At a Wednesday press conference, CEO Bre Pettis said that in describing Makerbots to those unfamiliar with 3D printing, he has to say, “You have to see it to believe it.”

“This is where you can go to see Makerbots in action,” he said.

The retail location will certainly help the company get its name out to a broader audience of consumers and elevate the 3D printing space in general. Today’s Wired cover story will no doubt boost its profile too.

On Wednesday, the company also unveiled its newest desktop 3D printer , the Replicator 2, as well as new software, called MakerWare, to help “drive” the Makerbots. It also announced an experimental version of its new printer, the Replicator2X, which targets 3D experts.

The new replicator, which costs $2,199, is the same size as the previous version, but has nearly three times the resolution of its predecessor (which means the final products are smoother) and it has more build volume, which gives operators more space to make multi-part projects and bigger models.

“We’ve set the standard in desktop 3D printers,” Pettis said. “We just didn’t compromise. We didn’t want designers and engineers to have anything that would hold them back.”

In a recent profile, Pettis told my colleague Ryan Kim that he hoped Makerbot products could help entrepreneurs build businesses on top of 3D printing and this evolution seems to move closer to that promise. In announcing the new printer, Pettis said he expects architects, designers and industrial engineers to “salivate” at the new device.

He also referenced one entrepreneur who is using a Makerbot printer to build prototypes for a sleep apnea diagnosis shirt so that he can move items to market faster.

Since launching in 2009, Makerbot has steadily gained traction in the 3D printing market. To date, the company has sold more than 13,000 Makerbot printers.

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in Makerbot and the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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In a highly thought-provoking plea to rethink (again) our approach to design at work, New York Times architecture and design writer Allison Arieff uses that newspaper’s Opinionator blog as a forum to dig deeply into exactly how we should be re-conceptualizing work spaces. In her post, Arieff draws a parallel between those who suggest cosmetic solutions to environmental problems and those whose approach to redesigning our offices only goes skin deep:

In the same way that bamboo floors, hybrid SUVs and eco-couture haven’t done much to curb carbon emissions, designing (and buying) more stuff for offices, no matter how sleek or sustainable it is, likely won’t help reset the culture of work.

Rather than add oriental rugs and comfier chairs to our offices, Arieff suggests we consider redesigning not just the spaces where we work but the whole concept of work itself. There are more fundamental problems to solve than the aesthetic, she contends:

I’m willing to bet that almost any office worker would happily swap Webcam lighting that won’t make you look, when you’re on Skype, like you’ve “been out partying all night” (as Steelcase’s head of design explained in Fast Company), for solutions to more pressing work issues like, I don’t know, burnout or fear of losing health coverage.

So what sort of wholesale redesign of our fundamental conceptions of work does she have in mind? Arieff runs through a slew of design professionals who are wrestling with this knotty problem and coming up with everything from “a co-op babysitting arrangement among working parents in the respective workplace to cover for one another throughout the day” to community-building events at co-working spaces.

The post is lengthy, full of questions guaranteed to get you thinking (Examples: What careers are viable and how should we train people for them? Might companies and their employees be able to re-envision what loyalty looks like in an era where the average time spent in a job is hovering in the range of one to four years?) and is well worth a read in full.

Is redesigning our office spaces just moving around deck chairs on the Titanic?

Image courtesy of Flickr use Ste3ve

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The last major computing infrastructure paradigm shift happened in the ‘80s when “client/server” was introduced as the new way to design business applications. Those applications typically ran on x86 computers – aka PCs.

Then, in the ‘90s, the “client” part of this overall design was disrupted and changed with the advent of the Internet. Instead of having applications running on a desktop PC accessing application servers on other PCs, we started accessing applications through web browsers which did little more than rendering on your own desktop or laptop computer. Now, 10-15 years later, we’re seeing the “server” side of client/server disrupted and replaced by cloud computing.

A New Architecture for More Devices

The underlying driver of these changes is the 10X effect — writ large. The early Internet had around 10 million users. Today we have on the order of one billion users (100X) on the Internet, and up to three billion if you count Internet-enabled mobile phones too. Whereas in the early days of the Internet, there were perhaps one million websites, today we have about 100 million active websites (100X). The total number of Internet connected devices is today around five billion (a 100X growth from about a decade ago), and the boldest predictions say that in the next few years this number will grow to a trillion! That’s 200X the current number.

These massive growth numbers, stepping up two or three orders of magnitude in about a decade, are forcing us to look for a new way to design our IT systems. The old architecture is completely unable to handle the new compute load, so we must re-architect the systems on all levels. Cloud computing is the new architecture.

Cloud computing is a term that reaches from the lowest piece of computer hardware all the way up to the highest level of web and mobile services. Google’s search is a cloud service. Salesforce.com is a cloud company. Apple’s iTunes is music and entertainment in the cloud. Amazon Web Services is cloud computing, as is Microsoft (a msft) Azure. Cloudera, RightScale and Eucalyptus are innovators of infrastructure software for the cloud. The modern servers produced by Dell and HP are made for cloud computing, as are the new storage solutions from giants like EMC and NetApp and from newer players such as Fusion-io.

Computers and the Three Musketeers

Whereas in current IT systems, computers and other resources are hardwired to serve just one specific set of users or set of applications, cloud computing lets any computer serve any need of any user. Computers are finally learning from the Three Musketeers: one for all and all for one.

Interestingly, the converse can be true as well in the cloud. When usage shoots through the roof (think of a mobile game that suddenly becomes popular), all cloud computers can be put to the use of one single application. Compute resources such as servers, storage devices and network equipment, can be called to duty and sent back on leave in an instance. This is called “elasticity.”

The “one for all and all for one” principle is possible because computer and software engineers have made sure that compute resources are fungible, i.e. mutually replaceable. You’d think engineers would have made this possible decades ago, but this has been a very hard nut to crack. It requires new thinking so new products (both software and hardware) are ready to operate across multiple computers from the start. This may sound like a natural thing to do, but so far in our history of computing, most software and hardware products were designed to function on their own with little interaction with other similar products.

Fungible compute resources that produce enormous elasticity are the only way to serve the growing Internet. When we reach the point of having one trillion connected devices, those connected devices all need service from the underlying computer network, but they do so at unpredictable times and with unpredictable workloads. It’s totally impossible to have servers devoted to certain uses — sitting there idly waiting for the user or the application to need them. Such a model would require close to a trillion servers. But with cloud computing, resources can be shared across the cloud, and a much smaller number of servers can successfully serve the fluctuating needs of the users and the connected devices. With fewer servers, we save time, money and energy.

As compute loads grow 10 times, 100 times and even 1,000 times, we need new architectures for our IT systems. In cloud computing, it is all about creating elasticity by making the compute resources fungible. When any computer can step in at any time to do any computation needed, scaling will no longer be an issue.

Marten will sharing his thoughts on “The Future of the Cloud” at our Structure 2011 event in June.

Marten Mickos is CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.

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Back in October, HardMac reported that Apple was busy testing Intel’s new “Gulftown” Xeon chip ahead of its inclusion in a refresh of the Mac Pro, which is slated for release early next year. The 32nm Gulftown chip is an evolution of the 45nm architecture found in the currently-shipping 2009 Mac Pro model.

Gulftown will be sold under the Core i9 brand name for consumer machines, while its server counterpart will be labeled the Xeon 5600 series. HardMac’s sources suggested Apple would have short-term exclusive use of the chip, much as it did for each of the last two “Xeon” revisions of the Mac Pro line.

Now, according to AppleInsider, Polish website PCLab last week published performance test results on Gulftown, showing that the new chips operated at nearly twice the speed of the previous generation chips during parallel tasks. In addition, they consumed only 50 percent as much power doing so. Sadly, the performance results are no longer available. PCLab explains:

We have been contacted by the reps of Intel Corporation. We agreed to remove the article. We will bring it back once Gulftown hits the stores, somewhere in 2010 :-)

Earlier this year I bought a 2009 Mac Pro. And – as sheer luck would have it – my purchase was delayed by one week… the very same week, as it happens, that Apple refreshed the Mac Pro line. I scoured the online store, meticulously comparing specs and searching the web for in-depth reviews of the new machine from the sort of geeks who spend their days doing nothing but benchmark testing. In short, I learned that while the Mac Pro prices went up, clock speeds came down – but I was reassured by those “in the know” that it didn’t matter the cores were (marginally) slower than before. I was still getting a more powerful machine than I’d ever need. I don’t mind admitting, though, for what I paid, I wanted my Mac Pro to be light years ahead of everything else, and I wanted it to stay that way for a long time! That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Still, Gulftown will squeeze-in an extra four physical cores above the eight I currently enjoy, and provide an extra four megabytes of L3 cache over the eight offered by my suddenly lowly-by-comparison machine. And don’t forget that 50 percent power-saving…

I’m only partially joking. Setting aside my shameful greed for ever-more-powerful hardware, the fact remains that my many-cored 2009 Mac Pro is woefully under-utilized. I do a fair bit of audio and video editing, but none of the software I use takes full advantage of multiple-processor cores. In addition, none of it is optimized for the 64-bit architecture of my machine or its Snow Leopard operating system. Final Cut doesn’t even try to be 64-bit compatible. Adobe CS4 Master Collection (in itself almost the price of a Mac Pro!) stubbornly remains a 32-bit suite.

So the bottom line is that my gloriously powerful and impressive Mac Pro is still sporting its (virtual) training wheels because, frankly, developers are dragging their heels updating their software.

That doesn’t stop me wanting the new Mac Pro, of course. Like I said, I’m greedy. But I’m also learning. And even if Apple releases this behemoth early in 2010, I don’t think I’ll be too frustrated. News of breathtakingly-more-powerful machines is tantalizing, to be sure, but until software developers really get behind this new hardware, whatever advantages these powerful new chips and architectures promise remains almost entirely academic.

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This weekend featured the grand opening of Apple’s latest retail store, Scottsdale Quarter, in beautiful Scottsdale, Ariz. As evidenced by looking at the front of the building, this particular store quickly stands out among the rest of Apple’s retail lineup.

Hello, New Architecture

A few weeks ago, Ron Johnson was featured in USA Today discussing new changes that were coming to retail stores, including more Genius Bar space and larger tables to feature even more products. As you can see, the Scottsdale Quarter store is one of the first new retail store to incorporate some of these new design elements.

With features such as a front and rear made of all glass and a beautiful 75-foot skylight that spans the length of the store, Apple has clearly designed this location to take advantage of Arizona’s abundance of natural light. Additionally, the 20-foot ceilings and spacious entry area help to accent the more open feel of the store.

The Return of the Family Room Concept

The back of the store is similar to most stores but features a unique split Genius Bar with tables in the middle for One to One sessions. Recent store designs have utilized the back walls near the Genius Bar to feature additional third-party products, but this departure moves Apple’s idea of the “Family Room” back to its core with the rear section of the store entirely devoted to services. The split Genius Bar should help alleviate crowding during busy times and allow the store flexibility to run one bar as a Mac queue and another for iPod and iPhone queues if needed.

The first three images below are from Apple.com. A special thanks to photographer Brian Hancock for the opening day photos; you can view more from his web site.

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Larger cities such as Leeds and Manchester have reinvented themselves as financial, media and creative hubs that provide regional alternatives to the global powerhouse of London and attract the Creative Class that Richard Florida defines as the driving economic forces of post-industrial cities.

However, smaller post-industrial cities such as Bradford are still struggling to find a path to attracting information industries, caught between ambitious but incompetent government regeneration programs and projects that misfire and develop facilities for creative classes, but misread what’s actually needed; projects such as a recently announced ‘Digital Park‘.

Much of the core of the city lies dormant, with vacant buildings awaiting vision and leadership, whilst the city’s confidence diminishes along with the hopes of its residents.

However, a pair of recently published articles hints at a way forward for places such as Bradford…

Springwise’s recent article ‘Pop-up workspaces in vacant buildings‘ covered the work of Holland’s SpareSpace Foundation in transforming vacant office and retail space into what they call ‘mobile offices’ (coworking by any other name), helping entrepreneurs from creative classes find low-cost premises in neglected downtown areas. Sparespace intends for their development to be transient until more permanent uses arrive, but there’s no reason that sustainable and viable coworking communities couldn’t continue to exist.

On the other side of the world Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future recently observed The Future of Libraries as Places and the novel uses that students are making of NYU’s Bobst Library.

IFTF staffer Anthony Townsend observes that libraries are transforming from solitary, monastic learning environments into collaborative spaces for discussion and debate. As Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute notes, “libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture”. As library materials become more accessible and useful in electronic form, ironically the physical space of a library is performing more of the role of a digital discussions forum. As books are increasingly digitised, forums are being un-digitized.

At NYU Townsend pays a discounted alumni fee of $150 per year for access work areas, printing, conference rooms and research services…that sounds like coworking to me :)

So in a place such as Bradford, where the downtown area is becoming progressively vacant and the public library is utilised less and less each day, but where there’s a vibrant University, perhaps the route to nurturing a creative class lies in the reinvention of our repositories of commerce and knowledge.

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Due to my flight delays, I missed the CES Keynote featuring Bill Gates on Sunday. I’ve just now got a chance to catch the coverage and although this is all over the web, I thought to share this spoof on the off-chance you haven’t seen it. This was shown as part of the keynote and is absolutely hysterical!

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apple.com, 9 May 1998 [via]

Noted blogger and podcaster Daniel Eran Dilger writes today at Roughly Drafted on Leopard and the History and Future of Mac OS X on PowerPC.

For those of you, like our own Stephanie Guertin, who are running on older PPC systems, Dilger lays out why support for the PowerPC isn’t going away anytime soon. With an informative examination of historical Apple products, his article provides a sound argument for G4 and G5 owners to stay calm.

His article (as well as his blog in general) is worth a read whether you’re panicking about support for that PowerBook you bought just before the MacBook Pro was announced, or you merely want a refresher on the history of Apple’s products and CEOs during the dark ages (the years when Jobs was gone).

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What does it in for me, however, is that Apple is pushing their ringtone product at me when I don’t even own an iPhone.

In the iTunes store for every album that has any ringtones available for its songs it shows the little bell next to the songs I could purchase as a ringtone as well as an entire section in the sidebar dedicated to ringtones.

You could call it cross selling/marketing but I call it overcrowding and unnecessary. It wastes valuable screen space pushing a product I have absolutely no possible way of even using.

Maybe Apple is doing it in the hopes that some poor soul without an iPhone will accidentally purchase it thinking they can use it or maybe the marketing guru’s think a few 30 second loops of a song will make me buy an iPhone. I’m not sure. I am sure that I’d like a Preference option to turn off any and all traces of ringtones in the store though.

If they’re really looking to cross sell some things, maybe a more useful feature would be suggesting the movies and TV shows that certain songs by that artist include.

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Since all leading voice telecommunications providers are now delivering IP-based telephone system products for an IP network environment, their existing TDM customers are depending on them to support their migration to converged communications. In particular, new voice application products that support a selective migration from legacy TDM equipment are making migration implementation more flexible and cost-effective.

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