The Pirate Bay (TPB) is confident that this will soon be a reality.

The website just announced it is supporting a new type of file on its BitTorrent site—“physibles.” TPB uses this term to describe “data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.” Among the current TPB physible files available for download on the site are a Chevelle hot-rod 3D model and a clock.

TPB is the 75th most visited website in the world and has more than 5 million registered users. So for many in the tech world, the website’s actions carry weight and may indicate trends to come.

What 3D downloading would mean for the world of commerce

The Pirate Bay has declared that 3D downloading comes with some benefits for society. In fact, TPB shared on its company blog that “we [TPB] believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.”

But the implications of this technology go far beyond new sneakers. TPB predicts, “no more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labor. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.”

If TPB is right, and consumers can just print products from the comfort of their own home, what will happen to the establishments of the manufacturing industry—like factories and plants?

Sound like a bunch of sci-fi nonsense?

A world without factories and assembly lines seems unfathomable. And, to be honest, you probably don’t need to worry about the factory near you closing its doors anytime soon. 3D printing may never replace the need for manufacturers, and printing and assembling your own goods may be a long time away from mainstream acceptance. And the fact the TPB has a controversial reputation for its loose IP protection policy and anti-copyright stance may further skepticism about the new technology.

But it’s worth noting that the technology needed to download and print 3D files already exists. The MakerScanner, for example, is an open source 3D scanner that digitally records 3D objects and sends the information for print using a MakerBot 3D printer. RepRap is another open source ‘self-replicating’ 3D printer capable of producing plastic objects. You can watch a video of how the RepRap works here.

Time will tell what the future holds for 3D downloading

As with the introduction of any major new technology, there are a lot of questions still unanswered, and we are just entering the infant stages of 3D downloading technologies.

Nonetheless, TPB seems confident in declaring, “the future of sharing is about physible data.”

If 3D downloading really is on the horizon, what do you think the short term and long term ramifications might be?

UPDATE (2/6): A team of researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands has successfully replaced an 83 year old woman’s jaw with a 3D printed model of a prosthetic jaw. Read more here.

For more information:

Adopting innovation as a winning philosophy: an Arena customer spotlight

What’s next in manufacturing? Some predictions for 2012

Can you teach a robot to flip a pancake?

Our customer, Liquid Robotics, has been all over the news lately with their Wave Glider, an autonomous ocean-powered robot that can travel long distances, hold station and measure everything happening in the ocean—from weather to whale activity to oil slicks.

In November, we announced that Liquid Robotics was hosting the PacX Challenge—a data-collection journey across the Pacific Ocean that will break the world record for longest distance ever attempted by an unmanned ocean vehicle. I was lucky enough to attend the launch on Nov 17 at the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco where I had a chance to get up close and personal with the four bots attempting the journey.

During their 300 day voyage across the ocean, four Wave Gliders will collect approximately 2.25 million discrete data points that will give scientists insight into ocean salinity, water temperature, waves, weather, fluorescence and dissolved oxygen. Two robots will go from San Francisco to Australia, and two will go from San Francisco to Japan (after a pit stop in Hawaii in February.)

So far, the mission has been going pretty well. After a brief shakedown in the San Francisco Bay, the robots were on their way, and have already collected a ton of interesting data points for scientists and researchers to review.

The Wave Gliders prepare for their journey across the Pacific ocean.

With the press gathered around, the Wave Gliders are ready to launch!

James Gosling, creator of Java, and chief software architect at Liquid Robotics, photographs the Wave Gliders as they leave the Bay.

Meet the Ocean-crossing Robots

TEAM JAPAN—Piccard Maru & Fontaine Maru

Piccard Maru
Inspired by Jacques Piccard, a Swiss oceanographer and engineer, known for having developed underwater vehicles for studying ocean currents. He was one of only two people, along with Lt. Don Walsh of the United States Navy, to have explored the deepest part of the world’s ocean, and the deepest location on the surface of the Earth’s crust, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench located in the western North Pacific Ocean.

Fontaine Maru
Inspired by Matthew Fontaine Maury, an American astronomer, historian, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer, author, geologist, and educator. Maury made many important new contributions to charting winds and ocean currents, including ocean lanes for passing ships at sea.

TEAM AUSTRALIA—Benjamin & Papa Mau

Benjamin
Inspired by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. In addition to his writings, his inventions and experiments with electricity, Ben was an early oceanographer. As deputy postmaster, Franklin became interested in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation patterns. Ultimately, Franklin was responsible for discovering the Gulf Stream Current.

Papa Mau
Inspired by Pius “Mau” Piailug, a Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal. Mau was best known as a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wayfinding methods for deep-sea voyaging. With Mau’s help, the Polynesian Voyaging Society PVS was able to recreate and test lost Hawaiian navigational techniques on the Hōkūle‘a, a modern reconstruction of a double-hulled Hawaiian voyaging canoe.

How is data being captured along the way?

Here are some of the sensors mounted on the Wave Gliders as they make their way across the Pacific.

You can follow along and see the robots' progress on Google Earth, via the Liquid Robotics website

Seabird GPCTD with Dissolved Oxygen Sensor – measures water conductivity, temperature, depth, and dissolved oxygen just below the float of the Wave Glider.

Datawell MOSE-G Directional Wave Sensor – measures significant wave height, average period, peak period, and peak direction.

Airmar PB200 WeatherStation– measures air temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, wind gust speed, and wind direction one meter above the deck of the Wave Glider.

Turner Designs C3 Submersible Fluorometer – measures chlorophyll-A and crude oil fluorescence, as well as turbidity and water temperature just below the float of the Wave Glider.

For more information:

Our customers are doing some pretty big things, and it’s always a pleasure to be involved! If you’re interested in following the PacX journey, keep up with the robots on the Liquid Robotics blog. To read more articles on manufacturing and engineering innovation, subscribe to our blog.

Through my exposure to Arena’s customer base, which includes innovative manufacturing companies like GoPro, Square, Beats by Dr. Dre and Sonos, I’ve come across a variety of inspired new products that are not only taking design and engineering to the next level but are also changing the way we live.

Below are a few of the pioneering new products that have caught my eye this year, and just may inspire you to beef up your holiday wish list.

The Fitbit Ultra—a wireless activity and sleep tracker to improve fitness

The Fitbit Ultra tracks your steps taken, stairs climbed and calories burned.

Fitbit, an Arena customer, recently released its Ultra Wireless Tracker that provides even more incentive to take the stairs. The Ultra tracks every step you take using a super sensitive 3-D motion sensor called a MEMS 3-axis accelerometer, similar to the sensor built into a Wii controller, and provides more accuracy than traditional pedometers. The newly built-in altimeter recognizes when you are climbing or descending stairs and counts that in your daily exercise as well.

The Ultra can also calculate calories burned throughout the course of the day, giving you a complete snapshot of your daily fitness. You can even track how long and how well you sleep and automatically sync your data into the cloud to check progress over time.

Withings’s Wi-Fi Body Scale—the first personalized smart scale

Monitor your weight, fat mass and BMI with the Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale

Being a numbers junkie, the wi-fi body scale appeals to my addiction. This beautifully designed scale gives you a complete body analysis, including stats on weight, fat and muscle mass and BMI, and tracks changes over time. The silver wi-fi sensor in the center of the scale automatically sends your health stats to the cloud, where you can access the data online or through a free app on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. The web dashboard clearly displays your health information over a period of time and allows you to view any given date range. And since the data exists in the cloud, it’s easy to share your health progress with others, like your doctor or coach.

The scale is extremely accurate and can automatically recognize and remember multiple users, making it family-friendly.

RunKeeper—designed to track, manage and improve your fitness

Who says running isn’t social? Besides tracking running stats including distance, pace, calories, heart rate and paths traveled, RunKeeper creates a social community around improving your daily exercise.

Track your progress with the RunKeeper mobile app

RunKeeper is a mobile app that uses the GPS already built into most mobile devices to log your fitness runs and patterns and lets you share that information with those in your fitness community. By sharing your workouts with friends and family, you get the social motivation and feedback to push yourself to the next level.

The app is smart enough to identify patterns in your workout to help you improve the performance and quality of your workouts. Just sync up your iPod and off you go.

Strava—helping you log, analyze, compare and compete with your rides

Strava is another social fitness tracking mobile app that gives you a detailed snapshot of your fitness routine and enables easy comparison with friends around the world. You can also choose to maintain your privacy and use it for personal tracking.

Visualize your rides with Strava's training log

Using a dedicated GPS device or one already built into your iPhone or Android, Strava tracks and analyzes your rides or runs and visualizes your fitness history over time. Strava even takes elevation into account, adjusting your “suffer score” based on your increased heart rate during a given sprint.

One of the coolest aspects of Strava is its Leaderboard feature, which let’s you compare your pace on a given route with previous runs or with friends who have run the same ground. You can even filter through Strava users who belong to a similar weight and age class to see how you fare.

Which innovative new gadgets have grabbed your attention this holiday season? Share your find in the comments section below.

For more information:

Lytro makes headlines with its light field photography camera

The Victor Bike: the bicycle goes even greener

Does open-design hardware have a place in manufacturing?

Although oceans cover 71% of the earth’s surface, we know very little about their weather, currents, chemistry, topography or ecosystems. Liquid Robotics seeks to change all that with a fleet of robots that can measure everything happening in the ocean—from weather to whale activity to oil slicks. They’ve pulled together an exciting team of innovators, including James Gosling, the inventor of java, and Edward Lu, a former astronaut who is in charge of “innovative applications” at the company.

Liquid Robotics has been getting lots of attention from sites like the New York Times and Fast Company, and their upcoming PacX event—a challenge that will send four robots across the Pacific Ocean—promises to build even more momentum for this ocean robotics startup.

The Wave Glider—A solar and wave-powered robot

The Wave Glider uses a wave-based propulsion system and two solar panels to fuel its computers, meaning it has zero emissions, and requires no fueling or additional power supply. It moves at about one and a half knots across the ocean, recording data, which is then crunched automatically onboard and shipped by satellite or cellphone to big onshore computers that do complex analysis.

Its sensors can monitor pollution, oil spills, salinity levels and even phytoplankton activity, and so far, the Wave Gliders are being used by a number of different organizations—including BP (for water quality monitoring in the Gulf of Mexico), NOAA and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

Liquid Robotics is working toward networking thousands of Wave Gliders, and adding sensors and onboard computing capability so the robots can manage themselves during ocean-going projects lasting years.  According to Edward Lu, “This is a bit like 1960 in the Space Age, when they had launched just a few satellites. . . space is now a normal part of life, used for television transmission, credit card transactions and driving directions. We can do the same thing with the sea.”

The PacX Challenge. Four Wave Gliders. 300 Days. 25,000 Miles. 2,250,000 Discrete Data Points.

On November 17th, 2011, in San Francisco, Liquid Robotics will attempt to send four Wave Gliders across the Pacific Ocean—the longest distance at sea ever completed by an unmanned marine vehicle.

The robots will travel from San Francisco to Hawaii together, and then take separate routes across the Pacific, one pair arriving in Japan and the other in Australia. While at sea, the Wave Gliders will be routed across regions never before remotely surveyed and will continuously transmit valuable data on salinity and water temperature, waves, weather, fluorescence and dissolved oxygen. This data will be made available in near real-time to all registered individuals.

Scientists are encouraged to submit uses for the data, and the winner will receive six months of free Wave Glider data services. The lucky winner will also get to work with Liquid Robotics to chart the course and mission for the six month deployment.

I am so excited to see what’s next for this Arena customer—they really have a shot at accomplishing something huge!

And for more info, here’s a video showing a little bit more about what the Wave Glider can do:

And to see more Arena customers, visit our website.

I love a good opportunity to brag about Arena customers, and so I’d like to thank Lytro for giving me something to talk about.

Last week, Lytro launched an ultra-compact light field photography camera that allows users to take pictures without having to focus the lens. (Or as TechCrunch reported, Lytro launched “a new type of camera that dramatically changes photography for the first time since the 1800s.”)

What is a light field camera, and why is it so cool?

The innovation in the Lytro camera comes from its ability to capture the light field—or the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space.

Capturing the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light requires a totally new type of sensor, and it’s something conventional cameras have not been able to do.

Once you capture the light field, you can do a lot of post-production work that was impossible before. You can focus anywhere in the image, and refocus your pictures at anytime after the fact.

The new technology in the Lytro camera may also lead to better overall camera performance. For example, because an auto-focus motor is no longer needed, shutter delay becomes a thing of the past.

The Lytro cameras create the first “living pictures” as they can be refocused over and over again by different users. The technology is still very new, but we see a lot of exciting potential for them as they fine-tune their product, get user feedback, and continue to develop. (Check out the Lytro picture gallery to see it in action.)

It’s companies like Lytro that make me proud of my work at Arena, so I’d like to say “Congratulations” again to the Lytro team—I am excited to see what they come up with next.

For more information, check out the Lytro blog. But first, check out this video!

Interview with Mobius Photonics—an innovative scientific and industrial laser producer

The first customer we’d like to highlight is Mobius Photonics—a short-pulse, fiber-based laser company based in Mountain View, CA. Mobius is a small company, with fewer than 20 employees, yet it’s been able to scale by strategically using its resources. Since its launch in 2005, Mobius has survived a recession, a period of rapid growth and a direct hit on its following the Japanese tsunami.

Earlier this year, Mobius developed a new prototype laser source named “Rainbow.”  Rainbow’s unique design employs a novel way of using optical fiber to generate key visible wavelengths for super-resolution microscopy applications. The system is intended to allow scientists to image biological samples quickly, using florescent markers of choice.  To see how the company is navigating this exciting time, and to discuss how an open-minded and innovative culture has contributed to the company’s success, we talked with Red Byer, co-founder and vice president of operations at Mobius Photonics. Below is a summary of our conversation.

Alyssa: How has Mobius benefited from embracing innovation?

Red: At Mobius, we believe innovation transcends the product design process and extends to all levels of company operations. Any way a company can cut costs and save time, while maintaining quality standards,  is a good thing, so we are very receptive to new ideas from anyone in the organization. As a small company, we can react and respond quickly to innovative ideas and tend to have a hands-on approach to innovation.

I think it’s important to remember that even trivial, everyday innovations can make a big difference in your daily operations as well as your bottom line. For example, a while back we needed a new safety barrier for our high power laser. A typical laser safety barrier can cost as much as $5000 and require contractor installation in a fixed location, so we decided to leverage our in-house engineers to design and build it ourselves. We expended a small amount of time and energy upfront, and came out with a completed design that is safer, cleanroom compliant, highly modular and costs us a mere $300 in materials while taking one person less than 30 minutes to assemble.

Alyssa: What challenges Mobius?         

 Red: Maintaining consistency of process—particularly when it comes to receiving parts and handling accounts and transactions—is a continual challenge. We are a small company with a very complex product and BOM, so we’re always asking ourselves whether we are using our product management tools, like Arena, in the most efficient way.

Day-to-day communication with our suppliers around the world is another challenge. We try to keep our suppliers in the fold of our operations as much as possible, but it’s surprising how often a supplier can forget a log-in, which can clog up process.

Alyssa: How have changing market conditions like the recession, increased global competition or natural disasters affected Mobius and its customer base?

Red: The recent tsunami in Japan definitely impacted the semiconductor industry—our primary customer base. This could have been disastrous for us, but fortunately we were at the tail-end of a product design phase and had not yet ramped manufacturing. The poor market conditions gave us a small window of opportunity to prove out and gather data on the quality and cost effectiveness of our product. If we had already ramped and been mid-production when the tsunami hit, we would surely have experienced a very different set of issues.

Alyssa: What unique approaches have helped Mobius achieve success?

Red: We are unusual in our industry in that we’ve merged the design and manufacturing engineering functions and have implemented a cradle-to-grave approach for our engineers. We adopted this philosophy because we believe that when these groups are totally separate, successful hand offs are rare. When engineers follow their designs all the way and are engaged in the manufacturing process, there are fewer errors and less opportunities for miscommunication— and this ultimately creates better synergy between design and production.

Alyssa: If Mobius had a superpower, what would it be?

Red: I’d say that Mobius’ superpower would be the ability to peer into the future and support decisions and investments with big picture in mind. Even if something seems like a big up-front investment, or takes a lot of work initially, we look down the road to determine if it will pay off. If we think it makes sense, we’ll put in the work to get it done right from the start. And so far, this approach has worked really well for us.

For example, we owe the ease with which we scaled to our early implementation of a PLM and ERP system. When we first began Mobius, we had a PLM system (Arena), Quick Books and Excel. We were doing a lot of double-entering between Quickbooks and Excel and dealing with all sorts of accounting mismatches—and we quickly realized we needed to start thinking about growth and staying competitive. It’s tough to do this without implementing a PLM and ERP system up front.

Another time we used foresight to our advantage was when we decided to implement a modular design strategy. This design style is still largely unheard of in our industry and comes with some cost, but now we can tinker with one or two components and come out with a new design at a much faster rate. This creates a long term design and engineering savings. Because we invested in the infrastructure in advance, the aggressive goal of developing several new products in 2011 is realistically achievable. The leverage this has given us is huge—we can now develop a new laser design in a matter of months rather than years, which means we have more time and energy to devote to innovation and product optimization.

For more information

To learn more about Mobius Photonics, you can visit the company website or check out the Mobius news section to read more on the prototype Rainbow Laser and other Mobius innovations.  If you would like to be featured in an upcoming customer spotlight, post to our comments section below and I’ll be in touch.

Meet Mobius Photonics. Founded in 2005, Mobius has fewer than 20 employees. Mobius has been developing fiber-based laser technologies for years, and in early 2011, the company developed a new prototype laser system for the scientific research field—the “Rainbow” Laser System. Rainbow’s unique design employs a novel way of using optical fiber to generate key visible wavelengths for super-resolution microscopy applications. Mobius developed its prototype Rainbow system to help scientific researchers image biological samples quickly, with ultra-high resolution and using florescent markers of choice.

The Rainbow Laser System is a huge accomplishment for such a small company. Mobius’ ability to develop new technologies with limited resources and manpower is a testament to its distinctive company culture and strategy, and other would-be innovators can learn a lot from the way Mobius has maximized collaboration, innovation and foresight to overcome the usual obstacles and develop a pioneering prototype in addition to its other products.

Eliminating the engineering ‘he-said, she-said’

Orchestrating a successful engineering-to-manufacturing hand-off can be a challenge at even the highest functioning organizations. For Mobius, the best way to deal with the engineering hand-off was to eliminate it altogether. For example, instead of passing the company’s G1R3 laser system for materials processing applications from engineering to manufacturing, engineers followed the design all the way through the development process—and this kept them engaged in both the design and production of the product. Having a tightly integrated team has saved Mobius both time and money and minimized miscommunication throughout the production process.

Innovation as a daily routine

For small businesses, resources are often limited.  And when saving money is a top priority, developing innovative solutions to expensive problems can improve the bottom line when funds are tight.

For Mobius, this means leveraging in-house talent to creatively solve problems. When the company needed to purchase a laser safety barrier but the cost seemed too high, Mobius decided to utilize in-house engineers to design a safer and more flexible barrier system at a fraction of the cost.

Keeping an open mind to innovative ideas is not just a good management practice, it will also help a small business stay competitive and boost company morale.

When planning for today, think about tomorrow

Excel might be cheap, but it could not sustain our growing business forever…

Red Byer
VP of Operations
Mobius Photonics

Maintaining a competitive edge today and planning for future growth are not mutually exclusive. The market is moving faster than ever before and small operations must keep one eye on current performance while scanning the horizon with the other.

Mobius is a big-picture kind of company, and when looking at its future growth projections, leadership decided to integrate ERP and PLM systems early in the production process. Originally, Mobius relied on QuickBooks to manage its basic accounting needs, but soon realized it simply would not scale to meet the company’s needs. The system was beginning to threaten growth—a definite concern.

“Excel might be cheap, but it couldn’t sustain our growing business forever, so we made the investment to implement Arena PLM from the start” explained Red Byer, co-founder and vice president of operations at Mobius Photonics.  “As for ERP, we could have waited until we were bigger and our back was against the wall, but at that point it becomes a huge headache—not to mention a waste of time and money—to migrate to a new business, accounting and product lifecycle management system.”

Future-minded actions like the early implementation of scaling tools can make all the difference in how small organizations grow, and while businesses can plan for today’s needs, tomorrow’s needs should be taken into account as well.

Do you have tips for success you’d like to share?

It’s too easy to forget that innovation and hard work were not always enough to turn world changing ideas into reality. At Arena, we celebrate innovators and entrepreneurs, and love sharing the success stories of up-and-coming small businesses. If you have a story you’d like to share, post to the comments below, and you could be featured on our Arena blog!

More information:

Why is it so hard to move a BOM from engineering to manufacturing?

Three ideas for encouraging workplace innovation

Aaron LeMieux, founder and CEO of Tremont Electric, invented the nPower PEG to convert kinetic energy into useable power.

It took ten years for Aaron LeMieux, founder and CEO of Tremont Electric, to turn his product idea into reality. LeMieux’s product—the nPower PEG (Personal Energy Generator)—is a universal charger powered by kinetic energy. The device fits into a backpack or clips onto a belt and uses the energy generated by a person’s movement to charge handheld mobile electronics.

Not surprisingly, once the prototype launched things began moving at an accelerated pace. And as Tremont Electric began to grow, LeMieux decided to make sustainability a central part of the nPower PEG manufacturing process.

While it makes a lot of sense that a manufacturer of sustainable energy would embrace sustainability as a company value, green manufacturing is seen by some as expensive and difficult to implement. However, LeMieux found that incorporating sustainability into Tremont Electric’s strategy was ultimately an important contributor to the organization’s success.

Local sourcing + a sustainable process = a winning combination

Roughly 90% of Tremont Electric components are sourced from local companies, a decision that was made to help maintain a small carbon footprint. Even non-local suppliers were chosen with a required distance in mind to ensure the supply chain was small and manageable.

Additionally, LeMieux’s strategy is made to scale. “From day one, I always viewed nPower as an industry-making technology rather than a company-making technology,” says LeMieux. “By being able to rely on vendors and suppliers that are close to us, we’re helping to build an ecosystem that’s going to be able to allow us to develop new products in the future from our technology.”

LeMieux’s commitment to a local supply chain quickly paid off. Soon after launching the nPower PEG, a glitch with a component on the circuit board forced the company to temporarily halt sales. Although this could have been a disaster, the company’s decision to work with local vendors allowed it to resolve the issue and get back to manufacturing as quickly as possible. “It’s a lot easier to be able to jump in the car, drive over there, and point to where the problem is and what needs to be fixed,” LeMieux says.

As Tremont Electric grows, so will its commitment to local vendors, and its focus on sustainability—future projects for nPower include a wave energy converter, which will upsize the current technology to the size of a car and encapsulate it in a buoy on the water to harvest wave energy, and other applications for the military, consumer and biomedical fields.

Don’t wait to consider sustainability

For startups looking to launch a first product, there is a lot to learn from Tremont Electric—namely, don’t wait until demand is through the roof to consider sustainability.

Although it can be tempting to focus solely on costs in the beginning, working out a sustainable manufacturing strategy upfront can save money and mitigate risk in the long run. By using suppliers across town you can more easily communicate concepts with manufacturers throughout the rapid product development process, and by taking the time to think strategically, you can be better prepared to mitigate problems when they inevitably arise.

For more information

• Rethinking renewable energy
• US manufacturing—alive, well, and local
• A story in every surface – Vetrazzo countertops
• Power play

But there are some “Makers” who are in favor of leaving modernity behind, in order to better preserve and understand the past.

Exhibit A—Guédelon castle.

Guédelon castle is a 25 year project to build a medieval castle from scratch—and in my opinion, must surely be the outcome of historians and makers getting together over a bottle of Premier Cru Burgundian wine.

The castle is being built using only the techniques available in the Middle Ages—specifically, in the year 1229. The only materials that can be used in construction—wood, stone, earth, sand and clay—must be found onsite, which happens to be an abandoned quarry in Yonne, Burgundy. Quarrymen, stonemasons, woodcutters, carpenters, blacksmiths, tile makers, basket makers and rope makers have been working diligently since 1997 to complete this project, and have attracted quite a following from tourists and the local public. Our VP of Marketing & Design, Marc Escobosa, just returned from France with some amazing pictures of this project that I’d like to share.

A team of people is required to work the crane that puts beams into place

Molding used to support the ceiling while a vaulted stone arch was being built in the basement of one of the towers.

Blacksmiths - an important part of a medieval manufacturing team

While Guédelon castle itself isn’t exactly an innovation, the idea for this project is extremely innovative. As the founders describe, Guédelon is a back-to-front archaeological dig with the goal of recreating the construction processes that might have existed on an early 13^th century building site. As the castle is built, experiments will be conducted and theories will be tested that will help us understand a little bit more about how these massive structures were built.

I think this project is definitely worth a look-see—but for those who can’t make it out to France, the Ozark medieval fortress is being constructed between 2010 and 2030, right here in the United States by the same master planners.

All images copyright 2011 Marc Escobosa

We saw the bill of materials (BOM) for the iPad 2 last week and were impressed by the low costs Apple was able to achieve for its newest version of the tablet, which is considerably improved over the original. With iPad 2 sales reaching almost a million units in the product’s debut weekend, Apple has once again established its dominance as a leader in consumer electronics.

Taking manufacturing tips from Apple can seem like a futile exercise—its unique position in the market affords it privileges other companies simply don’t have. Apple’s manufacturing strategy requires volume, power, adamant control of the supply chain and attitude—for smaller manufacturing organizations with limited resources, it’s an impossible strategy to replicate. But no matter how small your organization, there are lessons to be learned from Apple’s progression as a leader in consumer electronics.

Design, execution and volume set Apple apart

When tracing Apple’s path as a manufacturer, there are clear differentiators that have led it to success, including a strong and focused design aesthetic, perfectionism in execution and unparalleled dominance over its supply chain.

Apple established its brand, style and ideals early on, and stuck to them through failure and success. The strong adherence to the brand is clear—you know an Apple product the moment you see it. Though its aesthetic and artistic sensibilities have clearly matured over the years, Apple has always driven toward simple design, minimized modes, low part count and cohesion across versions.

Additionally, Apple has extremely high standards for product development and won’t release a product until it works seamlessly with other Apple products. In many cases this means leveraging parts already in Apple’s library, or creating parts that can be integrated into new releases across other product lines. If an expensive prototype doesn’t fit the Apple mold, it is eventually scrapped. Not many companies in an industry as fast-paced as consumer electronics allow this kind of design inefficiency on the path to innovation. Even if a product flops once it hits the market—like the notorious clear cube—Apple engineers have no problem scrapping months, if not years, of design work to go back to the drawing board and make it right.

Because of Apple’s adherence to a specific design aesthetic and philosophy, the limited products that actually make it to market have a lot in common. The unique parts used across multiple product lines are purchased in extremely high volumes, so although Apple incurs a large initial expense to have these parts custom-designed, the overall cost is low. For example, the A4 processor was used in both the iPad 1 and the iPhone 4, while the new A5 processor (which is basically two A4s working together) will be used in both the iPad 2 and the iPhone 5. So as millions of products are sold, Apple buys millions of the same parts, making it a desirable customer for any supplier. As Apple’s reputation and purchasing power grow, its control over the supply chain increases as well. When a new product needs to be created Apple has the ability to design a its form factor and have its suppliers make parts that fit—unlike most companies, who need to design their products around available parts.

Apple’s ability to purchase uniquely designed, high-quality parts in bulk has created a barrier to entry for other manufacturers in the space. The barrier is not just Apple’s unique technology and design, but also the volume of products the company sells. Competitors in the space have a difficult time finding comparable parts for a similar price and are unable to replicate Apple’s unique form factors, so it’s nearly impossible to enter a market dominated by Apple and effectively compete.

So what? I’m not Apple.

Don’t worry—not everyone needs to be. For example, Google has become wildly successful creating low-cost, sharp-edged technology that can be implemented in a number of ways—a direct contrast to Apple’s strategy of using high-end, high-volume parts. The point is, it’s a big mistake to try and be Apple if you’re not Apple. To be Apple is a luxury that requires a unique attitude, focused design aesthetics and large scale purchasing, and depending on your industry that might not be a realistic strategy. But you can emulate Apple (or Googe for that matter) by using your own internal biases, culture and personality to determine what competitive differentiators will inform your strategy.

Apple has a uniquely profitable combination of traits—purposeful waste, intelligent product selection, clear vision, low part count, excellence in design—these are all things you can try to replicate, but only if it makes sense for your product, culture and industry. Perhaps your strengths are different. Maybe you have a geographic advantage or a highly efficient purchasing team or good relationships with your customers—if you can identify what your differentiators are, you can choose a manufacturing strategy that makes the most of them.

Determining your strengths and embracing a clear vision in line with them won’t necessarily make you a $200 billion company, but it will help you develop the most efficient and effective strategy for your team. And that is something even the smallest of manufacturers can drive toward.