Ghost in the machine

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Although my makerbot still sits in its box in the basement, I am still spending some time thinking about how I will use it once I eventually get it built.  I've got most of it figure out, but still have some questions about input.

There are three ways that something can end up being made by a 3D printer:

  1. it can be designed in a 3D software tool from scratch.  I have Solid Edge and Blender for these sorts of jobs.
  2. it can be downloaded from a 3D community like Thingverse or GrabCAD and then either printed directly or modify it using one of the software tools I mentioned in the point above.
  3. it can be "digitized" from a real object that I have in front of me or even in a series of pictures.

It's this last one that has me spinning a bit.  What I want to be able to do is capture a 3D image of a human in motion.  A 3D action shot if you will.  These are the ways I have read about digitzation being done

  • A group of "performance artists" in Barcelona (you'll know what I'm talking about if you've ever been to Las Ramblas) pulled of an exhibit called "Be your own souvenir" in which they hacked together 3 kinects to scan tourists.  The tourist cum souvenir would strike a pose, would get scanned and then they would print out a 3D model of them.  This is the closest to what I want to do (and the cheapest – kinects are less than $100 each and I already have one) but documentation is lacking and I am not sure if it could capture a high shutter speed freeze frame of a person in motion…soemthing tells me the answer is no though.
  • Autodesk has a tool called 123D Catch that magically converts a series of 2D images into a 3D point cloud.  Now there would obviously need to be some cleanup of the cloud before it was printed, but this also holds some promise.  The trick would be to arrange multiple high speed cameras around the person in question…then synchronize them so somehow they all were generally focused on the same thing and took a picture at exactly the same moment.  That sounds pricey (multiple high speed cameras) and hard (synchronization).  If desktop software is too 20th century for you, then there is a cloud based company that claims to do the same thing – they might even offer some cleanup services so it may be a better deal overall.
  • In the DIY realm from whence my printer came, there is a scanner prototype of sorts, but it seems scaled down for taking scans of small toys or other small parts that you would print out 1:1 on a Makerbot.  I need something to scan a person then print it out at 5 or 10% life size (so it will fit on my makerbot in one pass).  There are some really nice commercial solutions in this vein as well.  But they don't even have prices on their website (if you have to ask, you can't afford it).

So nothing fits the bill perfectly.  Looks like I have some more digging or possibly inventing to do.

Building

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The time off from work over the holidays was great. One reason was the immense number of things that I was able to cross off my to do list that had been there for months. Walls were patched and painted, closets were cleaned, cars got alignments and new tires. It really was cathartic. Of course the to do list doesn't get shorter, new things just get added to the bottom. It seems I have a lot of building in my near future:

  • As I have previously tweeted, The Makerbot I ordered a few weeks ago came in almost 10 days ago. It is still sitting in its box on a workshop table at home because I just haven't had time to do an official I boxing with all the associated picture taking. That build may start tomorrow.
  • Also something that I leaked out earlier (on Facebook) but I ordered a greenhouse a few days ago. It should be here in a few weeks and then it will be a race to get the site prepared and the greenhouse up in time to use it to start seeds this year. The big thing I have to decide here is what sort of heating I want to add since some of the options include laying some pipes in the floor, so I need to decide what I want before I start.
  • I have also decided to send some more money to the .gov and build an SBR. For those not in the know, that TLA stands for short barreled rifle, which is any rifle with less than a 16 inch barrel or 26 inches of overall length and it requires a $200 tax stamp in order to be legal to own (in addition to the cost of the rifle). I sent some money to the ATF last year to buy a 762 SD can (suppressor / silencer) from AAC, so now I have the bug to build a 300 BLK rifle. I have ordered the upper, lower and bolt from Head Down Products and they are on their way to my FFL. I think I am going to go with a 8" barrel from Noveske, but the rest is up in the air. This will be a long term project since it can take 4-6 months for the .gov forms to clear.
  • Lastly, as it starts to get into March I will be starting a new round pen for training our horses. We had a metal one that I traded away a while ago, and one of our horses needs it for some training we want to do with him. So I'll be tilling, compacting, hauling gravel, setting posts and putting up rails.

It's only 4 things, but it think it should keep my weekend, wallet and blog busy for a while.

Absolutely Fab

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First week of the year and I already find myself on the road again.  I had to fly up to Boston yesterday for a few days of meetings.  I hate being on the road again so soon, but I tried to make the best of it, and used the flight time up here to catch up on some reading that had been sitting on my iPad drop box account for a while now.

I spent most of my time going through a report from the Institute for the Future (how cool of a name is that?) on the future of open fabrication.  There was a lot in here that got me thinking, some of which I wanted to capture here and go through the process of thinking by writing.  

The first few chapters go through the basics of open fabrication – things like 3D printing, design software and emerging communities – and this is where things got interesting.  IFTF makes a connection between open source 3D printing, specifically the Makerbot and the "pirate" manufacturing operations in China (so called Shanzai) – a connection I haven't considered before, but the more I think about it makes sense.  

Not everyone is going to invest in a 3D printer and 3D printing will still be somewhat limited, so if the open fabrication / personal maker movement is going to take off, there needs to be more than just 3D printing as a realization mechanism for everyone's personal concepts.  Not sure I am ready to ship my digital idea to China to have it shipped back to me in a UPS box, but it would be nice to have the option I supppose.

The report then goes on to talk about opportunities for existing manufacturers in the coming age of open fabrication.  The one that jumped out at me is the the idea that manufacturers will be able to sell digital designs for local makers to print or otherwise fab in their own shop.  Sort of changes the manufacturers business model that something akin to that of Apple's iTunes.  Perhaps that is the long terms plan of places like GrabCAD or Thingverse and I think places like Tech Shop will have a role to play here as well.  One new angle that IFTF added to this idea was that in addition to selling the model itself, manufacturers could also sell for a premiumm access for users to edit certain features of the model – for a personally bespoke , or to customize for purpose.  Imagine if iTunes sold you a song for $0.99, but sold you mashup rights to that song for $1.59.

Another point that the report touches on that I found interesting was the need for standardized structured data in order to realize the real potential of the community collaboration to build on and improve the shared designs.  The reason that open source software works so well is that there is a standard way to write the programs (Ruby, JS, etc) and a standard way to check things and out (apt-get, GitHub, etc).  If folks that have never met are going to design the next ggreat car, much less the next great office chair, these same structures will have to emerge for manufactured products as well.

A walk down a rather strange path begins with a discussion of printing food.  I could have sworn the last soy burger I got from the cafeteria at work was printed, but maybe it was injection molded.  In all seriousness, the idea is that there is an opportunity to use existing 3D printing technology to create things like edible wedding cake bride and grooms (of course that could lead to all sorts of wierd new reception traditions – "Who wants to eat the bride?") and cupcakes with a 3D rendering of your face.  Never bet against how strange people can be, so there is likely something to this.

To end this (probably too long) post, I'll share something that has been bugging me since I finished the report:  if 3D printing and more importantly 3D scanning become both more capable AND more prevalent, what is the role of the designer?  It sort of reminds me of the situation that the monks who used to copy books faced when Gutenburg started printing books — they quickly had to find other things to do.  This isn't to say that all design is merely copying what someone has already done – I know that is far from the truth, but I also think that alot of it can be fairly detivative of things that have already been done.  Of course that's the boring work, so maybe this will free designers to focus on "the fun stuff" and just as Gutenburg's press created more opportunity for authors (vs. copiers) by creating a larger market, the open fabrication movement will create a new wave of opportunity for designers and new designs.

Social vacation suggestions – part 2

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Last year I used this blog to get a lot of great suggestions about the trip we planned to Europe last summer.  It worked great and we were able to do alot of things we wouldn't have known about if it weren't for your ideas.  So, I though I'd try it again, only this time with a twist:  where should we go?

My original thought was to head out west for a week or two and see the grand canyon, yosemite and the like.  Then Hawaii came into the mix.  Recently we've been thinking about Puerto Rico or the Caymans.  So it's really up in the air.  Looking to stay reasonably close to home (next year the plan is to take the kids through Asia, so want a easier vacation this year) but other than that open to any and all suggestions.  Only other constraint is that is has to be nice in the mid to late July time frame…really the only time we can go.  So…where are you sending us?

Resolutions revisted

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I did a “resolutions” post at the start of 2011 and was thinking of doing the same this year. But decided not to. Call it a cop out, but this year I only have one resolution: to take each day as the blessing that it is and enjoy it as much as I can. There are some things I would like to get done, some things I would like to avoid and some things that I am ambivalent about. But I’m not going to get all wrapped up in the specifics only to get disappointed when the do or don’t happen the way I want them to.

Instead this is going to be the year of taking as it comes and making the most of what I get. Of enjoying where I am and who I’m with. And mostly of just living in the moment.

“The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the present is the point at time at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them…either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.”

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Making Christmas

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I’ve been doing a little Christmas dreaming lately.  No sugar plum fairies for me t – I’m dreaming of 3D Printers and desktop CNCs.  I’ve been watching these spaces for a while and I think the price / performance ratio is finally at a place where  will take the plunge.  I really am just looking to tinker and have one more go at getting the kids interested in engineering ;-) .  The question is what to get?  I’ve listed the top contenders in each category below.  If anyone has any experience (positive or negative) with any of these, I would appreciate a comment.  Also, of course any others I should look at are appreciated too.

3D Printers

  • MakerBot Thing-o-matic – this seems to be the top choice now.  Lots of unit sold, reliable company backing and lots of mod options.
  • Printrbot – this one doesn’t look like its available yet, but its got some good funding behind it through Kickstarter and I like the price (less than half of a MakerBot kit).
  • Fabbster – this one also isn’t available yet, but does come from a big time 3D Printing company so it should be solid.  Price is in line with MakerBot.

Desktop CNCs:

  • MicroMill DSLS 3000 – I think this is the same CNC that Taig Tools sells.  Seems to have good reviews and be fairly robust.
  • micRo – this looks cool (and is the cheapest option) but from the forum posts it looks like the “company” behind it may not be the most stable.
  • MyDiyCNC – this comes from another Kickstarter project, and is only a little more expensive than the micRo.  Only shown working on wood though, so wonder if you can mill any metal with it?

Software & Sites:

  • Thingverse – the place to get and share 3D models of things you can print or cut.
  • Sketchup – seems to be one of the free modeling tools of choice for feeding things to 3D printers and/or CNCs.
  • LinuxCNC.org – the home of the open source machine control software EMC.  Have to get one of my machines sitting around in the closet setup with the latest version of Ubuntu I guess to be a controller.
  • GRBL – controller software that runs completely on the Arduino chipset that is the brains of alot of the printers and CNCs.
  • Phlatscript – a sketchup plugin that spits out gcode from some guys that make machines to build your own model airplane parts.
  • Blender – all the cool kids make their action figures using this one ;-)
  • Autodesk 123 Catch – an app that turns a series of 2D pictures into 3D models.  Personal action figures anyone?

If I can get this figured out then I can make my own toys next Christmas ;-)

 

UPDATE: Just saw this article from the Economist which mentioned another 3D printer I was unaware of: Ultimaker (looks like a European MakerBot)

PLM Games

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Ha, fooled you.  You thought this was going to be a post about the (emerging) trend of gamification and what it will look like when designing your next part is as much fun as fraggin’ your buddies in modern warfare.  I’ll leave that to Oleg (he did a better job than I would anyway).  Instead this is a quick mash-up on some of the things I heard about today on the live stream of the F8 conference, a recent post from proto-blogger Robert Scoble (Where the title of this post comes from – he talks about the verbs and identity ecosystem as being the ‘game of games’) and some lingering thoughts from the Eric Schmidt / Marc Benioff closing keynote from Dreamforce a few weeks ago.

I missed being able to see the live closing keynote, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology I was able to watch part of it on my iPhone in the van on the way to the airport and the rest of it on my Roku at home on my TV.  The thing that stuck with me is about midway through when Eric Schmidt starts talking about how they can aggregate Android phone data (“with a users permission, of course”) in order to know if there is a traffic jam somewhere.  But Mr. Schmidt took it one step further by bridging to business and asking the question: what can you predict in business based what your customers, supplier and employees are doing.

Next, up I read this post from Scoble earlier this week (a little behind on my feeds…I know this has been out for weeks ;-) where he clearly articulates something I have been thinking about and experiencing in public social networks for a while now: it seems we have moved on from the creation of the social network and apps that live on that network and are rapidly coming to a time where all of the interesting apps will be built on the signals that those networks contain.  The fact that John is a friend with Sara is interesting – you can build an app that lets them share messages, tell each other what they are up to, share pictures and so on (sounds alot like facebook, right).  But the fact that John “likes” a page or comments on Sara’s post lets you build much more interesting applications that can actually add more than just communications value to both John and Sara’s world.  As Socble points out though, “likes” and “comments” (and shares and posts) are the only verbs we have access to on most social platforms today and the race is on between Google, Facebook and Salesforce.com to grab as much of the new verb landscape as possible.

The last piece fell into place today when I was watching some of the Zuckerberg keynote (not sure if this will work to get you directly to the keynote – if not, then just click the ‘previous segments’ button and then navigate to the ‘F8 2011 keynote’)  today in between calls and meetings at work.  I’ll have to watch the all of it (maybe tonight on my Roku), but the one part that I did hear about was the Open Graph.  The simple version of Open Graph is its the next logical step in Facebook becoming the identity system of the internet.  They are extending their APIs to let anyone else jump on top of not only their authentication system (login using your Facebook account) but then access and share information (over the Facebook network of course) back to the network.  What sort of information?  Well it has got to be a lot more than “likes”.  What are you eating?  What are you watching?  What are you listening to?  Where are you going?  A lot of that data is already shared on Facebook, but not in a structured way like a “like” is – with Open Graph I think Facebook intends to change that (and that may be why Google does have a leg up in this race since they seem to have the corner on the market of deciphering someones intent without making them put it into a structure).

The table is set.  Now for the main course: what  verbs are their in PLM today?  I create a part.  I check-in an assembly.  I  analyze performance.  I  release manufacturing.  There are literally thousands more.  But what do we do with those verbs?  Not much.  What could we do…a lot.  Imagine a PLM system that looks at the trend of check-ins and check-outs associated with a particular project and can predict based on the volume, frequency, duration and the job roles of the people doing the checking-in and checking-out whether the project is on track, ahead of schedule or falling behind?  What if you had an agent that monitored the activity of your workgroup and would tell you when something was up that needed your attention?

I often feel that enterprise software, and specifically enterprise software focused at the manufacturing industry, is far behind the rest of the IT sector.  We don’t do much with the cloud.  We’re still playing around with social.  Apps are toys at best, rather than “serious” business tools.  But in this emerging verb landscape, we may already be ahead of the consumer market.  We’ve been capturing verbs for years.  Now we just need to figure out what they mean.

My 911 story

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This blog started in March 2004, about two and a half years after 9/11.  I’ve done a few political posts and talked about the war on terror, but generally keep it a bit lighter.  On the 10th anniversary of 9/11 however, I feel the need to document my story on that day….before I forget more of it than I already have.

My airline ticket on 9/11

I woke up early on Tuesday morning (for whatever reason I do distinctly remember that it was a Tuesday) because I had to fly to San Diego that day.  I was working for Convergys at the time and there was a big wireless industry trade show that was starting the following day.  I had something for breakfast, kissed DeAnna and the kids goodbye and headed out the door.  Like everyone else, I do remember it being a very crisp and bright blue sky kind of day.

I made my way to the airport, parked my car, got my ticket and went through security.  I don’t remember if we had to separate out our laptops or not, but I know I kept my shoes on and didn’t have to show my toothpaste in a ziploc baggie.  I walked down to the gate and met up with a few friends.  I had been flying a bit the previous year (when I worked for SDRC) so I was Silver Medallion on Delta – which actually was enough to get a system wide upgrade back then – so I was sitting in first class.  Seat 4A and next to me was one of my co-workers, Joe Feldkamp, in seat 4B.  We had some orange juice as we tool our seats and pretty soon we were taxing out and on our way.  We took off in a Boeing 757 on Delta flight 343 to San Diego at around 9:10 AM on September 11th 2001 – almost 20 minutes after American Flight 11 had struck the North Tower.

There was nothing remarkable about the take off or cruise to 36,000 feet.  I was reading a newspaper, Wall Street Journal I think, and figuring out if I was going to have the in flight breakfast or not.  About 30 minutes into the flight, things changed.  The captain came on the PA and rather than his normal welcome, he announced that he was getting word that there was an “issue” (not sure of that was the exact word or not…) that might force the FAA to shut down the grid and that if we turned around now they would let us land in Cincinnati, but if we kept going for another 5-10 minutes while they decided and it did close, we would have to land in St. Louis.  “We’re going back” and we immediately took a bank to the left and headed back home.

Five minutes later the pilot came back on the PA and announced that he had word that a plane had struck one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  My mind immediately flashed to an image of the twin towers with the tail of a Cessna sticking out of one of them.  I seem to remember that a few months / years earlier there had been an accident (or was it an attack?) on the White House and remember seeing the images of a small plane’s wreckage on the lawn of the WH.  Surely this must be something similar.

We continued on our way to Cincinnati and Joe decided he wanted to call home.  They still had airphones in the seats at this time – I think they were GTE if I remember right.  Joe picked on up and wiped his card and I did the same with mine.  After a few attempts I finally got through to DeAnna and gave her our status – “Everything is OK here.  We’re coming back to Cincinnati.  What’s going on?”  She didn’t have any news for me right then, but I could tell she was worried.  There were no more announcements from the pilot.  I think he was getting more news than he wanted to share and was focused on getting us back to CVG and on the ground safely.

We landed…and there was no place to go.  There were so many planes that had been grounded in CVG that all of the gates were full.  We ended up parking at a set of portable stairs that let us descend to the tarmac and then walk in through a baggage entrance into concourse A of Terminal 3.  When I got up to the terminal it was obviously packed.  Across the way I saw one of my neighbors who had also been on a flight they turned back to Cincinnati very shortly after take off.  We talked briefly and decided both to head home.  It was pretty clear no one was going anywhere that day.  There were people everywhere.  No one was directing anyone to do anything or giving out any information.  All of the TVs in the terminal were switched off (I remember very distinctly that they were still the old tube TVs – massive things hung from the ceiling).

I tried to call home on my cell but the call wouldn’t go through.  I headed down the escalator to the tunnel that connected concourse A to ticketing and then rode back up another escalator to ground level.  I found my car (think I was still driving my 1996 Ford Contour SE at the time), started it up and turned on the radio.  It was then I first heard about what was really going on.  It wasn’t a small plane.  It wasn’t an accident.  There was more to come.  Once I got out of the parking garage I tried to call home again.  This time I got through and I could hear the worry and panic coming through the line.  I told DeAnna I was on the ground and headed home.

I listened to the radio all the way home.  Reports where coming in of a plane down near Cleveland.  There were still 7-10 planes unaccounted for.  Fighters had been scrambled over major metropolitan areas.  The Sears tower in Chicago was being evacuated.  I made it home and pulled into the driveway.  My father in law was over that day (he made it a habit to come over every Tuesday when the kids were young) so I couldn’t get in the garage.  I walked in the house and got my first glimpses of the images from New York.  They had just started to air the video of the Flight 175 hitting the south tower when I walked in.  The next few hours where a blur.  We just sat and watched.

Sometime around noon I had had enough.  We switched off the TV and just went outside.  It hit me then: that morning a bunch of people all over the US had gotten up early to make a flight to somewhere.  They drove to the airport.  Got their tickets.  Went through security.  Got on a plane – maybe they even got upgraded and felt lucky!  Took off and climbed to 36,000 feet.  All of those things happened to me too.  But for an unfortunate subset of those people,  then something terrible happened.

I am not a 911 hero.  I didn’t do any more after 911 than everyone else did: I prayed, I gave blood, I went to a few rally’s and waved an American flag.  But still to this day I feel strangely close to the crew and passengers on on AA flight 11, UA flight 175, AA flight 77 and  UA flight 93.  But for the grace of God, DL 343 is not on that list.

Continuous partial work

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Last week when I was in San Francisco for Dreamforce I did a little experiment: I left the MacBook at home and only took my iPad 2, iPhone 4 and Blackberry.  Don’t laugh – this week at our analyst event I am loaded down with no only the MacBook plus all the stuff I took to Dreamforce, but also my Canon camera, my personal iPad (1) and a Kodak video camera.  So honestly, I did travel light last week – for me anyway.

In the final analysis it worked out really well.  There were only two things that I absolutely needed to do that I couldn’t get done on the devices I had with me:  approve an expense report (required me to login to a card authenticated website) and send someone a file I had on my desktop PC and didn’t have a copy of locally on my iPad or in my dropbox.  Everything else I needed to get done for work (and play) for the entire week was easily doable on the devices I had with me – and the work horse was the iPad 2.

While I intended to find out if traveling without a PC in tow was feasible for the things I need to to get, I learned a far more interesting lesson through the week: the tablet made me more comfortable doing work in smaller chunks.  When I work on a PC and open Outlook to get email, or Powerpoint to work on a presentation, the shear size of the program and its various options create an expectation that I will do something great.  The simplicity of an app causes no such inflated expectations.  If I open up my laptop (especially when mobile), resume from sleep, and then open an application, I’ve made a serious investment of time and energy – now I better do something amazing: research some potential cures for cancer, solve the world debt crisis or at least balance my check book.  On the other hand, if I flip open the smart cover on my ipad, tap the EverNote Icon and jot down three random ideas that seem interesting to me at the time, there are no feelings of shame, like I have somehow wasted my one chance to ask Buddha the secret to life.

And its not just me.  When I first noticed myself doing little bits of ‘work’ in odd moments walking from one session to another I looked around and noticed almost everyone else was doing it to.  It reminded me of a phrase I heard in the early days of social media: continuous partial attention, but now applied to getting work done rather than consuming content.  It seems rather simplistic, but most things that are truly powerful do: because these devices don’t let you do much, you don’t expect yourself to get a lot done, so the momentum required to actually cause you to start doing work is lower, which allows you to start to do work more often and therefore more work overall gets done – just in smaller chunks.

This new way of work may finally let us eat one bite of the work elephant at a time.  How do you find you work differently when mobile with just a smart device vs. a laptop?

What I learned about the semantic web by traveling too much

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Last year I had the ‘privilege’ of amassing enough air miles on Delta Airlines to ‘earn’ the status of Diamond Medallion – with a few miles to spare to help me get it again this year, with (maybe) a little less travel. The quotes are not meant to demean the benefits you get with the status at all – I sincerely appreciate the shorter line at security, access to the lounge and the fairly regular upgrades – but rather to point out that traveling that much, well, sort of sucks. One of my colleagues (who doesn’t get the joy of traveling as much as I do) recently asked me if there was a level above Diamond, to which I replied, yes….it’s called Divorce ;-)

However, all clouds have a silver lining and in this case its a very practical lesson about how far we’ve come in getting software to do real work for us, instead of making more work for us to do. It all started with a little application for my iPhone and iPad called Tripit. I discovered Tripit through the use of another app that a fellow traveller in a long forgotten airport lounge told me about, Flight Tracker. The Flight Tracker app gives you a map with an overlay of where your flight is at any given time and has and integration with Tripit to feed it all your flight number info. I’ve long ago deleted Flight Tracker from my devices (ended up being pretty useless since I am the one flying and can’t track myself without a network – even if I could, what’s the point?), but use Tripit on a (far too) frequent basis.

My basic description of Tripit is an app that consolidates all of my travel information into one itinerary. Sounds pretty simple and to the casual observer it actually is. But if you look deeper, you realize that there’s some magic in there somewhere. The way Tripit gets my travel details is by me forwarding all of the confirmation emails I get from the flights I book, hotels I reserve and cars I rent. As soon as the hit my inbox, I forward them along to trips@tripit.com and forget about them. Tripit knows where to stick my information based on the reply-address in the email I receive. It infers a relationship between the data in the email and my account by looking at the email’s meta data. Pretty simplistic semantic leap, I know, but we’re just getting started.

What Tripit does next is where the real magic starts. Without having any prior knowledge of the format, structure or data in the email I am sending it, it is able to deconstruct the message into its core elements, and stick them into its data structure. It finds flight numbers, seat numbers, confirmation numbers and departure / arrival times from confirmation emails sent by United, Delta, Southwest and American (all the ones I have tried so far). It finds check-in, check-out, rate and confirmation info from every random hotel I have stayed at for the last year in America, Europe and Asia. It combines all this info with rental car, restaurant, tour reservations, and anything else that I can cram into my agenda by reserving ahead of time into one chronologically ordered agenda. What’s more, all the info looks the same – an airline booking with Delta looks just like one from United. A hotel reservation with the Westin looks just like one from the Hilton. As icing on the cake, it adds in a google map from airport to hotel with estimated drive times and any tolls.

Based on my experience with Tripit and its ability to digest anything I send it and turn it into structured data, I started to think about potential applications of the same principles to manufacturing (the whole reason I have to travel in the first place). Where is the product development process do we have massive amounts of unstructured data that would benefit from being put into a more structured format? The first spot that came to mind is requirements gathering. In the requirements gathering phase (which BTW I think is a giant misnomer since it shouldn’t really be a phase, but a continuous process) there are hundreds, thousands (or even millions depending on how large the market / customer base is and how long the product development cycles are) of suggestions, complaints and requests about new or existing product features.

These inputs come in the form of emails, call logs, and increasingly tweets and blog posts. Imagine a tool that would let you dump all of that input into a giant hopper and the most requested capabilities and changes would be assembled and prioritized – structured – for you in an easy to consume dashboard. Take it a step further and rather than a batch process (dumping all the inputs in at one time and seeing what comes out the other side), imagine a continuous process where new ideas, comments and suggestions where always being fed into the hopper and the top priorities and ideas where constantly in touch with the real time needs of the market. Clearly this will require some advancement from the sort of engine that Tripit uses that maps unstructured data to a predefined structured model to one that can analyze the unstructured information, define the categories based on what it finds and then map everything it finds in the rest of the input data into those categories. That might seem like a big leap, but don’t fear – search engines like Google and Bing are doing very similar things today, just to web pages rather than emails.

Terrible idea? Never work? Am I full of shit? Maybe…but this is one of those ideas that got stuck in my head like a bad song – it just keeps coming back up no matter how hard I try to think about something else. History is on my side as well: the number of ideas that have moved from the consumer to the business space in the last 10 years would make this post insufferably long if I tried to list them all here. So I am going to keep toying with it and trying to figure out if there is something there. Feel free to help me out – if you have other ideas about other spots in the product development / manufacturing loop where a magic box to convert a mess into something structured would be helpful, chime in with a comment below. On the flip side, if you see some big holes – hit me up with those as well. From 36,000 feet over Denver, that’s all for now.