By Derek Elley, Co-Founder of Ponoko
Products will be designed just for you, downloaded from the web, and made locally using hi-technology.
Products will follow the path of music, photos, movies and apps - downloadable to your local 'personal fabricator'.
Products will act more like digital information rather than physical items, for more of their lifetime than they do today. This enables creativity to be unleashed even more than it has to date.
This also opens up the debate about intellectual property and copyright of products - something that musicians and the like have been dealing with for some time now. Product creators have the opportunity to carve a new and distinct path - learning from these other areas, and moving in the direction of open design and open hardware. Well practiced concepts in the software industry.
Today you can get what you're given off the shelf from large chain stores. And you can customize a few things like computers (Dell), shoes (Nike-ID) and t-shirts (Cafepress). In the future you will get almost anything you want from the web (Ponoko).
