Michigan Tech Sponsors A 3D Printers For Peace Contest
Now that Defense Distributed is on the defensive, it’s time to think a bit harder about what 3D printing really means. To that end, Michigan Tech is sponsoring a Printers For Peace contest that is encouraging designers and engineers to make amazing stuff using a 3D printer that can change the world for the better. “Unfortunately, the only thing many people know about 3D printing is that it can be used to make guns,” writes Dr. Joshua Pearce, founder of the project.
“This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing.”
The deadline for the contest is September 1st and they’ll announce winners on the 4th. They are looking for designers to build things that will help, not harm, people.
low-cost medical devices
tools to help pull people out of poverty
designs that can reduce racial conflict
objects to improve energy efficiency or renewable energy sources to reduce wars over oil
tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure
things that boost sustainable economic development (e.g. designs for appropriate technology in the developing world to reduce scarcity)
tools to help pull people out of poverty
designs that can reduce racial conflict
objects to improve energy efficiency or renewable energy sources to reduce wars over oil
tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure
things that boost sustainable economic development (e.g. designs for appropriate technology in the developing world to reduce scarcity)
The winner of best project will win a Type A Machines Series 1 3D Printer and the runner-up gets a simpler RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printing kit.
With all the press attention on 3D printing is the gateway to firearms anarchy, it’s refreshing to see someone take a different path. By backing 3D printing engineers into a corner, DefDist and the government are simply using fear to achieve competing goals. The results will be both needlessly draconian legislation and a variant of the Streisand Effect that will spread these arguably faulty plans far and wide. When the government outlawed DVD decryption code you could buy a T-shirt with the code printed on it. The same will happen in this case, although this code, when run, could take off fingers and give legislators more ammunition for a full crackdown on home 3D printing.
Let us know if you enter and good luck. We need more weapons against poverty and fewer weapons against each other.
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Do you feel lucky? Picksum Ipsum replaces your Web placeholder text with quotes from Hollywood legends
Web designers and developers of the world, listen up. Your clients don’t want jumbled Lorem Ipsum placeholder text – they want proper, meaningful sentences. Better still, they want the wise words from some of Hollywood’s finest.
This, at least, is according to the good folks behind Picksum Ipsum, a quirky Web app that offers up quotes from Morgan Freeman, Jim Carrey, Clint Eastwood and Michael Caine, instead of a meaningless malaise of text.
How it works
First up, pick your protagonist from the top of the page. It’s worth adding here there’s a little ‘Rumble’ feature that lets you put two of the actors up against each other.
Indicate how many paragraphs of text you want and whether you’d like the HTML
tags or not.
Then, you’re served up a page of text which you can simply copy/paste to your site. Here’s a sample of what Mr. Clint Eastwood has to say for himself, which seems to be very Dirty Harry-centric:
“This is my gun, Clyde! When a naked man’s chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he’s not out collecting for the Red Cross. You want a guarantee, buy a toaster. Man’s gotta know his limitations. You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig. Here. Put that in your report!” AND “I may have found a way out of here. Well, do you have anything to say for yourself? This is the AK-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy; and it makes a distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it. don’t p!ss down my back and tell me it’s raining. Ever notice how sometimes you come across somebody you shouldn’t have F**ked with? Well, I’m that guy. What you have to ask yourself is, do I feel lucky. Well do ya’ punk? Are you feeling lucky punk.”
Picksum Ipsum is the handiwork of Adam Collins and Sam Colledge, designers and developers at UK-based agency Creare.
“Myself and Sam were getting more and more frustrated at having to use boring lorem ipsum as filler text on our homepage designs” says Collins.” So we have put together a movie alternative to lorem ipsum. It’s a great little tool and I am sure Web designers will love it.”
There’s no shortage of Lorem Ipsum alternatives, including Slipsum which is a Samuel L. Jackson-focused version that uses shall we say ‘colorful’ language. We also recently covered Lorempixel, which dynamically generates placeholder images.
But for movie fans, Picksum Ipsum is a fun and free addition.
Feature Image Credit – AFP/Getty
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Biz Stone’s New Startup Jelly Raises Series A From Spark Capital, SV Angel, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Al Gore, Bono & Others
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s new and mysterious startup called Jelly still isn’t saying what it’s up to, but it has announced funding. According to details posted to the official company blog this morning, the team has raised a Series A from a notable lineup of investors in a round led by Spark Capital, with additional investment from SV Angel, and a group of angels that includes Square CEO Jack Dorsey;Reid Hoffman; Bono (what!), Evan Williams and Jason Goldman via Obvious; Al Gore; Emmy-winning director Greg Yaitanes; and Afghan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob.
As a part of the funding, Spark General Partner Bijan Sabet now joins Jelly’s board of directors.
The company explains that it chose the angels for their diversity of experience, something that’s important to Jelly’s team as well as to its product, whatever that may be:
“We chose angels like Al Gore, a Partner at KPCB and Chairman and Co-founder of Generation Investment Management, Greg Yaitanes, a Hollywood director, and Roya Mahboob, an entrepreneur doing amazing work for women in Afghanistan partly because they work in divergent fields. Knowledge diversity is something we prize highly and is also something that will be represented in our product.”
The post also revealed that the Jelly product is only in the early prototyping phases right now, which is one reason why the company has yet to reveal product details to the general public.
The additional funding – no amount was provided – will be used for hiring and development, as is par for the course.
Jelly has already been busy on the hiring front as of late however, having recently hired former Twitter engineering manager and Fluther co-founder Ben Finkel as Jelly’s co-founder and CTO, as well as Kevin Thau, the man responsible for Twitter’s new app, Twitter music.
Though details as to what Jelly is up to are scarce, earlier hints seem to point to some sort of “social good” intention with the service, like perhaps offering a way for users to connect to social causes and show off their contributions. Stone recently explained that “People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.”
Philanthropy and volunteering don’t have many central homes on today’s web, as TechCrunch previously noted in a discussion about Jelly’s possible plans – save for something like Causes, which works on top of Facebook’s open graph, having never taken off as a standalone service of its own. In fact, social media-based activism has been under fire for years as being a poor substitute for real-world action. Liking and sharing and posting and re-tweeting does not necessarily have the desired impact on effecting change, though it may raise awareness.
Today’s announcement from Jelly still gives no hints as to how it plans to help people “do good in the world,” only noting that the proliferation of mobile devices is a big factor in its plans. “As mobile devices have taken an increasingly central role in our lives, humanity has grown more connected than ever—herein lies massive opportunity.”
BlackBerry World hits 120,000 apps, as Skype launches on the Z10 along with 10.1 firmware update
BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins has revealed that there are now over 120,000 apps in the BlackBerry World storefront.
To coincide with the milestone, Skype will be launching its cross-platform messaging service on the BlackBerry Z10 alongside the BlackBerry 10.1 firmware update, which will be rolling out to all users later today. Heins also confirmed that a number of other recognisable apps, such as Moog, iHeartRadio, SoundHound and Bloomberg Hub, will be available in the BlackBerry World store following the BlackBerry 10.1 release.
Skype has emphasized that its BlackBerry 10 app is still technically a preview version, although it will come with all of the usual features such as free voice and video calling, instant messages and the ability to call both landlines and mobile phones. The company says it will continue to work with BlackBerry “over the next few months” to refine and improve the app ahead of a full release.
Skype launched its app as a preview version for the BlackBerry Q10 in April; the second smartphone to adopt the BlackBerry 10 operating system, and one that has already been updated to version 10.1.
Heins also announced the BlackBerry Q5, a new mid-range smartphone running BlackBerry 10, at the company’s BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando today. It’s aimed at emerging markets and sports a familiar QWERTY keyboard, as well as a 3.1-inch touchscreen for all the usual swipes and gestures supported by the new platform. BlackBerry says the Q5 will be available in “selected markets” in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia – including the Asia Pacific region – and Latin America when it launches in July.
The 120,000 figure announced today is a significant improvement on the 70,000 apps that BlackBerry 10 launched with earlier this year. The issue, as always, is depth and quality throughout the store. Dozens of Web apps, combined with the absence of big name releases such as Instagram and Vine, will do little to change public perception about the BlackBerry 10 platform.
Image Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
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Strategist Jonathan MacDonald on ‘denoising’ and creating an engaged workforce [Video]
![Denoise 520x245 Strategist Jonathan MacDonald on denoising and creating an engaged workforce [Video]](http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/05/Denoise-520x245.jpg "Denoise 520x245 photo")
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.”
It was this Plato quote that Jonathan MacDonald, co-founder of This Fluid World and strategist for some of the world’s largest brands, chose to kick-start his keynote with at TNW Conference Europe last month.
MacDonald delivered an impassioned talk that focused on the human element in 21st century digital business, and how the modern world has changed how people behave. Or, at least, how they should behave.
“In the business world, we were able to put things out into the public and hope that they resonated, but internally we may not necessarily have believed them,” he says. “What we did outside was a dirty little secret, and on the inside we were thinking something totally different. If we didn’t talk about it too loud, we could get away with for a long time. Now, it’s really hard to do so, because all of a sudden, if a Chief Executive of a company says, ‘you know, it’s all about renewable fuel so we’re gonna make sustainable energy cars’, then drives away in a gas-guzzling Bentley, people find out about that.”
Similarly, if you’re a celebrity who publicly backs an anti-drugs charity while simultaneously living a life of hedonism in ‘private’, there’s every chance this will be revealed.
In other words, how we behave should reflect how we feel on the inside. From a business perspective, this is imperative for having an engaged workforce. “It’s about denoising down to what really matters to you,” he says. “And finding people that share that belief, and producing what that belief manifests itself like externally.”
Ultimately, MacDonald argues, this will lead to a better-engaged workforce. “74% of employees across the top 500 companies were actively disengaged…didn’t want to be there,” said MacDonald, citing a recent study. “In real terms, that’s $350Bn lost within the US economy simply down to people not caring.”
You can watch MacDonald’s keynote in full in the video below.
Catch up with all our coverage from The Next Web Conference Europe 2013.
Original post: Strategist Jonathan MacDonald on ‘denoising’ and creating an engaged workforce [Video]