail.com

The world's first genetically modified humans have been created, it was revealed last night.

The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.

So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'.

Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey.

The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive.

Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults --two women and one man.

The fact that the children have inherited the extra genes and incorporated them into their 'germline' means that they will, in turn, be able to pass them on to their own offspring.

Altering the human germline - in effect tinkering with the very make-up of our species - is a technique shunned by the vast majority of the world's scientists.

Geneticists fear that one day this method could be used to create new races of humans with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence.

One way or another people’s curiosity will lead to more experimentation, which is why we should expect human cloning to be next, in spite political opposition.

This reminds me of two “cloning is bad'” movies: Scarlett Johansson’s The Island and Arnold Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s the 6th Day

Expect the rapid changes in technology to challenge people’s ingrained beliefs and lifestyles.

Spotting Technology Winners is a Judgment Call

Forbes’ brilliant technology analyst and venture cap investor Josh Wolfe gives as a clue on how to identify winning technology innovation, (bold caps original)

And the stakes are always highest when the forces of technological disruption, oft too weak to be detected, catalyze massive industry change and become too strong to be resisted.

Common conception holds that brilliant inventions burst straight from research labs to take over markets. But in studying and investing in change, it becomes apparent that the enabling technologies have often been in existence for some time, developing quietly in the background in ancillary markets or other incarnations. It’s only at the confluence of parallel technological developments and shifting market forces that, often unexpectedly, “Aha!” – a new application takes hold. The combinatorial chemistry of industry and invention yields an explosive reaction, and then: everything changes. Thus we’re always hunting for two things: cutting-edge technologies and rapidly changing markets.

In short, the success of identifying winning disruptive technology innovators comes with the ‘right timing’. Technology may have been "in existence for some time", but markets may not be ripe for it.

This gives merit to Professor Peter Klein’s definition of entrepreneurship as one of speculative judgment.

At the Mises Blog Professor Salerno writes,

So, Klein maintained, the profit opportunity was not an ex ante fact waiting to be discovered; rather the profit opportunity was only realized , ex post, as the successful outcome of an action based on a speculative judgment. Whether or not the plans of economic agents are better coordinated and the economy is closer to equilibrium than before is “irrelevant,” Klein explained; the important point is that ex post profits indicate that resources have been reallocated from less valuable to more valuable uses from the point of view of consumers.

Anyway, Mr. Wolfe’s present candidate is the 3D printer.

I talked about the potentials of 3D printers at an earlier post.

I also share the view that 3D printers will function as one of the three major forces of the information age.

Information Age Education: Student Focused Online Platforms

The information age will massively disrupt (20th century classroom mass based) education as we know of it today.

Hedge fund manager Andy Kessler in his interview with Artificial Intelligence expert Sebastian Thrun, published at the Wall Street Journal, gives us some clues. (bold highlight mine)

Yet there is one project he's happy to talk about. Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig's) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000.

In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. "I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said 'If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?' And I said: I. Don't. Care."

In the end, there were 160,000 people signed up, from every country in the world, he says, except North Korea. Rather than tape boring lectures, the professors asked students to solve problems and then the next course video would discuss solutions. Mr. Thrun broke the rules again. Twenty-three thousand people finished the course. Of his 200 Stanford students, 30 attended lectures and the other 170 took it online. The top 410 performers on exams were online students. The first Stanford student was No. 411.

Mr. Thrun's cost was basically $1 per student per class. That's on the order of 1,000 times less per pupil than for a K-12 or a college education—way more than the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley that you need a 10 times cost advantage to drive change.

So Mr. Thrun set up a company, Udacity, that joins many other companies attacking the problem of how to deliver the optimal online education. "What I see is democratizing education will change everything," he says. "I have an unbelievable passion about this. We will reach students that have never been reached. I can give my love of learning to other people. I've stumbled into the most amazing Wonderland. I've taken the red pill and seen how deep Wonderland is."

"But Wonderland is also crazy!" I interrupt.

"So?"

Ah, another Thrun project that can radically disrupt the old way of doing things. "But isn't that exactly what we should be doing? I'm going part-time at Google to pursue this. I really care. Isn't this the American history? Can't you pinpoint almost everything that happened back to some technological breakthrough?" Indeed, this is going to disrupt public schools and teachers unions and universities and tenured professors and so on, Mr. Thrun effectively interjects: "The dialogue always focuses on what's going to happen to the institutions. I'm totally siding with the students."

I ask why he always takes on these quantum changes instead of trying something incremental. "That's what Google taught me. Aim higher. Udacity is my playground—to radically experiment and find out. I've seen the light."

Education in the information age will see a deepening trend towards personalized (demassified) learning, will focus on job related skill building (which does away with useless subjects aimed at indoctrination) and on increasing specialization.

Continues innovation, competition and noncontiguous platform which should cover the entire world (in terms of providers, educators and students), will become important forces in driving down the cost, or the “democratization” of education.

Finally, job hiring based on the education credential system model will be challenged, if not transformed to meet the new digital realities.

Explore Sebastian Thrun's Meet Udacity website here.

Quote of the Day: The Information Age will Revolutionize Higher Education

Mainline universities loudly proclaim their love of online learning — and pedagogical innovation more generally — while doing everything possible to retard it. The strategy has been to make a few easy, low-cost, conservative moves that preserve the status quo, such as putting some existing courses online, while trying to suppress the innovative outsiders like Phoenix, DeVry, TED, Kahn Academy, etc. It’s a classic example of what Clayton Christensen calls sustaining innovation — incremental changes that keep the existing market structure intact. The last thing the higher-ed establishment wants is disruptive innovation that challenges its dominant incumbent position.

This is from Austrian economist Peter G. Klein at the Mises Blog.

Accelerating instances of "disruptive innovation" from the information age will help collapse the current education bubble.

Online Interactive Learning: Flipped Classrooms

I have been predicting that the information age or digital economy will be driving radical changes in many aspects of social life especially in education.

Peer based instruction seems as another frontier for innovation in education.

From Harvard (bold emphasis mine)

Researchers at Harvard University have launched the Peer Instruction (PI) Network (www.peerinstruction.net), a new global social network for users of interactive teaching methods.

PI, developed by Eric Mazur, Area Dean for Applied Physics and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), is an innovative evidence-based pedagogy designed to improve student engagement and success.

Mazur, famous for his talk titled "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer," developed the method after realizing in the 1990s that his physics lectures at Harvard, while popular, were not helping students to master the basic concepts.

The PI technique relies on the power of the "flipped classroom." Information transfer (i.e., a teacher transferring knowledge to students) takes place in advance, typically through online lectures. In short, students study before rather than after class.

As a result, the classroom becomes a place for active learning, questions, and discussion. Instructors spend their time addressing students' difficulties rather than lecturing.

While originally developed for Mazur's introductory physics courses, PI is now used across multiple disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities.

The Peer Instruction Network will serve as a hub for educators around the world to connect and share their PI experiences, submit questions, and engage with other PI users.

Most of the changes will gravitate towards personalized or individual based learning rather than from the current mass based ‘classroom’ education. Online education will bridge the geographical distance and competition should drive down costs. Online learning will drive the knowledge revolution.

Revolutionary 3D Printing Technology: Jawbone Replacement

The speed of technological advances is just amazing and 3D printing technology seems to be showing the way.

From Discoverynews.com (hat tip Mark Perry; bold emphasis mine)

When surgeons replaced the infected lower jawbone of an 83-year-old woman, they needed a fast replacement tailored to fit the patient's existing bone structure, nerves and muscles. That medical dilemma inspired a world-first achievement -- creating a customized jawbone from scratch with 3D printing technology.

The "printing" process used a laser to heat and melt metal powder in the shape of the jawbone. That process, carried out by Belgian manufacturer LayerWise, allowed the 3D printer to sculpt and build up the patient's medical implant layer by layer. A bioceramic coating ensured that the patient's body would not reject the implant.

"The new treatment method is a world premiere because it concerns the first patient-specific implant in replacement of the entire lower jaw," said Jules Poukens, a surgeon at the University Hasselt in Belgium

Poukens led the team of surgeons that implanted the new jawbone during a four-hour operation at a hospital in Sittard-Geleen in the Netherlands last June, according to the Dutch newspaper De Pers. The elderly patient made a rapid recovery.

"Shortly after waking up from the anesthetics, the patient spoke a few words, and the day after, the patient was able to speak and swallow normally again," Poukens said.

3D printing has already helped many DIY innovators create everything from robots to household items on demand based upon digital designs. But the combination of precise designs and rapid manufacturing could have even greater potential for creating customized body parts for medical patients -- especially when transplanted bone structures and organs suffer from short supply.

The revolutionary 3D printing technology reinforces the secular trend towards decentralization. But this won’t come smoothly as many politically entrenched groups or interests will figure out ways (from environmentalism to health regulations and others) to forestall 3D technology’s fabulous advances.

Also the political battlefield will shift from nations (with no more China or Japan to blame on) to technology. In short expect anti-free market politics to shift from mercantilism to neo-Luddism.

The illustrious Julian Simon once remarked about the growth of human capital

The essence of wealth is the capacity to control the forces of nature, and the extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge

Information Age will be Driven by Three Major Forces

Writing at the Wall Street Journal physicist-entrepreneur Mark P. Mills and Dean of McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University Julio M. Ottino sees a dramatic reconfiguration of the US economy that would likely be driven by 3 major forces: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

They write, (bold emphasis mine)

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the "cloud"—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian. From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.

The second transformation? Smart manufacturing. This is the first structural shift since Henry Ford launched the economic power of "mass production." While we see evidence already in automation and information systems applied to supply-chain management, we are just entering an era where the very fabrication of physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science. Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level, optimizing features and even creating new materials, radically improving quality and reducing waste.

Devices and products are already appearing based on computationally engineered materials that literally did not exist a few years ago: novel metal alloys, graphene instead of silicon transistors (graphene and carbon enable a radically new class of electronic and structural materials), and meta-materials that possess properties not possible in nature; e.g., rendering an object invisible—speculation about which received understandable recent publicity.

This era of new materials will be economically explosive when combined with 3-D printing, also known as direct-digital manufacturing—literally "printing" parts and devices using computational power, lasers and basic powdered metals and plastics. Already emerging are printed parts for high-value applications like patient-specific implants for hip joints or teeth, or lighter and stronger aircraft parts. Then one day, the Holy Grail: "desktop" printing of entire final products from wheels to even washing machines.

The era of near-perfect computational design and production will unleash as big a change in how we make things as the agricultural revolution did in how we grew things. And it will be defined by high talent not cheap labor.

Finally, there is the unfolding communications revolution where soon most humans on the planet will be connected wirelessly. Never before have a billion people—soon billions more—been able to communicate, socialize and trade in real time.

The implications of the radical collapse in the cost of wireless connectivity are as big as those following the dawn of telegraphy/telephony. Coupled with the cloud, the wireless world provides cheap connectivity, information and processing power to nearly everyone, everywhere. This introduces both rapid change—e.g., the Arab Spring—and great opportunity. Again, both the launch and epicenter of this technology reside in America.

I think that this will not just be a feature that would influence the US economy, but also of the world, as the significance of political borders trends towards irrelevance.

Said differently, the above forces will likely underpin the accelerating influence of decentralization to the political economic sphere throughout the world.

Sweden’s Free No-Classroom Schools

A private school in Sweden jettisons the conventional classroom based education

From the Businessinisder,

A new school system in Sweden eliminated all of its classrooms in favor of an environment that fosters children's "curiosity and creativity."

Vittra, which runs 30 schools in Sweden, wanted learning to take place everywhere in its schools -- so it threw out the "old-school" thinking of straight desks in a line in a four-walled classroom (via GOOD).

Vittra most-recently opened Telefonplan School, in Stockholm. Architect Rosan Bosch designed the school so children could work independently in opened-spaces while lounging, or go to "the village" to work on group-projects.

All of the furniture in the school, which looks like a lot of squiggles, is meant to aid students in engaging in conversation while working on projects.

The school is non-traditional in every sense: there are no letter grades and students learn in groups at their level, not necessarily by age.

Admission to the school is free, as long as the child has a personal number (like a social security number) and one of the child's parents is a Swedish tax payer.

As I have been continuously pointing out, the information or digital age will radically change the way we live or do things.

And the secular trend will evolve towards the personalization of educational services. And moving away from the classroom model, as the above, is just an example of such transition. Aside, online platforms, and other competition-driven innovations will drive such transformations that will send the current firmament high costs of (industrial era designed) education spiraling down.

Pivotal changes happen at the fringes. As I earlier pointed out the Khan Academy’s P2P collaborative tutoring, free online education as the University of People and Stanford University’s expanding online courses could be representative of the early movers.

And as the cost of education falls, knowledge will surge. Thus, the knowledge revolution will serve as the critical backbone to decentralization trends.

We are Living in the Best Years in over Two Thousand Years

The Economist has this interesting population weighted chart which shows that much of human history and progress has been happening during the 20^th century up to the present.

The Economist writes, (bold emphasis mine)

Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already "longer" than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010, according to an updated version of Angus Maddison's figures.

The chart reveals how growth in population has coincided with economic output expansion.

And second and most importantly, that human progress from the last century through the current millennium has been exponential.

Perhaps Professor Deirdre McCloskey’s “Bourgeois Revaluation” accounts for as the pivotal factor for such astounding acceleration in the rate of progress.

As Professor Don Boudreaux writes of Professor McCloskey’s thesis, (bold emphasis mine)

Only when merchants, tinkerers and practical seekers of profit in markets came to be respected -- and to be widely spoken of with respect, even with admiration -- did the social status of the bourgeoisie increase enough to make membership in that group desirable to large numbers of people. And when this Bourgeois Revaluation happened, innovation skyrocketed.

It's this innovation -- mad, fevered, historically off-the-charts amounts of innovation -- that really is what we today call "capitalism."

I am glad to have lived in this generation and to be a part of and witness such magnificent phenomenon unfold before our eyes.

And I guess that despite all the risks and the prospective afflictions which could interrupt or disrupt on such trends, the best is yet to come. I think that we are transitioning towards the information age that should characterize even faster rate of innovations under more decentralized settings (governance included).

Remember, such feat came in spite of the 2 World Wars and the gruesome tragedies of the failed experiment of communism in the 20^th century.

The above should serve as good tidings for our progenies.

Mary Meeker on Web 2.0: Bet On Mobile And Social Networking Trends

GIGAOM.com showcases the projections of “Queen of the Net” or Morgan Stanley's Internet guru Mary Meeker.

All the following quotes from GIGAOM.com

Ms. Meeker first predicts the major dynamic:

"Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking."

Next is the evolution of the technology cycle from the Desktop to Mobile.


"The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says — predicting that within the next five years “more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.”

In addition, internet take up will increasingly migrate to the mobile spectrum.

"Meeker says that mobile Internet usage is ramping up substantially faster than desktop Internet usage did, a view she and her team arrived at by comparing the adoption rates of iPhone/iPod touch to that of AOL and Netscape in the early 1990s"

And in terms of application, connectivity is now largely driven real time via social networking platforms as email is gradually being dislodged as the main instrument of communication.

"On the social networking side, Meeker’s report notes that social network use is bigger than email in terms of both aggregate numbers of users and time spent, and is still growing rapidly. Social networking passed email in terms of time spent in 2007, hitting about 100 billion"

Another feature of the rapid adaption of technology would be the "creative destruction" as toll carriers lose ground on the increasing use of data.

"But that mobile boom will take its toll on carriers, Meeker says, because mobile Internet use is all about data."

As you can see the next set of "industrial" wreckage (and job losses) is already becoming palpable, as people (consumers) speedily migrate to new technologies to 'enhance' their web 2.0 based lifestyles.

This also means business models will likewise be changing, where those attuned to these changes are likely to benefit, while those who can't cope up with the swiftly altering consumer demand are likely to perish.

This only implies a deepening transition to web based businesses as new industries are likely to be created.

"One of the implications of mobile access is a growth in ecommerce, says Meeker, featuring things such as location-based services, time-based offers, mobile coupons, push notifications, etc. In China, the success of social network Tencent proves that virtual goods can be a big business, she says — virtual goods sales accounted for $2.2 billion worth of the company’s revenue in 2009 and $24 in annual revenue per user. Online commerce and paid services made up 32 percent of mobile revenue in Japan in 2008, up from just 14 percent in 2000. Meeker’s report suggests that the rest of the world — which is still below the 14 percent-mark — could see much the same trajectory over the next 10 years.

Finally Ms. Meeker gives us where the revenue side is likely to emanate;

"Meeker says that users are more willing to pay for content on mobile devices than they are on desktops for a number of reasons, including:

* Easy-to-Use/Secure Payment Systems — embedded systems like carrier billing and iTunes allow real-time payment

* Small Price Tags -– most content and subscriptions carry sub-$5 price tags

* Walled Gardens Reduce Piracy -– content exists in proprietary environments, difficult to get pirated content onto mobile devices

* Established Store Fronts -– carrier decks and iTunes store allow easy discovery and purchase

* Personalization -– more important on mobiles than desktops

Read Ms. Meeker's presentation via GIGAOM.com

Ms. Meeker appears to be validating what we think as a massive shift in the wealth creating process, which had been predicted by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in Revolutionary Wealth,

The Tofflers: "Several forces have been converging to drive the acceleration needle of the gauge. The 1980s and '90s saw a global shift towards liberal economies and hypercompetition. Combine that with the eighteen-month doubling rate of semi-conductor chip power and you get near-instantaneous financial transactions. (Currency traders can find out about a trade within two hundred milliseconds of its completion.) Put differently, behind all these pressures is the historic move to a wealth system whose chief raw material-knowledge-can now move at nearly real-time speed. We live at a pace so hyper that the old law that "time is money" needs revision. Every interval of time is now worth more money than the last one because in principle if not practice, more wealth can be created during it."

Organizational Capital: Business Model Innovation

One of the reasons we believe that traditional fundamental metrics will hardly apply today is due to the fact that the world economy has been transitioning from the industrial age to the information age-where Alvin Toffler calls this the Third Wave.

This means that the current underlying trend which deepens the integration of global markets (globalization), intensifies comparative advantages and the international division of labor plus competition driven technology innovations has been paving way for a reconfiguration of global economic structures.

This also means that capital in a traditional sense has also been evolving to incorporate organizational capital-or a procedure implemented by businesses to complete work (wikipedia.org).

The Boston Global Consulting Group presents a recent paper "Business Model Innovation" highlighting on these:

According to BCG, (bold highlight mine)

``This combination of product innovation and business model innovation (BMI) put Apple at the center of the market approximately 30 times larger than its original market. It also helped expand the company's share of the traditional computer market, as new customers become so attached to their iPods that they took another look at the Apple's computers.

``The greater frequency of disruption and dislocation in many industries is shortening business model lifecycles. New global competitors are emerging. Assets and activities are migrating to low cost countries. Systemic risk is growing as global business becomes increasingly interconnected. Social and ecological constraints on corporate action are emerging. All these factors require businesses to bolster and accelerate innovation. The discipline of BMI offers a fresh way to think about renewing competitive advantage and reigniting growth in this challenging environment.

``Business model innovation means more than a brilliant insight coming at the right place and the right time. To confer a reliable advantage, BMI must systematically cultivated, sufficiently supported, and explicitly managed.

Here is a diagram of the conventional model.

The BCG says that BMI is helpful during times of crisis or instability in the sense that

-it provides companies a way to break out of competition via process or product innovation.
-it help address disruptions or technological shifts-to cope with new business demands
-it addresses specific opportunities, by enabling companies to concentrate on either lower prices or reduce risks and cost of ownership for customers-usually by means of reengineering or reinventing themselves.
-companies often find it easier to gain consensus around the bold moves required to reconfigure an existing business

To add, BMI delivers superior and sustainable returns according to BCG, aside from offering "a premium over the average total shareholder return" on their industries or businesses See exhibit 2

And BMI can take several forms (see above).

Read the entire BCG paper here

And it is probably a reason why workers may have been more productive even during today's crisis. To quote Garrett Jones (Source Tyler Cowen: Marginal Revolution), ``Workers mostly build organizational capital, not final output. This explains high productivity per 'worker' during recessions."