That first RE.WORK summit will take place on 19 September, which is also the second day of GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference in London. The RE.WORK program will kick off with a focus on the areas of: the internet of things, 3D printing, nanotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, computing systems and sensors.

“We’re trying to showcase emerging technologies and breakthrough ideas,” summit founder Nikita Johnson told me. “It’s all about reworking big challenges that we’re facing in the future. We want to bring the technology and science aspect, but with mission of positive impact.”

While the first of these summits will focus on technology, others will have different themes: one in December will deal with urbanization, RE.WORK Health will take place next year, and still others will handle energy, education and the environment. The first three meetings will take place in London, with others set for Dublin, Berlin and other European cities. Events will also be followed up with smaller meet-ups, Johnson added.

Apart from Solve For X, other initiatives in this space include TED, to a certain extent (RE.WORK looks to be a bit more collaborative and interactive) and the engineering-led Global Grand Challenges Summit.

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It’s not that the State Department did anything wrong here – indeed, if I were in the U.S. I’d be alarmed if there was a lack of action on their part. It’s just that, even though Defense Distributed quickly complied, the exercise was utterly pointless. The files are out there, hosted on catch-me-if-you-can services such as Mega and The Pirate Bay, which has a whole “physibles” section devoted to downloadable 3D-printed object designs (a good chunk of which are for weapons parts, by the way).

Stop doing that thing I can’t control! Please?

Analogies are not hard to find. As a journalist who spent many years working in the U.K., I am acutely aware of the absurdity of that country’s libel laws in the information age. British publishers sometimes have to shy away from information that everyone else in the world is happily publishing online – it may keep them safe from being sued, but it certainly doesn’t stop British people from reading and sharing these scurrilous rumors (and, occasionally, facts).

In effect, the State Department’s attempt to enforce American arms control regulations amounts, in this case, to censorship. I don’t mean that in a free-speech-justifies-weaponry sense; I simply mean that what was once a matter of controlling the trade in physical hardware has now become a matter of trying to stem the flow of bits and bytes.

This is precisely the same problem faced by record labels suffering a premature album leak, or those trying to stem the aftermath of a Bradley Manning-style leak, or even the European regulators who want to institute a “right to be forgotten” when anyone who’s ever used the internet could tell them it’s a fool’s errand.

Can we talk about this?

Personally, I strongly disagree with what Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson has done – I think it is irresponsible, and it may well lead to the loss of lives (though many have pointed out that it’s a heck of a lot easier to buy a ready-made gun than to make one yourself). However, in a way I’m glad that he’s done it.

I have zero doubt that similar designs have already been successfully executed by those who just don’t want to make a song and dance about it, and I would much rather have this sort of activity out in the open, stimulating an open debate. After all, what Wilson and the sharers of his designs did was completely inevitable. It may never become an issue on the scale of music and film “piracy” — I suspect more people like free media than want to shoot things — but it was always going to happen.

The challenge now, for regulators and for all of us, is to find a new approach to the control – or lack thereof – of things we don’t like, but that are now impossible to stop with mere border controls or targeted investigations. Perhaps most importantly, we need to find a way forward that doesn’t remove the liberties of those who like to share designs for less harmful objects.

It won’t be easy, but new problems require new solutions. Let’s talk.

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The story of the Robohand is as inspiring as an Oprah interview. One of the participants, however, noted that he didn’t intend to help those missing a limb. Instead, he sought out a 3D printed hand to save himself after a wood working accident shaved off four of his fingers. And yet, thanks to a collaboration between carpenter Richard Van As in Johannesburg, and a Seattle prop designer a five-year old born without fingers now has a more functional hand.

There’s also an Indigogo campaign to raise money to make more of these and help more children and adults born without fingers get their own Robohands. It’s heartwarming.

The collaboration between the two also emphasizes the best of what the internet and connectivity has to offer. This story wouldn’t have happened without a 3D printer, but it also wouldn’t have happened without the rapid dissemination of information enabled by the internet. For example, the South African woodworker first learned about Ivan Owen in Seattle because a video Owen had done showing a robot hand he had made went viral.

Then, there’s the building of the hand, which costs about $150. After Owen and Van As developed the plans for a hand, they made the plans open source and freely available on the internet. At a point where plenty of people are worrying about the IP infringement implications of 3D printing, such as printing out a proprietary design such as LEGOs or the dangers of evading regulations by printing harmful devices such as guns, this story is a reminder that people will use 3D printing for good as well.

Yes, this story is being pushed hard by MakerBot, the company that makes 3D printers (there are more than 15,000 of them in use today), but it’s also a reminder that as any new technology is introduced it will be used for both good and bad. And with regulators having met last month in Washington DC a conference to discuss some of the implications of 3D printing technology, it’s good to remember that 3D printers are a tool capable of good or bad when pondering upcoming laws and regulations.

We are lucky to live in a time when technological advances are making new things possible at pace that is possibly more rapid than any other time in human history. We have the rapid dissemination of knowledge and ability to share across continents thanks to broadband. Crowd funding tools now allow a wider spectrum of people to raise money for their ideas and we also have tools like 3D printing to turn digital designs into physical products.

And perhaps most of all, we have an engaged community of people who have the technical know-how reaching out to those around the world who have the curiosity and intelligence to make a difference. Now those billions can have the tools as well.

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New York-based Shapeways sells 3D printing services to designers and makers and also has an Etsy-like marketplace for creators. The startup, a transplant from the Netherlands, was printing more than 100,000 products a month and had over 150,000 users inside its community last year, so has no doubt grown that audience and volume since then.

Last month Shapeways debuted their new API which enables developers to create consumer facing applications that can tap into the Shapeways printing network and marketplace. That’s important because, as GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf explained it, the API gives Shapeways greater access to the bigger, non-maker audience who want access to 3D printed objects but don’t want to learn how to use sophisticated 3D design software.

Shapeways has been planning to expand through its new New York factory, which is supposed to occupy up to 30,000 feet in Long Island City. Previously, much of the printing work was being done in Europe at its Eindhoven factory in the Netherlands or through partners.

Check out our Field Guide to 3D Printing on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), which defines 3D printing as:

[A] process that produces physical 3D objects by adding layer upon layer of material. Direct from a computer model, objects are “grown.” These objects can be almost anything: engineering prototypes of automotive components, tooling for manufacturing, medical implants, architectural models and sellable goods for end users.

We’ll be digging into 3D printing more at our RoadMap conference on connected design in November in San Francisco. To be the first to register for this event sign up here.

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But sometimes April Fools’ jokes can get interesting — like when a gag starts to look more like a prophesy about our changing industry or a foreshadowing of a future product or service. Here are three April Fools’ jokes from this year that we think may, unwittingly, have more than just a hint of truth to them.

A broadband connection in every alley

Google is famous for pulling out all of the stops each April 1^st, and this year is no exception.  There’s Gmail Blue and a new levity algorithm. One of its biggest pranks, Google Nose, actually has some grounding in real technology, as my colleague Barb Darrow pointed out earlier today.

But the one that really caught my eye this year was Google’s video advertisement of its fake new broadband service fiber-to-the-pole in Kansas City, where Google is building high-bandwidth optical connections to homes and businesses.

“We thought a lot about what we do to enable this kind of ubiquitous connectivity throughout our fiberhoods, and we realized that the answers were all around us: utility poles,” the on-screen spokesman says. “I mean, we’re already invested in building a fiber network using these utility poles so we thought: why not make them even more useful.”

To be honest, the humor falls a little flat: Google pictures people gathered around poles plugging their laptops into Ethernet ports. But the idea of Google providing ubiquitous broadband in its fiber cities is probably far from a joke. Google of late has pursued a wide range of initiatives related to building better mobile and wireless broadband networks: it’s experimenting with high-capacity, long-range Wi-Fi gateways, it’s testing new small cell mobile network architectures and it’s been an active proponent of using TV white spaces spectrum for broadband.

I don’t know for certain what Google plans to do with those technologies, but all of them could easily ride on the back of its pole-mounted fiber infrastructure.

Your kid’s first 3D printer

Millions of future artists and draftsmen began their careers on Etch A Sketches. Maybe the next generation of sculptors and industrial designers will get their starts on 3D printers. ThinkGeek is advertising the world’s “most economical and fun entry-level 3D printer on the market” for just $49.99. Its media? What else: Play-Doh.

Many of you are already thinking this would be an incredibly handy gadget to own (and not just for your kids)– and it might not be too long before something like it appears on store shelves.

Once the purview of sophisticated engineering shops, 3D printers are becoming much more accessible to the everyday creative classes. Companies like Shapeways are providing 3D printing services for artisans. Today my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote about a 3D printing kiosk at Virginia Tech University available free of charge to any student – just insert an SD card with your 3D design code and out pops your object.

Of course, there are still plenty of technological and economic obstacles in the way of a $50 3D printer. But keep in mind Play-Doh is a much more forgiving material than steel or ceramics (and you don’t need a laser to bond layers of Play-Doh together). Our toddlers might have trouble figuring out the ins-and-outs of Autodesk’s computer-aided design software, but if the market for home-brew 3D printing develops you can bet more novice-friendly software will follow.

The selective vision of Guardian Goggles

Leave it to the U.K.’s liberal mainstay The Guardian to add some wry political humor to the April Fools’ mix. Its gag is a sendoff on Google Glass: Guardian Goggles, a set of spectacles that filters everything through the Guardian’s prism.

“And then there are those times your willpower falters,” goes the Guardian’s promo video as a reader reaches for a discarded copy of competing – and right-leaning – paper The Daily Mail. “It happens to the best of us. But Guardian Goggles can help keep you on track. Our proprietary anti-bigotry technology automatically protects you from harmful opinions before they even reach your eyes.”

Here are my colleague Mathew Ingram’s thoughts:

“The Guardian’s Goggles are obviously designed to lampoon Google’s version, and play on the newspaper’s reputation for leaning to the left. But Augmented Reality devices could be programmed to exclude or blur out content that a user didn’t want to see, such as that involving offensive words or imagery.

We already filter what information we expose ourselves to by selecting the type of media we consume – whether it’s The Guardian or Fox News. Technology helps us refine those filters further. Augmented reality could actually insert those filters directly into our lines of sight.

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Thursday, March 7th

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For the past few years, SXSW — which is like the tech industry’s Spring Break fueled by BBQ, beer and the latest startups — has acted as a platform for a variety of social media and mobile apps to launch and gain mind share. Twitter famously broke out in SXSW in 2007. But at SXSW this year, as the New York Times noted this week, it looks like it’s hardware’s turn in the spot light.

Hot hardware

The Replicator 2, 3D printer, by MakerBot

As rain drizzled down outside the Austin convention center and marketers handed out logo-laden bright ponchos to conference-goers, Pettis used the opportunity of his opening remarks at the show to unveil his company’s new 3D scanner called the MakerBot Digitizer. He referred to the Digitizer as the “washer and dryer” partner to MakerBot’s 3D printer the Replicator 2, and described the Digitizer’s 3D scanning process as “like what happens in Tron when Flynn gets digitized.”

The device, which is supposed to be out in the Fall, will give creators and makers another tool to move designs from the physical world, to the digital world, and back again. While professional designers and artists have high-end machines that do this, the Digitizer is meant to bring this capability to the DIY movement. The Digitizer uses a camera to scan the device as it rotates, the digital design of the 3D object is captured, and the Replicator 2 can replicate the object, or a tweaked version of the object.

A monster created by the MakerBot

Pettis also used his talk to announce that design giant Autodesk is now selling MakerBot’s 3D printers, giving the startup access to Autodesk’s large customer network, and adding some heft to the 3D printer movement. Pettis, who was introduced before his talk as the “King of the 3D printing revolution,” launched MakerBot as a company at SXSW in 2009. (To read more about 3D printing check out our research report on GigaOM Pro, subscription required).

Makers, creators and devices

As Stacey Higgenbotham predicted earlier this week, SXSW Interactive 2013 is all about the DIY maker movement and 3D printing. Across the street from the convention center, Autodesk is hosting a large “Create” space that’s highlighting inventors, and tinkerers and the devices that they’ve developed.

Of course under the Create tent, Autodesk and MakerBot are showing off the Replicator 2, and Autodesk’s 3D printer software and applications, and they’ve even got a vending machine that’s selling 3D-printed monsters. Autodesk has an app called 123D Creatures that lets you make, and print out, monsters on your iPad; Autodesk can use these types of consumer-focused apps as both marketing, as well as to boost sales for its 3D printer software ecosystem.

Vending machine dispensing 3D printed monsters, by MakerBot, Autodesk.

Other devices under the Create tent include social good gadgets like the BioLite Stove, invented by Alexander Drummond and Jonathan Cedar, the “See Better to Learn Better” low cost eye glasses from Fuseproject’s Yves Behar, and the Embrace Nest baby warmer. Lytro was showing off a camera that was launched at SXSW 2012, and which captures the light field of photos, enabling users to focus on and interact with different parts of the picture.

The Lytro camera

In fact, in the few hours that the show has been open on Friday, I have yet to see a demo of or hear about a super hot social media or mobile app that’s blowing up at the show. But I have heard about 3D printable rocketships, new wearables from unusual players, and I got a brief demo this morning of the Misfit Shine from Misfit CEO Sonny Vu. I’m sure the digital-only apps and services are here at the show, but hardware and the physical world seem to be overshadowing them.

In a way, that makes sense. The Internet of Things is officially here, and super cheap sensors are enabling gadgets to use data to help us in our daily lives. At the same time, wearable technology like Google Glass is making the computing industry think in an entirely new way. A physical component is almost necessary to move the computing paradigm forward beyond tablets, smart phones, and laptops. And for the early-adopters at the SXSW show this year, that means they get the first change to play with these devices.

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Great. Now how about those business cards? Unfortunately, you’re going to need them because I’m pretty sure that — assuming it hasn’t happened already — this will be the year the marketing mavens at SXSW finally overwhelm those who are here to party and play with technology. In other words, expect to meet a lot more hucksters than engineers.

I won’t make an official call until the event is over, but there are two trends apparent in the session programming decisions and the inbound pitches leading up to the event: 1) there is a ton of corporate money flowing into the official SXSWi that drowns out the exchange of ideas with incessant commercials for a product or app, and 2) there are still a few geeks holding onto the glory from the heydey of SXSWi with unofficial or additional parties in Austin.

It’s all about the money, honey

First off, a little history for those who may think of SXSWi as some paradise of geekdom; it’s always been an event focused on the bottom line. SXSW Inc. has strictly enforced the use of the SXSW brand, so if you want to have a party at SXSW you have to pay. There are no true unofficial SXSW events, only events that might happen during spring break week in Austin with private guest lists.

But in the 11 years I’ve attended the show it has grown from a small event with a couple thousand “tech folk” — mostly from the hardware and gaming industries — to a creative festival where graphic designers, gamers and people who were trying to build web sites and online startups shared their hopes and fears about open identity, web fonts, privacy and media in small panels. After hours, they drank hard and modified Roombas to race in the streets. Companies like Twitter got their start here; not because they orchestrated huge splashy launches, but because a high concentration of geeks with a lot of free time were clustered in one place.

But as technology became an essential part of everyday life for everyone through mobile phones (as opposed to work-oriented PCs), the corporate presence grew larger and the partiers swankier (it’s still hard to find food, but not nearly as hard). The programming still had some fun and far-out topics, but geek panelists were replaced by marketers from big brands.

BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: I just got word from Friskies that GRUMPY CAT is coming to #SXSW Interactive. I am not even joking.—
Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) March 04, 2013

Last year I was demoralized when I realized that every other person I met happened to work in business development or marketing for a large corporation outside of the tech world. Yet, there were still pockets of the original SXSW spirit of technology explorers. Encountering a cluster of people trying to connect technology and food was probably the closest I got to those middle years of SXSW, a time when every person I met and every panel and party had me thinking about how tech can change the world — not just get us to buy more soda.

This year, among the pitches and programming, I don’t see any clusters that strike me as super fun. There are a few panels on toys and technology, several (although not as many as I would have thought) on 3D printing and hardware hacking. There is also a component of that ethos at the SXSWedu conference happening now. It may be that these geekier, more cohesive groups (there’s also a SXSWeco and the upcoming SXSWv2v in Las Vegas) are being pulled out into their own events.

Making a break for it

For the hardcore geeks who still want to congregate in one place to discuss their ideas, there is a growing shadow SXSW. It’s no secret that many attendees will never hit a SXSW speech, panel or programmed event. Instead they will attend events programmed by others outside the typical SXSW vote-for-your-favorite-panel method. Maybe it’s a happy hour shared amongst followers of a Facebook page, members of a meetup group, or just recipients of a group email.

But there are several events — including some that attendees pay for on top of their SXSW badge — that have created programming and content for people in town for SXSW. Mobile Saturday is one-day conference focused on all things mobile, while Dave McClure and Eric Reis have pulled together a Lean Startup event during the same day.

A bunch of groups from Germany are taking over Icenhauer’s for the entire conference and are running German Haus. It has panels, discussions, and parties. Big-name corporations have been doing this for the last few years, taking over lounge space and having presentations, but this year it seems more common and home to the most exciting programming.

There are also some events happening outside of the conference such as Doing Business in the U.S., Tech Career Expo and the Ideas Are Worthless conference. Some of these have licensed the SXSW name and some have not.

The point is that even as the core SXSWi event has become overrun with marketers, there are events within the event (or just outside of it) that still retain the spirit of the SXSW of six or seven years ago. Like the web itself, the good stuff is still here; you just have to wade through a lot of crap and marketing before you get there.

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If you’re not familiar with 3D printing, here’s a quick primer to help you understand what it is and why the Filabot sounds appealing. Unlike traditional printers that lay out ink on paper in a 2D plane, 3D printers create physical objects. They do this by heating up and extruding small layers of plastic atop one another. The plastic used for 3D printing comes in spools and isn’t what I’d call inexpensive; especially if 3D printing takes off and consumers use more plastic to make things. Shop around and you’ll see it’s about $40 for a kilogram spool.

That’s where the Filabot comes in. You can feed cut-up plastics into the device and it will melt them down and squeeze the remains out into strands of material for a 3D printer. The Filabot can handle plastic chunks up to 3-inches square and will extrude plastic strands in either 1.75-millimeters or 3 millimeters in thickness; fairly standard sizes for 3D printers. Here’s a look at an early stage concept:

I’d expect the Filabot’s price around $500 based on the Kickstarter pledge levels, but there are no details yet on exactly how much you’ll be able to purchase one for. And since 3D printers use filament for each successive printing layer in an object, that material is likely to be used up quickly.

So a machine that can create its own 3D printing filament could be a money saver in the long run. Even better is the fact that you can essentially reuse plastics at home for printing. In fact, if a 3D printed model doesn’t come out quite the way you’d like you can actually recycle with a Filabot and print an improved object.

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The hobbyists have established a startup called The Flexiscale Company, which launched a Kickstarter project on Monday that aims to fund the production of model kits for several old and very obscure locomotives, the Ffestiniog Englands. If recently-announced plans to 3D-print a moon base are all about creating futuristic designs, The Flexiscale Company is trying to recreate designs of the past.

Copying trains with lasers

What’s fascinating is the accuracy with which they can achieve this. Last year Chris Thorpe, the man behind the project, approached a firm called Digital Surveys that was more used to modelling for the energy sector. He got someone from the company to come over with his equipment and laser-scan Winifred, an 1885 steam engine that had recently returned to the UK for restoration after a 40-year stint lying in storage under the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

This was the result:

With that data in hand, Thorpe was able to do two things. First, he sent it off to the French 3D-printing firm Sculpteo to make a 1:25-scale model of Winifred. As he put it in a blog post:

“Even printed in the cheapest white plastic and with all of the inherent faults of the medium and process it is an exquisite model and so much more. It is an artifact of digital reproduction and the industrial revolution; both the old one powered by humans and the new one which has more computers and robots.”

However, the other thing Thorpe wanted was to recreate part of Winifred in 1:1 scale, namely her smokebox door. To test whether this would work, he sent the data for the door latch to Shapeways, which returned a copy in stainless steel: effectively a spare part for vehicle that’s more than 120 years old, complete with the patina gained by the original part over the years, with 1mm accuracy.

To make that finish even more authentic, though, The Flexiscale Company needs more accuracy in its scanning, so the four Ffestiniog Englands are being scanned with a system called Surphaser, which offers 0.2mm accuracy. That means around 10GB of data per train, since you ask.

Those who donate to the Kickstarter campaign can get the resulting model at varying sizes – in the old days scaling a model meant hard, manual work, but with this sort of data it’s becoming easy to automate. Those who donate £1,000 ($1,572) or more will also get to have themselves scanned, so a mini-me version can be the train’s driver.

The Flexiscale Company itself is unlikely to become large-scale though, Thorpe said:

“I’m doing this because I’ve always wanted these kits. I’m interested in a space where you can have the things you really want. A lot of the time you tend to buy things that aren’t optimal and you don’t tend to have a long-lasting relationship with them. I’m interested in the sustainability aspect of it as well.”

What can we learn from this?

The model train scene is about as niche as you can get, but the work being done by The Flexiscale Company will allow those with even more specialized interests to be catered for. The big model manufacturers such as Hornby are themselves testing out 3D scanning, but even there they will stick to relatively well-known engines. The Ffestiniog Englands will only be of interest to a small subset of people but, once they’ve been scanned, the trains can be made to order on demand and in a variety of sizes — economy of scale is not an issue.

Chris Thorpe presenting at the Monki Gras scaling conference in London

As for the cost of the scanning, well, that depends on what you’re scanning. The equipment being used to record locomotives costs in excess of £15,000, but it can be rented with an experienced technician for a lot less — the Surphaser scans only cost £900 per train.

The resulting product cost is pretty eye-opening. According to Thorpe, a model of a certain mass and detail may cost £160 from Hornby and around £200 from The Flexiscale Company – more, but not nearly as much more as you might suspect. For something so niche, this is remarkable.

And what about smaller objects? After all, that’s where the scanning itself can become something for the home hobbyist.

“You can use Kinect and a cheap USB-powered turntable,” Thorpe said. “There are different bits of software – the one that works the best is Artec Studio. The Artec guys make really good laser scanners, so you’re using all their knowledge.”

This stuff is being done now, and it can be achieved incredibly cheaply, so it’s probably worth starting to chew over the implications. Here are just a few of questions I have running through my mind:

• Are we going to see more heritage preservation operations go technical, with objects being scanned in the same way Google is trying to scan and record the world’s book catalog?
• Will there be any way to enforce design rights when anyone can not only disseminate schematics online, but create those schematics themselves through 3D scanning?
• How might these advances affect the servicing and repair industries, particularly in terms of after-sales support?

I don’t expect to see answers anytime soon. But in the meanwhile, if you’re interested in supporting an innovative model train startup, here’s the Kickstarter pitch:

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