I'm not really a gear guy but I think 3D printing is one of the coolest technologies I've ever seen. I've heard anecdotes of low-end 3D printers being available in the $1,000 range. If that's true, that's what I want for Christmas.

I did some research over Thanksgiving and spent some time researching the two 3D printers made by ZCorp (ZPrinter 310 Plus, Spectrum Z510).  These printers basically build up a part by successively spreading layers of powder on a surface and then gluing together the area to be printed in thin, horizontal slices. The materials used can vary from strong, high performance composites to snap-fit or rubber-like materials (wax, metal, plastic, plaster). These are the ZCorp printers and some examples printed from each:

ZPrinter 310 Plus	Spectrum Z510
Examples

With the increase in the Maker community I would think there might be a good business creating a virtual 3D printing service bureau. Indeed there are some including Proof Of Concept, Inc. The key would be tapping into the hobbyist community in an effective way. This seems to be the target audience for Fabjectory who does 3D printing for Second Life avatars.

The reason I'm interested in all this is because I have several consumer product ideas I'm interested in prototyping and then perhaps licensing. I've been playing around with SketchUp (why is this owned by Google???) CAD software but I'll surely need to partner with an engineer to get the product ideas ready for prime time.

It looks like 3D printing is making inroads in the art world as well, according to a recent BusinessWeek article titled The Edge of the Possible.
 

• [SM] As the Web gets bigger, search results contain more irrelevant stuff. In many cases, it's getting harder to find what you want. Appreciably harder.
  [IM] People tend to think spam in search indexes is a huge problem and it is, when it shows up in the first few pages of results that users see. If my query returns 1,860,000 results then I'm less concerned if the bottom 1,500,000 are spam/irrelevant. Investments in core search relevance that make sure the best results for a query dominate the first few pages of results are key. This means good spam classifiers that penalize spam but doesn't necessary mean a bit that dumps a doc out of the index when flipped.

• [SM] "...it surprises me that the presentation of Google's main search results pages barely changed in the two years from one edition of the book to the next."
  [IM] I wonder if companies that measure everything and take notice of small dips in clickthrough/conversion are less likely to make bold changes to the user interface of key features. Nisan Gabbay cites another case on Startup Review where HotOrNot, a successful company (though on a different scale), became more conservative over time once they had cash flow to protect. I know that when I worked at a startup we were much more likely to make big changes on a whim than at bigger companies I've worked at. Perhaps that's why we see the large players opening Labs to try out and validate new ideas in isolation before attempting to integrate them.

• [SM] "Other search companies are doing some cool stuff with their main results."
  [IM] Windows Live Search, especially Product Search, is definitely trying to differentiate based on UI with features like infinite scroll, inline answers, related searches, refinements, etc.

• [SM] "As search results get more unwieldy, recommendation engines like Amazon's or iTunes' could become more important tools. (Bonus: they're an iteration of the architecture of participation, so we can claim some kind of credit. ;) Presumably, implicit relevance (based on search-result clickstreams) is going to be a big part of this if it's not already."
  [IM] I think we'll see clickthrough by keyword data in the aggregate used well before any kind of collaborative-filtering for general web search. The engines will track which results get the highest clickthrough rate for a given keyword and then play SERP king-of-the-hill based on that data until results stabilize. This will be a challenge but should be possible in the next several years. I actually think this type of technology will be pioneered by smaller vertical search players because scale won't be as much of a blocking issue due to less load, smaller indexes, and less stringent response time requirements.

• [SM] "I wonder when/if search is going to be real-time (i.e. live Web) rather than index-based. And I wonder if the main barrier to it now is hardware or software (to the degree you can separate them). At Web2, I met a woman from Intel R&D who's working on a continuous refresh data system that would allow real-time searching but for which you need multi-core processors that aren't yet ready for primetime. Still, an interesting glimpse of the possible future. [Sidebar: I brought up the idea of real-time Web search with Tony Stubblebine, and he thought it was hilarious. Totally unrealistic viz computing capacity. I thought it was laughable that he thought we wouldn't eventually have the bandwidth and cycles to do it. Tune in in 10 years for an update.]"
  [IM] Only when we have a ping system for all web pages will we have anything approximating real-time search. Site Maps is about as close as we come today. Even then we'll only have realer-time search. We already have a tiered system today with important, frequently updated sites crawled daily and less important, less-frequently updated sites crawled on closer to a monthly-basis.

• [SM] "When do the implicit conclusions of hardcore data-mining and analysis become part of search results? For example, Marc Smith's newsgroup analysis can point to potential experts on a topic. If I want to find an SEO guru, when will search results from a major engine contain implicitly derived info from Marc's project?"
  [IM] I agree Marc is doing some cool stuff. It comes down to cost-benefit and we'll need to wait for some product group to find a data-mining scenario of such clear value to outweigh the scale headaches necessary to implement it. Someone is going to have to meet Marc half-way. The same goes for any research prototype or incubation idea. Successful evangelism by the researcher/incubator is a start, but the spark has to be lit within someone in a product group to move it down the sometimes long path to production. Given the tall odds, many of those ideas find their way into startups where they have a better chance of seeing the light of day.