Manufacturing is hard, but it's getting easier. In every stage of the manufacturing process--prototyping, small runs, large runs, marketing, fulfillment--cheap tools and service models have become available, dramatically decreasing the amount of capital required to start building something and the expense of revising and improving a product once it's in production.

In this episode of the Radar podcast, we speak with Chris Anderson, CEO and co-founder of 3D Robotics; Nick Pinkston, a manufacturing expert who's working to make building things easy for anyone; and Jie Qi, a student at the MIT Media Lab whose recent research has focused on the factories of Shenzhen.

For more about this episode, visit http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/11/podcast-the-democratization-of-manufacturing.html

And for more on these topics, check out Solid, O'Reilly's new conference about the intersection of software and the physical world: http://solidcon.com/

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The democratization of manufacturing: a conversation with Chris Anderson, Nick Pinkston, and Jie Qi

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

The democratization of manufacturing: a conversation with Chris Anderson, Nick Pinkston, and Jie Qi

O'Reilly Radar