The rise of open source, cloud computing and the newly created distribution channels has also dramatically changed how solutions and businesses are created – known as “lean methodology” – and has been embodied by The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

In a similar manner, the costs associated with startups that include a hardware component are also going through a rapid decline.

And at the same time as these cost reductions, Kickstarter has created a marketplace for the crowd funding of hardware projects. More importantly, it has created a framework for startups to essentially run “smoke tests” — as advocated by Ries — to ascertain whether there is demand for a product or service, as well as the price points that the market might accept.

So why does hardware or Internet of Things need an accelerator?

While many of the conditions are highly conducive to support the rise of Maker communities, it’s still a relatively immature ecosystem. Much of the activity and noise is focused on just hacking around rather than having a commercial focus. It’s a good thing and encourages innovation, but tapping into this high energy Maker culture with a guiding hand from experienced mentors has the potential of spawning new ideas – the black swans for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

More interestingly, this emerging market is also attracting some extremely smart entrepreneurs who avoid the trends and fashions of others and like to play on the edges. The technical complexities associated with hardware – the things that make it hard – immediately limits participation to only the brightest engineers.

But it’s not all a bed of roses. It has been previously highlighted that technology projects have one of the lowest success rates among all Kickstarter categories, with only 29% percent being successful. Only fashion projects do worse. In addition, not every project goes well. Delays occur, especially with more complex projects. Some teams over stretch themselves and fail to deal with many aspects of the delivery that are new to them. Even Kickstarter has been forced to admit that “it’s not uncommon for things to take longer than expected.”

And this is where accelerators can help to nurture and support the best and the brightest in this emerging Maker community. As entrepreneurs with domain experience and expertise, mentors can provide first hand knowledge in managing the complexities associated with designing, prototyping, building and the manufacturing of physical devices — which reduces the operational and investment risks of projects.

There are other ways that an accelerator can help, too.

Being a hardware entrepreneur is also a very lonely existence, unlike our more popular and mainstream web service cousins. The peer to peer learning and cohort effect of getting the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the same sector working alongside each other cannot be underestimated, both during the program and in the future.

Finally, there are real practical differences between hardware and software which make being part of a dedicated accelerator even more valuable.

Hardware development has specific resource requirements that include access to a workshop space that with, say, 2D laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers and so on as well as support from industrial designers and engineers. Any of these individual resources might be prohibitively expensive or difficult to source, but within the framework of an accelerator their shared cost and accessibility can be invaluable.

Hardware is hard. But that’s what makes it fun and highly investable – given the right resources, environment and support structures. Why shouldn’t the Internet of Things have a dedicated acceleration program?

Jon Bradford is the CEO and co-founder of Springboard, which launched its SpringboardIoT accelerator this week. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is the founder of Good Night Lamp, a new Internet of Things startup.

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That would mean up to 45 million Americans looking for replacement roles in any ten-year span. Yes, my numbers were developed anecdotally from previous experience in combination with information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As an example in 2002 there were roughly 15 million manufacturing roles. When you combine that with operations oriented IT or service oriented roles you can quickly come up to 45 million affected positions.

It gets worse, not better.

The first world has been lucky. We had the last 100 years to help folks through a changing job market in the manufacturing sector, yet we still often failed. Many of the employees during this 100-year stretch felt they could make a good-enough living without a college degree or seeking a path into alternate roles in their company. This “good-enough” mentality is now causing the first world real issues as they try to transition these folks effectively either into early retirement or new jobs.

It’s not just manufacturing. Even computer programming has experienced this cycle of job obsolescence. Consider all the assembler and Cobol programmers whose careers in the 60s and 70s seemed as if they would last forever.

Today’s job market is very obviously different from a century or even three decades ago. Many of today’s positions have a lifespan of less than 10 years. Almost any manufacturing role or traditional IT infrastructure role would fit into this category. This sub-10-year job lifespan already affects millions of positions in the U.S. alone. Interestingly five years from now we’ll look back longingly at the good old days when a job (role) might last 10 years. The accelerating change associated with advancements in technology has increased the speed at which many jobs become obsolete.

Why now is different

Think of the trauma caused in a single-industry town (logging, manufacturing, fishing, etc) when the winds of change (regulations, technology, climate) eliminate that industry in that location. This trauma occurs even though we often see the change coming for a decade and the jobs have been largely the same for 30 or more years already.

Today, that same trauma would be magnified by the fact that most of the jobs would be less than 10 years old and the town will likely have two years or less to react to what the future holds. That assumes, of course, that the town or people in that town are actively paying attention to the future. In order to continue to grow our companies and our economy we must get away from the reactive response to role changes or compensation changes and think more strategically about how we protect our employees.

The role of HR, business and you

If you agree with the risks implied in the above, then there would seem to be no alternative but to rethink how most modern companies recruit, hire, train and retain employees. The employer and employee are going to need to work together to effect this change. HR isn’t always going to understand whether a specific role or function is becoming outdated, so they will have to work with employees and leaders.

The knowledge of “what’s coming” should be translated into your training/retraining programs. Basically you should be training your team to take jobs that don’t exist so they are ready when they do. It also means that reward systems need to be reworked significantly. Current systems tend to emphasize excellence at a particular skill. Instead you should be putting emphasis on how well employees work themselves out of their job. In effect the employee should be creating their own obsolescence.

There are several areas of opportunity in the corporation to help reduce the trauma of this shift:

• When recruiting places new or additional emphasis on skill development capability in the potential recruit
• During hiring, include discussion and planning around the growth of the employee beyond just “I’d like to be a manager someday” or “senior system admin.”
• Training should focus as much on how effectively employees can change as it does on a specific skill set. However, training will also need to include “retraining” of staff as an ongoing part of the employer/employee responsibility.

Governments can also play a role since, it seems logical that they would be interested in helping companies that are working effectively to support employment in the U.S. Some simple suggestions include:

• Labor areas where the traditional rules of benefits are softened, but the rules for training and retraining are increased.
• Tax incentives could be applied in order to push companies and workers to develop better retention and training programs. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that we incent companies or employees to keep doing jobs we can get rid of, just the opposite.

And of course, employees also have a role to play. Instead of whining about how hard it is to find another system admin job or a manufacturing line operator position, take responsibility for developing your career and working with your leadership to be prepared for what’s coming. Keep up your education current through any processes available, from night classes to cross training, industry participation and reading. As employers we need to take more interest in how well our employees are being developed so that they are a greater enabler to our success.

At the end of the day, if we have higher employment our companies sell more, which means more opportunity for all.

Building photo courtesy of Shutterstock user  Vladitto

Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10.

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On Friday, Grishin is launching a new $25 million investment fund, Grishin Robotics, with the intention of funding a new generation of robotics startups. It’s his own money, and he wants to use it for something more exciting than yet-another-internet-business.

“I have a big passion for robotics,” he tells me. “Looking around, I think it’s the right time.”

More specifically his fund will look at so-called “service robotics”, the sort of personal robots that can be used to help people (it’s often used as a catch-all for anything that is not military or industrial). That may include telepresence bots that let you be somewhere without really being there, he says, or bots that provide assistance for the elderly. Whatever the case, he wants to go mass market, and he’s looking to invest a few million dollars in companies that already have prototypes in action but need money for production.

Why? Because he believes somebody needs to make the leap.

Robotics requires risk

“Usually venture capitalists are very conservative,” he says. “They only want to fund ideas that have already been proven and don’t really take much money. But robotics requires quite a lot of capital, and you can’t make a big step until some risk-takers invest capital. I really want to make robotics more popular and drive future investment in this area.”

The time is right, he suggests, because the costs of making robots have now fallen to a point that is feasible. Unlike the past, where a single bot might cost hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars to build, the price of even high-end models is dropping. That’s partly due to advances in technology and the efficiency of outsourced manufacturing in China.

But even so, Grishin also says the robotics industry (which has largely spun out of the academic world) could do with an injection of internet culture: more pace, faster iteration, a speedier production process than traditional offline companies. That’s something he can bring as the CEO of Mail.ru Group, which started as a web portal in the late 1990s, span off in various directions until it become one of Russia’s most important internet companies — and went public in 2010.

In undertaking this project, Grishin joins a pantheon of internet industry entrepreneurs who are trying to use their wealth to build a more ambitious future. Most of them are focused on space: Jeff Bezos of Amazon with his Blue Origin project, or Elon Musk who has used wealth generated by PayPal to push Space X to the point where its spacecraft, Dragon, was able to dock with the International Space Station last month.

Grishin says he’ll keep investing in internet companies too, but he thinks the world could be a more exciting place if those who had money used it to fund high-risk, high-reward ideas as well as the more mundane stuff.

“I don’t know too much about their projects, but I think the idea is very similar,” he says. “You need people to put money into the next generation, the next step.”

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Daisey’s infamy has grown following the decision of This American Life on March 16th to retract an earlier report after discovering that Daisey could not account for key facts in both his monologue (The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs) and in his statements to This American Life for a report on Apple and manufacturing that got widespread attention. Among other things, Daisey completely made up an anecdote in which he had supposedly invoked a sense of child-like wonder in a former Foxconn worker with a hand mangled on the iPad production line by showing the man a working iPad for the very first time.

After his uncomfortable performance on “Retraction,” Daisey defended his work, writing on his personal blog that “my show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.” Given more time to think about it, he actually doubled down, attacking his critics: “Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.“

However, it later emerged that Daisey had insisted on printing “this is a work of non-fiction” on playbills for his monologue, making it clear that he wanted audiences to walk away from the performance seeing Daisey as a courageous muckraker unafraid to tell the stories others wouldn’t touch.

Daisey’s conscience finally caught up with him over the weekend. On Sunday, he wrote the following:

When I said onstage that I had personally experienced things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract I’d established with my audiences over many years and many shows. In doing so, I not only violated their trust, I also made worse art. This is not the place for me to try and explain my good intentions. We all know where the road paved with good intentions leads. In fact, I think it might lead to where I’m sitting right now.  I had an acting teacher, years ago, who always taught that the calling of an artist is to be humble before the work. He knew, I think, how easy it can be to lose one’s way.

He went on to apologize to his other theater performers, human-rights advocates, and journalists that had interviewed him for stories in which he repeated all his falsehoods. “Things came out of my mouth that just weren’t true, and over time, I couldn’t even hear the difference myself,” he wrote.

But Mike Daisey forgot to apologize to the entity that was the direct target of his lies: Apple.

Original Sin

Daisey’s selection of Apple and Jobs as the centerpieces of his monologue was not a coincidence. A self-confessed Apple fanboy, he held great admiration for the work that Apple contributed to the world under Jobs’ second term as CEO as well as immense disgust for the conditions under which modern consumer electronics devices are produced. Given that Apple is the largest producer of modern mobile devices made in factories such as Foxconn’s, and given the intense scrutiny that is paid to all things Apple both inside and outside the tech industry, it’s not hard to see why Daisey chose Apple and Jobs as protagonists in his work.

But in reality, Daisey exposed nothing about Apple’s manufacturing issues that wasn’t already known. It’s not that his whole account was fabricated: workers manufacturing products for Apple have been poisoned by dangerous chemicals, killed in explosions that were preventable, and have committed suicide in groups over the last few years.

Steve Jobs Announces iPhone

What Daisey did do, however, was present made-up emotional and personal stories about those issues as if they were new. He spent months on a media blitz linking Apple as the main contributor to the widespread labor and safety issues at companies like Foxconn (which builds products for an entire industry) based on fabricated accounts of his travels in China.

He implied that the company was covering up even worse violations, such as the widespread use of child labor, in one of the most dramatic scenes of his monologue. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News the day before the latest iPad was released, saying “I traveled to the factories in China, spoke to dozens of workers, heard their stories firsthand and went undercover into factories and dormitories. … The company has been choosing profit over workers’ lives.”

And perhaps worst of all, on the day after Jobs died Daisey repeated the story about the Foxconn worker with the mangled hand in The New York Times, linking Jobs’ legacy to a horrific anecdote that never happened.  After This American Life published its retraction earlier this month, the Times removed that paragraph from its archived copy of the article.

The Daisey And The Damage Done

There is no doubt that the consumer electronics industry needs to do more to improve the working conditions under which its products are made, and that Apple, as the leading consumer electronics company of our time, is in a position to make an outsized impact. But Daisey’s contribution to this issue was not just to raise attention to the problem at large (which he definitely did), it was also to generate publicity for his Apple-themed show. He did that with lies that declared not only was Apple not doing as much as it could to solve the problem, but that it was actually a worse actor than its peers.

On a petition circulated by Change.org following the airing of the first episode of This American Life, over 255,000 people affixed their names to a call for Apple to do more to protect workers. They said things like “I can still make the decision to buy PC instead for the sake of my conscience and the wellbeing of other people” and “As a Mac user for 17 years, this is the first issue that could make me stop buying from Apple.” A petition to retract that petition following the exposure of Daisey’s lies has just 373 signatures.

Mike Daisey built the key parts of his monologue–and much of his current fame–on lies he told about Apple. He has one more apology to make.

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The worlds of fashion and technology have finally begun to combine in a serious way. It couldn’t have happened soon enough: Judging by the racks of discounted clothing you’ll still find when you walk into any typical Gap or department store, the big traditional retailers still have a long way to go when it comes to using technology to help with design, manufacturing and inventory analytics.

Of course, the selection and shipping elements have already been worked out by e-commerce giants such as Amazon. But the thing is, folks still need help deciding what to buy — especially now that selection is bigger than ever. Historically, that need has been met by brick-and-mortar stores staffed with salespeople. But today, software algorithms and social media can go a long way toward supplanting those in a more efficient way. Meanwhile, newer sites such as Pinterest, Polyvore and Fancy have made it so that window shopping online is now just as fun as strolling down Madison Avenue in person.

Now, for me, shopping in-person at local businesses will always be ideal (I’d hate to think of all the neighborhood boutiques in San Francisco being boarded up). But a new crop of companies is raising the bar for everyone in the retail space, using the web to make the process more data-driven and social than ever before — and that should ultimately be a good thing for everyone. Here are a few of the hottest ones:

Stitchfix

What it is: Your own personal stylist or personal shopper — but without any in-person pressure or Hollywood-style fees. For now, the site is focused on female clients, and the bulk of its products seem to fall in the mid- to upper-middle price range, with many of them made by up-and-coming designers.

How it works: You take a survey so that Stitchfix has an idea of your budget, size, body type, personal taste and lifestyle. The company then sends you a box of clothing and accessories for you to try on. You keep and pay for what you like, and send back what you don’t. Stitchfix charges a $20 “styling fee” per box, but that will be put toward any clothing to decide to keep — so you only really pay it if you end up sending everything back. Shipping is free.

Who is using it: The site is in beta now, so the user base is limited — but already the site has garnered lots of buzz and dedicated fans among 20- and 30-something women working in the tech world.

StitchFix user Laura Oppenheimer, who works as a marketing manager at San Francisco startup Formspring, says she likes the service because it’s convenient and continuously improving:

“I like that I can try on each item at home and make a decision based on how it fits in with the rest of my wardrobe, not just how I look in the mirror at a store, with a salesperson telling me how great everything looks. The pieces they send me aren’t always my style, but I feel like the more I use the service, the more targeted it gets.”

Trunk Club

What it is: Essentially, it’s a lot like Stitchfix, but it’s for men — a set of the population that’s notoriously allergic to the mall. The company puts it this way: “We help guys get excellent clothes without any of the shopping.”

How it works: First, you let Trunk Club know your size, taste, budget and style preferences. You can do this by filling out an online profile or calling them on the phone. Trunk Club will then send you a personalized box of clothing and accessories for you to try on. You keep and pay for what you like, and send back what you don’t. There is no styling or service fee, and shipping is free. Alternately, you can go in person to Trunk Club’s Chicago headquarters for a personal fitting of everything in their inventory.

Who is using it: Trunk Club’s target audience is professional men who prefer classic, well-made clothing — and are willing to pay for it. Its products are on the higher end in the price spectrum, and the company likens itself to Barney’s, Nordstrom and nicer mens’ boutiques: Shirts cost between $70 and $250, denim between $165 and $225 and sweaters between $75 and $225. Trunk Club’s CEO Brian Spaly has said in interviews that the service is made for “married men between the ages of 25-55 with zero time on their hands.”

Everlane

What it is: A members-only, online-only clothing and accessories business that sells well-made basics for men and women.

How it works: Everlane has established relationships with the same factories that make expensive designer goods. Each month, the company produces its own collection of high-end wardrobe essentials — think James Perse-like t-shirts, Citizens of Humanity-like jeans, and so on — to sell to members at wholesale prices (everything is under $100). Everlane’s business model is a lot like Trader Joe’s, which finds the best organic peanut butter and sells it under its own house brand name at a fraction of the price it would be at a normal grocery store.

Who is using it: It’s still in very limited beta, so the user list is super limited — but Everlane already made lots of waves in 2011 with its initial line of luxury t-shirts. Everlane is still essentially in stealth mode, but I’m hearing the site has already garnered more than 150,000 membership request signups. It’s gotten a lot of traction among the hip, urban, young adult set who are spreading word about the service through Twitter, Tumblr and the like.

Birchbox

What it is: Once a month, Birchbox sends out a box filled with four to five sample sizes of high-end personal care products. The service costs $10 per month, and shipping is free. Birchbox also sells full-size versions of beauty products on its website.

How it works: It’s pretty simple — you sign up, pay your money, and the Birchbox comes to your door. If you want, you can fill out a profile online to let Birchbox know your product preferences, but it’s not required.

Who is using it: Birchbox is really hot right now, especially among young women. There’s a big market for high-end beauty products at the moment (perhaps it has to do with the famed “Lipstick Index” that says makeup sales boom when the larger economy is weak.) And there’s a growing population of women that doesn’t mind spending $20 on a tube of lipgloss, if they can try it before they buy it. Sarah Campbell, who works as an editorial assistant for GigaOM, says she subscribes to the service because it’s frictionless and fun:

“With Birchbox, I can sample makeup and skincare I might not have picked out myself. I don’t have time to go to department store counters for beauty consultations, and it always feels awkward doing the drive-by sample request. Plus, who doesn’t love pretty things delivered to your mailbox?”

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• In total, Apple conducted 229 audits, an improvement of 80 percent over its 2010 total. Over 100 of these audits were first-time audits.
• Apple expanded its audits to 28 suppliers in Malaysia and Singapore, where migrant workers are known to be in heavy use. The audits resulted in payout of $3.3 million to foreign contract workers as a result.
• Overall, Apple found a 74-percent compliance rate across eight categories when it came to labor and human rights practices in 2011, and 67-percent compliance when it came to suppliers having management systems in place to deal with the problem areas identified.
• In response to non-compliance across human rights and labor practices, Apple ended discriminatory medical screening at suppliers that had them in place, cut ties completely with at least one supplier in retaliation for repeat offenses regarding forced labor, and required compensation for underpaid wages, among other measures.
• Apple has partnered with the Fair Labor Association, an initiative spearheaded by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, to bring outside monitors into its suppliers’ factories to ensure standards are being met.
• At 14 suppliers in China, Apple conducted “specialized environmental audits,” which involved bringing in third-party environmental engineering experts. Apple intends to continue working with these facilities to correct issues uncovered during these audits, and plans to expand the program in 2012. This will no doubt continue to be an area of contention for Apple, since Chinese environmental groups continue to press the issue, and while they’ve reported being pleased is taking action, they aren’t yet satisfied enough has been done.

In addition to the highlights listed above, Apple also posted a list of its suppliers, containing 156 companies and representing 97 percent of “Apple’s procurement expenditures for materials, manufacturing, and assembly of Apple’s products worldwide.” Apple has been criticized in the past for not divulging specific supplier relationships, so this is a major step towards greater transparency, and one that will likely be welcomed by environmental advocacy organizations.

Update: Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly sent out a company-wide communication about Apple’s supplier report. In it, he highlights some of the progress made by Apple in curbing underage labor practices, improving living conditions for supplier employees, and building an extensive training and education program. Cook also highlights Apple’s partnership with the FLA:

The FLA is a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving conditions for workers around the world, and we are the first technology company they’ve approved for membership. The FLA’s auditing team will have direct access to our supply chain and they will report their findings independently on their website.

For the full text of Cook’s letter, check it out at its original posting location at Macgeneration.

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But here comes the pushback. Amid the hype, some vendors are starting to point out that building and maintaining a Hadoop cluster is complicated and — given demand for Hadoop expertise — expensive. Larry Feinsmith, the managing director of JPMorgan Chase’s office of the CIO, told Hadoop World 2011 attendees recently that Chase pays a 10 percent premium for Hadoop expertise — a differential that others said may be low.

Manufacturing, which typically generates a ton of relational and nonrelational data from ERP and inventory systems, the manufacturing operations themselves, and product life cycle management, is a perfect use case for big data collection and analytics. But not all manufacturers are necessarily jumping into Hadoop.

General Electric’s Intelligent Platforms Division, which builds software for monitoring and collecting all sorts of data from complex manufacturing operations, is pushing its new Proficy Historian 4.5 software as a quicker, more robust way to do what Hadoop promises to do.

“We have an out-of-the-box solution that is performance comparable to a Hadoop environment but without that cost and complexity. The amount of money it takes to implement Hadoop and hire Hadoop talent is very high,” said Brian Courtney, the GM of enterprise data management for GE.

Proficy Historian handles relational and nonrelational data from product manufacturing and testing — data like the waveforms generated in the process. GE has a lot of historical data about what happens in the production and test phases of building such gear, and it could be put to good use, anticipating problems that can occur down the pike.

For example, the software can look at the electrical signature generated when a gas turbine starts up, said Courtney. “The question is what is the digital signature of that load in normal startup mode and then what happens if there’s an anomaly? Have you ever seen that anomaly before? Given this waveform, you can go back five years and look at other anomalies and whether they were part of a subsequent system failure.”

If similar anomalies caused a system failure, you can examine how much time it took after the anomaly for the failure to happen. That kind of data lets the manufacturer prioritize fixes.

The new release of Proficy software seeks to handle bigger amounts of big data, supporting up to 15 million tags, up from two million in the previous release.

Joe Coyle, the CTO of Capgemini, the big systems integrator and consulting company, said big data is here to stay but that many businesses aren’t necessarily clued in to what that means. “After cloud, big data is question number two I get from customers. CIOs will call and say, ‘Big data, I need it. Now what is it?’”

Coyle agrees that Hadoop has big promise but is not quite ready for prime time. “It’s expensive and some of the tools aren’t there yet. It needs better analytics reporting engines. Right now, you really need to know what to analyze. Hadoop brings a ton of data, but until you know what to ask about it, it’s pretty much garbage in, garbage out.”

The companies who make the best use of big data are those that know what to ask about it.

For example, Coyle explained, “Victoria’s Secret harvests information from Facebook and can tell you in detail about every 24-year-old who bought this product in the last 12 months. It’s very powerful, but that’s because of the humans driving it.”

Elephant photo courtesy of Flickr user sarahemcc

Waveform photo courtesy of Flickr user altemark

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, Ltd. (TSMC)   is the company that will be supplying the A6 to Apple, according to the report. Reuters reported last month that the chipmaker was getting underway with trial production, but this latest report seems to suggest that trial production hadn’t yet begun in earnest until now.

The current A5 chip that powers the iPad 2, and is rumored to power the upcoming iPhone 5, is supplied by Samsung, but reports have long suggested that Apple was considering moving their chip production to TSMC, which is the world’s largest semiconductor foundry as measured by market share. Apple is also thought to be looking to move some of its business away from Samsung, since the two companies are involved in a complicated and volatile legal battle in various courts worldwide.

The A6, based on the ARM chip architecture, will use TSMC’s new 28-nanometer process, along with 3D stacking technologies. That will make for an extremely low-powered chip that’s also capable of blowing away the A4 and A5 in terms of processing ability, since those designs both use layered instead of 3D designs. The 3D stacking tech will allow layers to be integrated vertically and horizontally into one single circuit. Computerworld’s Jonny Evans suggested in July that such a design could make for a processor powerful enough, in theory, to replace Intel chips in future MacBook Airs, so they should extend the iPad’s capabilities considerably.

Taiwan Economic News says TSMC and Apple had discussed working together on past chips, but the chipmaker didn’t have the spare production capacity to take on the iPad maker as a customer. Owing to a downturn in the industry this year, the publication says TSMC now has room to fill Apple’s orders.

While it may be disappointing to some that it’s looking less likely we’ll see an iPad 3 this year, an iPad 2 and an iPad 3 released so close together isn’t a smart play for Apple anyway, as I noted earlier this year. The iPad continues to dominate the tablet space, and Apple is currently doing a good job of keeping its competition from even being able to sell their products. Even if we won’t get to see a new iPad product before 2012, the news that TSMC is getting underway with its chipmaking plans ahead of ramping up for full production in the first quarter of 2011 is still an exciting prospect for fans eager to see what’s coming next from Apple.

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