3D printer at MIT Media Lab could construct a building.

New Gartner research shows that the price for “enterprise-class” 3-D printers is falling enough that more businesses can (and should) start experimenting with them. It estimates that by 2016, these big-boy 3-D printers will cost as little as $2,000. Industrial-grade printers now typically cost five times that much but there’s no reason to wait. Companies should start experimenting with the technology now, even if it’s with lower-cost desktop models, since there is minimal risk of capital or time.

In a statement, Gartner Research Director Pete Basiliere said:

“Businesses must continuously monitor advances to identify where improvements can be leveraged … We see 3D printing as a tool for empowerment, already enabling life-changing parts and products to be built in struggling countries, helping rebuild crisis-hit areas and leading to the democratization of manufacturing.”

Companies that jump in early can get a more realistic grasp of material costs and the time it takes to build parts and components, Gartner said.

To be sure, some affordable technology is already available, at least, to churn out small items. The Makerbot Replicator 2 desktop 3-D printer, which made a splash at SXSW, lists for $2,199. Makerbot is also working on a 3-D scanner to ease the measurement and digitization of what needs to be manufactured. Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis told GigaOM that the Makerbot Digitizer, due this fall, will give creators another way to move designs between the physical and digital worlds. If you want to replicate a physical item, you scan it into the system which digitizes it and builds a 3-D blueprint which can be fed into the printer.

MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito is a huge fan of 3-D printing. At a recent event broadcast by the BBC, Ito reiterated his enthusiasm for the technology which he says can make high-quality manufacturing a key part of the U.S. economy again and boost the “maker movement” overall. As 3-D printing gains traction, more manufacturing may come back to the U.S. Ito is also investing in the sector. He, along with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, has invested in 3-D printing startup FormLabs.

In theory, the availability of inexpensive 3-D printers means that manufacturers can afford to make small lots of goods and then quickly change up their production lines to meet new demands. This technology has spawned a new class of hardware-oriented startups and efforts. With the time-and-cost savings 3-D printing can provide, “hardware really could be the new software.”

This story was updated at 7:30 a.m. PDT with additional information on the current price of industrial 3-D printers.

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Ito likened these groups and the challenges they pose to innoculating a young child against illness. If you protect him so stringently against germs to keep him from getting sick, you can bet he will get really sick at some point. But if you let him “eat dirt” and expose him to lots of things he’ll be a healthier child, Ito said during a BBC World Service event held at MIT and broadcast live on Thursday.

Anonymous and Wikileaks are like catching the flu–they hurt us but we learn to be "transparency robust" from them. #whys @joi—
MIT Media Lab (@medialab) March 14, 2013

The specter of groups like Anonymous lurking in the background may also encourage better behavior by people and organizations, Ito added.

These groups make us more “transparency robust” and that’s a good thing, he noted.  The thinking is: If you know someone might be poking around in your business, you’ll probably be better, more ethical, smarter about how you conduct that business in the first place.

This was a good, wide-ranging session with good insights on the maker movement and other topics. I’m sure it will be streamed later today.

Update at 3:45 p.m. PDT: Here’s the BBC stream of the event.

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And now he’s backing a new project that would let corporate Media Lab sponsors fund students’ startups after they graduate, according to this Scott Kirsner story in The Boston Globe.  That means big name companies including Samsung, Panasonic, AOL etc. could pony up to fund a stipend for MIT graduates to build the company or technology of their dreams.

This is still early stage. Asked to comment on the report, an MIT spokeswoman said “the program has not yet been approved or funded, so the Boston.com story was a bit premature.”

Industry-funded academic research projects are problematic. Critics say that private companies use universities, which often are publicly funded,  as petri dishes for their own R&D purposes. Company-funded college research can also lead to squabbles over  who owns intellectual property rights of work done at the school but partially or wholly underwritten by private industry.

Here’s the crux of the issue from Kirsner:

“One key purpose of the new fund, Ito explained to me recently, will be to encourage students to finish their degrees before they start companies. “We want students to stay focused while they’re here,” he said. But once they’re done, the fund will provide a six-month stipend to lay the groundwork for their company, and help make sure that the new venture has clear rights to the intellectual property they developed while at the Lab. (In the past, there has been a somewhat vague non-exclusive right granted to students to commercialize technologies that they worked on while at the Lab, Ito said.)”

The idea of encouraging college researchers to stick around for their diplomas is actually of note. Obviously MIT has a vested interest in its students completing their coursework, but some in tech say this is a waste of time and resources. These skeptics include early Facebook investor Peter Thiel who has funded two classes of Thiel Fellows. These young technologists get money to leave school and pursue their work. His argument is that it’s better for promising talent  just to get to it rather than put in their time at college, running up huge student loan debt.

That’s a premise that Upstart, founded by Google veteran David Girouard, for example, finds troubling. Upstart invests in promising graduates of specified schools in return for a percentage of their future earnings. Again, you have to graduate to get that Upstart money.

Whatever happens with Ito’s new project, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

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And you’d be right. Holograms? Check. 3D printing? Check. Robots? Triple check — even a DragonBot.

I toured the lab this week. Here is a quick look at some of the coolest stuff on display…

1. Artisanal technology

Students at MIT’s High-Low Tech group pair old-world materials and processes with new-wave technology. They paint circuitry on paper, or stitch it onto cloth. In the dandelion print (below), the art overlays circuitry that provides interactivity. Blow on the dandelion seed pod, and guess what happens…

2. DIY and BYO objects

With the advent of open-source software and, more recently, open-source hardware, young designers have the tools to build lots of great stuff – at relatively low costs. Kickstarter efforts and open-source-like projects like Arduino blazed the trail here.

BYO cell phones?

That has sparked a big return to home-built gadgets — even cell phones – said Media Lab director Joi Ito. In the agrarian era, people made and grew what they needed before shifting to a mass-production/mass-consumption model. Now the pendulum may be swinging back. (Ito even hinted that the Lab might extend to deal with grow-your-own projects.)

3. Better, more realistic displays

3-D image of Joi Ito.

We’re not at the Princess Leia hologram stage yet, but we’re getting there.  Dan Novy, a research assistant at the Lab’s Object-Based Media group,  showed off a couple of cool display technologies, including a 3D projection of Ito seated in a chair.

A future iteration will let that image retain its 3D quality as viewers take different angles. And there’s an immersive video experience that really pulls you into what you’re watching, provided you view it at the right distance and angle.

4. Augmented reality

What if you wore a ring that could summon up additional information about anything you pointed it at?

That’s what the EyeRing project proposes. A prototype ring, aka a “finger-worn executive assistant”, can read price tags or signs to blind people. Or it can give tourists additional information about their surroundings without forcing them to look down at a smart phone or tablet.

MIT’s Roy Shilkrot wearing EyeRing.

5. 3D printed buildings

3D printing technology is a favorite topic at GigaOM. A group at MIT is building technology could enable the “print out” of a house in a day or two, according to research assistant Steven Keating. The process prints out molds made of plastic or composite which are then filled with concrete for assembly into a building.

3D printing.

One final thing…

Oh, and don’t forget DragonBot, the Android-phone-controlled social robot. I didn’t get to see him, but there’s no reason you should miss out: Check him (it) out in the video below:

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What do tech luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim, Sky Dayton, Joi Ito and Brad Garlinghouse have in common? They’re all backing Diffbot, the startup that’s building visual robot technology that parses web site content to make it easier to reuse.

Diffbot, the first company funded out of Stanford’s StartX accelerator program, makes its APIs available to users wanting to extract the components of web pages in a way that makes that content reusable and easier to mash up into apps, Diffbot founder and CEO Michael Tung told me this week. It’s identified 18 web page types and the API handles two of them — front page and article — to date and is building support for the others.  GigaOM’s Ryan Kim covered the launch of Diffbot’s first APIs last fall.

Unlocking web content

“We’ve got this great thing, the Internet, full of web pages, the problem is they’re made for human beings to read and understand, particularly people in front of a browser … but that’s inaccessible to software applications, hundreds of thousands of apps like Siri, that only work with a handful of APIs that they’re hard-coded for,” Tung said.

“Yelp is great for searching places, Flipboard is great for discovering news. Our main insight is the web can be broken down into 18 types of pages, news, people,places, photos, etc. and our goal is to teach a machine to understand all that,” Tung said. The company is working on more APIs to bring all that content into its reach.

At a recent hackathon, one participant built a web reader for his blind father using Diffbot’s APIs. “For a blind person, using the web is miserable. [Today's] screen readers read all the text starting at the top, including the nav bar and scroll down. Diffbot analyses that page, determines the title, author, text and can read it in a more natural way,” Tung said.

Diffbot can look at web pages created for human beings and analyze them visually  so the app can treat the web as a big data base. It is now processing more 100 million API calls monthly for software developers using the service for Web site mobilization, tag generation and other functions.

A-list backers

Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun Microsystems; Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink and Boingo; Joi Ito,  director of the MIT Media Lab: Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo exec and now CEO of YouSendIt (see disclosure)  all invested in this $2 million seed round as did Jonathan Heiliger, the Facebook vet now at North Bridge Venture Capital Partners.

The company is using a freemium model, encouraging developers and others to submit URLs to the system for content extraction. The service is free up to a certain number of API calls.  ”We want to apply Diffbot to the entire web, but it’s expensive to build a web crawler; we only analyze the URLs that people send us,” Tung said.

John Davi, Diffbot’s VP of product and a Cisco veteran, said the submissions in themselves will be valuable. “Our long-term vision is to avail ourselves of the cream of the content that comes out. We’ll be able to see the important pages — the articles and recipes that people submit — and we think there’s value in knowing that.”

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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Joi Ito’s Digital Garage, a Japanese incubation and investment company, snapped up Pivotal Singapore, news I had heard independently from sources. In an instant message conversation with me, Ito confirmed that the company bought Pivotal Singapore, but his group is not buying Pivotal Labs SF. Interestingly, on March 7, 2012, Digital Garage acquired New Context, a company that also lists Ian McFarland as president. McFarland was VP of technology of Pivotal Labs.

Back in 2010 here is what we wrote about Pivotal:

Pivotal Labs is a name that comes up often in regards to web startups, but it’s sort of an enigma. The company’s San Francisco office is home to the hyped-up distributed social networking effort Diaspora; its work has been credited for shaping Twitter’s development culture; and its clients include Groupon, Gowalla and Best Buy’s “Remix” API project. But what exactly does Pivotal Labs do?

Pivotal’s services are different from an incubator’s: It’s a consultancy that brings technical teams into its space to grow them, train them and help them build their products. Rather than Pivotal investing in companies, the startups and enterprise clients pay Pivotal for the service.

Pivotal has actually been around for 20 years, but in the last few years, it has created a sort of focused training program for technology startups and projects within larger companies. Say you have an idea for a company and raise funding for it. You then come to Pivotal, which takes on any developers already working on your project and hires new ones to round out the team. Your technical folks come into the Pivotal office every day at 9:00 a.m., sit down at a desk with a “Pivot” from the company’s team, and work in tandem as pair programmers for the full day until 6:00 p.m. At the end of period of about 2–7 months, you have a trained agile development team for building products with Ruby on Rails, as well as lot of progress on your product.

A few more reasons you may have heard of Pivotal: Pivotal Tracker, which the company developed to help clients plan and execute projects, is a free agile development tool that has hundreds of thousands of users.

In recent years, Pivotal has become a favorite recruiting ground for fast-growing companies. Square, for example, was one of the more desired destinations of those leaving the company.

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We’re not talking your basic British obsession-with-owls and getting-mistaken-for-Harry-Potter sort of nerd (though he does that too). We’re talking the sort of Grand Poobah ubernerd who is so utterly, terrifyingly smart that he does things for fun like helping to create the popular web framework Django, going hacking in castles on the weekend or, say, building startups while on honeymoon.

Yes, honeymoon.

Perhaps it’s not as bad as it seems — after all, the startup in question, social conference site Lanyrd, was an idea that Willison dreamt up with his wife, Natalie Downe, rather than on his own. But it did happen while they were enjoying a post-wedding break in Morocco. Fired up by the concept, they decided to build the first version on the road, and pretty soon they’d joined the next Y Combinator program, launched, graduated and returned to London.

Now, precisely a year after that first try, the company just raised $1.4 million in seed funding and is ready to take its next steps.

But before he explains what those might be, there’s a point that Willison feels he needs to make.

“I’d like it to be clear that we had three months of perfectly peaceful honeymoon,” he protests. True, the trip was intended to be a three-year round-the-world epic adventure . . . but he thinks they got a pretty good deal before Lanyrd came along. Still, trading one adventure for another meant they never quite shook off the idea that they were still honeymooning.

“I mean we tried to think of Y Combinator as an extension of it,” he deadpans. “But it wasn’t, of course.”

What Lanyrd does is fairly simple. It’s a directory of events, conferences, speaking gigs, lectures and so on that is highly connected and hooked up to Twitter. That allows people to find events that might interest them, lets organizers unearth speakers who might have something to offer, and gives speakers the chance to find events where they might be able to help. I suppose it’s a matchmaking service, of sorts.

But in a world that is stuffed full of event listings startups, from Eventbrite to Plancast to Upcoming, one of the biggest problems has been defining what it is that the site really focuses on.

“Basically the English language has let us down,” he explains. “We aren’t just conferences, but we’re not just a normal events listing — we don’t want people’s birthday parties and so on. We did try ‘knowledge-sharing events,’ but that was a horrible phrase, so we’ve settled on ‘professional events.’ It’s basically anywhere you’d go and exchange business cards; where you go to further your professional or personal interests.”

The focus on conferences gave them some early purchase in the tech community, which tends to treat big events like SXSW as spring break for geeks. But I’ll admit that early on, the idea of a site full of information about webby conferences filled me with dread. I had enormous respect for his work — we were sort-of colleagues at the Guardian, although we never really worked together, and he’s just about the smartest person I know at understanding the way the web works. However, the thought of getting excited by conferences seems to me about the same as getting aroused by a bowl of oatmeal.

But over time, Lanyrd has won me over by broadening out. Now it actually is much more about “professional events,” not just a way for web geeks to systemize their social lives. And it’s a much richer environment as a result. The team knows this is important.

“We’re very excited because we have noticed that things like magic conferences are being added to Lanyrd,” says Willison. “Criminology is very popular, too. The thing is, because it’s crowdsourced, you don’t need many people from a community to start adding events before you’ve got something fairly comprehensive.”

Crowdsourcing might be free, but a staff costs money — and that’s why Lanyrd raised its seed round from Index and London’s PROfounders, as well as a host of luminaries including new MIT Media Lab boss Joi Ito.

“We’re blowing it all on people,” he says. “We’re hiring our dream team in London and focusing on keeping them happy and productive.”

But why move to London? Most Y Combinator companies stay in the Valley, even the ones whose founders come from Britain or elsewhere.

“We thought about staying in the Valley, and looked into it,” he says. “We wanted to believe that we could do it in London . . . and because the product’s very international, we didn’t think it needed to be done in California. So we thought we’d come back to London and see what the scene was like.”

“If you want to have an international view, then London is amazing,” he says. “In San Francisco it’s hard enough to concentrate on the rest of America, let alone the world.”

Downe and Willison still rely on their Y Combinator chums for plenty of advice, but being outside the bubble has given them more chances to develop, he suggests.

“And in Silicon Valley, you’re one of a thousand companies doing the same thing. Here, everyone’s working together to make it all work: That energy and excitement is really important. It’s just much more exciting to be a startup in London than to be in Mountain View or wherever.”

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Remy Sharp

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But the news is important for another reason: It’s a chance for the Lab to start shaping the future once again.

When he takes up the role after the summer, Ito will be only the fourth person to have led the Media Lab in its 26-year history. The lab’s story is dominated by founding director Nicholas Negroponte (an architect), who was then succeeded by Walter Bender (who left to join Negroponte as head of software for the One Laptop Per Child project). In 2006, outgoing head Frank Moss, who made his reputation largely in and around IBM, took over and tried to guide it through tricky financial waters.

Now the Lab seems stable, with more than 60 corporate sponsors, but it faces another challenge: remaining relevant. During the early days of the digital revolution, just as the web started to gain traction, the Media Lab represented the pinnacle of a certain sort of creative approach to technology: happy to explore ideas at the fringe of our experience and turn them into practical systems. Negroponte was a spokesman for the digerati; he was the first investor in Wired, and a columnist for many years. As a result, the Lab has been massively influential in developing technologies such as electronic ink, affordable computing — as well as being an incubator for creative technologists who want to change the world, not just make piles of cash.

Today the Lab continues under the slogan “inventing a better future,” but in recent years, it has felt as if it has ceded that future to corporate technology companies. The momentum of the Lab under Negroponte’s guidance has faded; our sense of tomorrow replaced — in many cases — by the deep pockets of Google, Apple and others. What we perceive as innovation is often merely a minor product iteration or the obvious march of progress. Things get faster, smaller, more connected, but they don’t often change the way the world works.

None of this is to say the work being done at the Lab isn’t fantastic. I’ve visited once or twice, and some of the projects I’ve seen have been truly astounding. Reading the research pages is always exciting. But it feels as if somehow the message has been lost as the playground of the web has been taken over by those who can profit from it.

The mythology and grandeur of free-thinking invention has been overtaken by the demands of venture capital and the public markets. Judging by Ito’s announcement, he feels something similar. He describes his early meetings with MIT faculty and staff, and there’s a sense of dynamism that needs to be harnessed so that everyone can benefit.

Everyone was super-smart, driven, working on very cool stuff. They weren’t afraid to try anything. There was extreme diversity but also a common DNA. I felt a sense of mission that seemed driven by the physical proximity created by the space and the empowering brand and legacy of the Media Lab. It created a power to think long-term with agility that I’d never seen anywhere else.

People talked matter-of-factly about getting sensors from this lab, maybe we need a tissue scientist, and robots from that lab, and visualization from this lab to take this research in this other direction.

It was a firehouse of interconnections and creativity — I was completely energized and felt totally in my element

Ito’s biggest task, perhaps, is to really take on Negroponte’s role and convince us we haven’t yet reached peak innovation — and that perhaps that wherever the future does lie, it might not come from where we expect it to.

Photograph by Dean Ornish used under CC license, courtesy of Joi Ito

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Celeb mag Us Weekly last month gained possession of a video of Michael Jackson sustaining the burn injuries that would kick off his lifelong (and ostensibly life-ending) painkiller addiction. The previously unreleased footage from a would-be 1984 Pepsi commercial shows Jackson’s head catching fire when on-set pyrotechnics went off too early. Damage he sustained during the shoot required multiple skin grafts.

Us Weekly’s staff knew they had the video exclusively (they won’t say how they obtained it), and that it would get millions of views as soon as it went up. And they had already been talking to video management startup Ooyala about making a switch from Voxant/Grab Networks, part of a larger initiative to include more video from the site’s new web shows, red carpet events and other celebrity fare. So in a coincidence of timing, the Michael Jackson video was the first video they posted with Ooyala.

“It made us somewhat nervous, running for the first time ever with a video of that nature,” said Daniel Mandell, director of business development at Wenner Media, which publishes Us Weekly. “It was a dangerous time to test.”

In the 36 hours after securing the Michael Jackson footage, Us Weekly was able to cut the video down to a minute and 35 seconds, secure advertisers (the video was embeddable by any user, carrying with it a pre-roll ad), warn Ooyala — which used Akamai as its CDN — about the incoming load, and sync up with that week’s newsstand release. In the meantime, Ooyala readied its adaptive bitrate streaming to ensure that video views were uninterrupted by demand or bandwidth issues.

Soon after the clip was released on the morning of July 15, it became the most-watched video in Us Weekly’s history, with no delivery problems whatsoever, according to Mandell. The short video accumulated 150,000 hours of watching in the first 48 hours alone, for a total of 11 million views in July. That was by far the site’s best-trafficked video ever, and helped lead to a record-busting July overall, with 14.8 million uniques and 351 million page views.

Prepping for an onslaught of video views on short notice isn’t unique to celebrity sites. A remarkably similar set of circumstances took place a week later on eBaum Nation, a web ephemera site. In early July word got out that Xavier sophomore Jordan Crawford, participating at a LeBron James basketball camp, dunked on King James himself. Word also got out that Nike had confiscated footage of the incident immediately afterwards, claiming it broke camp media guidelines.

But then on July 22, TMZ announced that it had procured footage of the dunk, and would release it later that day. So the folks at eBaum rushed into action, because they had been offered an alternate (and they believed, better) video of the dunk in the weeks prior from a camp attendee whose footage from the rafters had not been confiscated. They quickly negotiated to purchase the video for $5,000 at about 2 p.m., and in less than two hours had it live on their site, beating TMZ.

Just prior to all this, eBaum had been talking to multiple CDNs, and had started a trial with up-and-comer BitGravity, said COO Jason Martorana. When eBaum got the clip, it cut over to BitGravity that same afternoon. “Nobody even came close both on price points and from a technical standpoint,” he told NewTeeVee. BitGravity took over delivery of the whole of eBaum within an hour.

By 4 p.m., eBaum traffic spiked to 15 Gbps, according to BitGravity CEO Perry Wu. The video exceeded 1 million views in three hours, and had 3 million views within 24 hours.

This wasn’t the largest single video BitGravity has ever hosted, said Wu, but it was the most viral.”It literally used our entire global network, every server around the globe.”

LeBron getting dunked on was instrumental in eBaum making a name for itself, as it was only founded earlier this year by the team behind the long-running site eBaum’s World after they were laid off by the site’s acquirer ZVUE. After the video was posted, eBaum was featured on Yahoo Sports, Sports Illustrated, ESPN and Diggnation, racking up more than 27 million page views in the ensuing three days. And the site never once went down.

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Tired of waiting for promised MIDs and disappointed that UMPCs are headed the way of the dodo? I suppose you could make do with lesser alternatives. That’s not your only option though. Case in point: this video from jkkmobile.

The master of mods took the best parts of a MID and added some nice touches to create his own pocketable computer. You’ll recognize the original device as the Aigo MID. jkk added a matte-finish carbon-fiber face to avoid fingerprints. The backside of the device now includes a second battery which should easily boost the original two-hour run-time to between four and five hours. Linux went away in favor of Windows XP, although I think Linux would be fine for browsing, IM, Skype and such. Different strokes for different folks, right? The device gets a nice performance boost through the use of Microsoft’s Enhanced Write Filter;  In this case, EWF disables writes to the SSD and keeps browser cache and app data in the faster RAM memory. That adds a little complexity when installing applications or saving data, but it might be a tolerable trade-off. Text entry, navigation and other input is done through the touchscreen or via the slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Very nice!

So: MID or UMPC? I agree with jkk’s UMPC nomenclature, mainly because the small device runs a full desktop operating system. That offers the benefits of greater hardware and software capability. Whatever you call it, a device like this is certainly attractive!

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