Mixing The Realities for Creation: Where Virtual Is Less Virtual

A few days ago, Monique Pool of SEAS NV dropped me a note, pointing me at Ponoko - a site which enables people to create 2 and 3 dimensional designs so that they can be made to specification. I looked into it (of course), and was pretty impressed. I don't have any concrete ideas on what I would make yet, but it is interesting and nice to know that I can do these things, should I choose to. Manufacturing with 'just in time inventory' is a real boon for people who have ideas and no materials. There are a few catches, though - for example, you have to check your prototype - which means that you have to pay for at least one rendition of what you make. While sensible, shipping is not known as the great equalizer. In essence, the further one is from New Zealand, the more one would have to pay for creating something. Since this is outside of the United States, most people from the United States may take this point.

What if such ability were less geocentric? Spread across the world in franchises to offset the costs in shipping? That would make sense. It works for Starbucks - you can get a bad cup of coffee just about anywhere in the United States. I apologize to the people who like Starbucks, but I won't apologize for liking better coffee.

All of that said - this is the start of something interesting, something new, and something which allows creators to create with less startup cost. The evolution of real world designs is catching up a bit to virtual objects as available in Second Life, though the postage is much cheaper in virtual worlds.

Enter The Dragon of manufacturing - China.

At the beginning of this month, Virtual World News wrote about the Chinese Virtual Economy - something which The Otherland Group reminded me of today. The Associated Press article from a few weeks ago, China Plans Virtual World for Commerce, does give some indicators:

...China's government is building a vast virtual world dubbed Beijing Cyber Recreation District, which founders say will help the manufacturing superpower evolve into an e-commerce juggernaut.

Some supply-chain experts say the project is impossibly grandiose in its goal to provide direct links between tens of thousands of Chinese manufacturers and millions of individual customers around the world. But every "Made in China" label eventually could include a Web site where customers could order more — and Chinese factories would produce custom-made goods and send them directly to consumers' homes, mused Chi Tau Robert Lai, chief scientist of the virtual world.

The 3D world is supposed to be the online counterpart to the China Recreation District, a theme park, mall and playground being built in a former steel plant in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

Some Chinese-language Web sites of the CRD are already up, but most of it — including the first direct links to manufacturers — won't come until the second half of next year at the earliest, Lai said.

In addition to connecting factories with people outside China, the project will allow businesses outside China to tap the nation's burgeoning middle class, he said.

"This makes you have to think of China in a different way," Lai said Thursday evening at the Virtual Worlds Conference & Expo in San Jose. "We are stepping back and trying to blend the human and the computer to touch everything associated with people's lives."...

Given that here in Trinidad and Tobago I can throw a stone to an import/export company that deals with Chinese manufacturers (and hit them, I might add), I am familiar with China's manufacturing ability - in fact, much of the solar energy stuff I have worked with was imported from China by my father and myself, or through contacts. Why? Quite simply, cutting out the middlemen. Buying things in the United States that were manufactured in China makes about as much sense as businesses buying Guyanese sugar packaged in Florida - a reality I have seen firsthand in local hotels on their sugar packets. The collapse of business geography is imminent in that regard: no longer are there secret places to buy things. The ability to manufacture products is now at everyone else's fingertips... and it holds promise. It should also be sending a very strong signal to the present leading retail exporter of Chinese Products... the tables are shifting.

China does have a long way to go - but lets take stock. We have Zazzle, where I have some of my own designs. We now have Ponoko. We have self-publishing on the Internet. We have a virtual economy based on copyright despite the protestations of a Linden Lab employee. We have China getting serious about a virtual economy.

The atomization that Pierre Levy wrote of in Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace is becoming more apparent... but it holds true for less than 20% of the world at present (global internet penetration).

The future is atomic, indeed. And funny enough, less venture capital will be necessary.