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"Unlike the jerry-built contraptions of the past, the Replicator 2s are sleek, metal, and stylish: MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis likens the design to "Darth Vader driving Knight Rider's KITT car while being airlifted by a Nighthawk spy plane." There is also the lighting. Oh, the lighting. "LEDs are part of our core values as a company," Pettis jokes. "

Thirty years ago, when John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends, his prescient vision of America's future, he used a simple yet powerful tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the newspaper. 

"Thingiverse is also introducing a new "Follow" button that will connect you to the things, digital designs, designers, users, tags, categories: all the stuff you care about most. By following a Thing, you'll get a notification when someone comments on it, makes a copy of it, or remixes it. Some new digital designs inspire a whole family of new Things, and the Follow button helps you keep track of those.  " As Bruce Sterling says, it's almost a social network of things. Now just imagine to have this affordance in augmented reality - you just point your smartphone, tablet or google glass to a thing, you activate some app and you get all this information. Also in the press release, the guys from Thingiverse explain how users have been tagging their uploads with useful descriptors - and so now you can follow tags or categories to get updates in a dashboard. We're talking here about the annotation of our physical reality, bookmarking no longer just the digital world of websites but of the objects which surround us. 

*This piece was originally published, in Italian, in the exceedingly innovative (and very Italian) website "Che Futuro." *As somebody who spends a lot of time in non-Anglophone countries, this is a situation that I see commonly. I rarely see it as well-described as this.

"Fab labs are a global network of local labs, enabling invention by providing access to tools for digital fabrication" Bruce Sterling has some comments on Beyond the Beyond http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/09/the-fab-charter-draft/