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Guy Mamou-Mani, co-président de la SSII OPEN et président de Syntec Numérique, et Henri Verdier, président de Cap Digital, en appellent tous les deux à agir urgemment pour développer une industrie de référence de l'après-numérique en France. La réponse nécessaire à une crise de la modernité.

Les projets permettant, grâce au web ou à des outils adaptés, de faire de biens comme des vêtements ou des lunettes des items personnalisés par l'acheteur lui-même, se multiplient. Un moyen non négligeable de stimuler le secteur ?

o you're standing around the water cooler on Monday morning, and Joe from accounting asks what you got up to over the weekend. "Oh, nothing much," you reply. "I learned how to pick a lock, how to make ricotta from scratch, and how to make a camp stove out of two soda cans, and that was just Saturday." Such an odd emporium of learning actually exists in Oakland, California. A pair of MIT-schooled brothers, Gil and J.D. Zamfirescu, have assembled a two day nerdapalooza they're calling Workshop Weekend

Slashdot editor Jeff Boehm visted Maker Works in Ann Arbor, MI, where they not only have an Epilog Helix Laser Cutter/Engraver, but let him use it. Which, of course, he happily did, just as you or I would have done if somebody said, "Here. Borrow my laser cutter and engraving machine." The sound in the video is a little rough, since it was recorded live in a room full of loud machines -- like laser cutters. But it's still fascinating to watch (and hear) the process. The only downside is the "Ooh! I want one of those!" effect. There are used units available out there, but they cost as much as a pretty good used car. Maybe that's why there are so many Maker Spaces, also called Hacker Spaces, out there. Here's a global Hacker Space list. Hopefully, you'll find one near you, so you can do a little laser cutting (and lots of other neat stuff) yourself. Note: Slashdot accepts reader video submissions. Email robin at roblimo dot com for details.

The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. "The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications," they wrote in their book, "Race Against the Machine." In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.

In recent years, Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten about silicon. It's been about dot-coms, Web advertising, social networking and apps for smartphones. But there are signs here that hardware is becoming the new software. It is an expansion of a trend that began a few years ago with the Flip videophone, a sleeper hit, and has recently accelerated with Nest, the smart thermostat; Lytro, a camera that refocuses a photo after it is taken; and the Pebble smartwatch, a wristwatch that can interact with a smartphone.

Baxter is the first of a new generation of smarter, more adaptive industrial robots. Conventional industrial robots are expensive to program, incapable of handling even small deviations in their environment, and so dangerous that they have to be physically separated from human workers by cages. So even as robotics have become commonplace in the automotive and pharmaceutical industries, they remain impractical in many other types of manufacturing. Baxter, however, can be programmed more easily than a Tivo and can deftly respond to a toppled-over part or shifted table. And it is so safe that Baxter's developer, Rethink Robotics, which loaned Baxter to Vanguard Plastics, believes it can work seamlessly alongside its human coworkers.

Heads up: in 20 years, you'll wake up and download the shoes you're planning to wear while brushing your teeth. Then, you'll walk to the kitchen to eat the breakfast burrito your burrito robot made you. Finally, you'll head out the front door of your house-an all-plastic abode made out of recycled plastic. Oh wait-actually, you could do that right now. Because the batshit insane technology for all this already exists. Weirded out? Here's a list of the 10 craziest things you didn't know 3D printers could do, ranked from least to most mind-blowing:

Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers. It started off as a project to give artists access to embedded micro-processors for interaction design projects, but I think it's going to end up in a museum as one of the building blocks of the modern world. It allows rapid, cheap, prototyping for embedded systems. It turns what used to be fairly tough hardware problems into simpler software problems.

AS manufacturing goes digital, it will change out of all recognition, says Paul Markillie. And some of the business of making things will return to rich countries

Today with the growing popularity of 3-D printer technology, anyone who fancies him or herself an inventor can find out overnight if they're truly innovative - or just a pretender. "We have an enormous advantage over a poor guy like da Vinci, whose every idea would involve a laborious effort to verify. Things that were good ideas, he would have discarded because of the manufacturing challenges. We don't have that problem any more," said Stocco, a professor of engineering at the University of British Columbia who is an inventor himself. His specialty is creating equipment for robot-assisted orthopedic surgery.

Co-founders von Bengtson, an aerospace scientist and former NASA contractor, and Madsen, an entrepreneur and aerospace engineer, have a lot to be proud of since they founded their non-profit space program four years ago. In June 2011, for example, Copenhagen Suborbital's army of volunteers successfully built, launched and recovered a 31-foot-tall rocket - the largest "amateur" launcher ever built - with a crash-test dummy tucked inside.

Berlin-based company Formulor was founded by a team with over ten years of experience in laser-cutting and design. Formulor launched in 2010 and became our first manufacturing partner in the EU. With the release of the Personal Factory API, the Formulor team began working on a whole new site and improved user interface. The new Formulor site is now live and features a great built-in design tool that lets you create your design right on the page. Just pick your material (25 to choose from), select a size and thickness, then start creating your design with the various shape, text, and line tools

Last winter, Thomas Valenty bought a MakerBot - an inexpensive 3-D printer that lets you quickly create plastic objects. His brother had some Imperial Guards from the tabletop game Warhammer, so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank.

Les signaux s'accumulent. L'industrie « traditionnelle » serait de plus en plus tentée par l'open source. C'était déjà le cas dans l'électronique, avec notamment la carte Arduino. La santé et l'automobile y trouveraient aussi aujourd'hui un relais d'innovation crédible, voir incontournable. Un article de The Economist intitulé « When code can kill or cure » (dans le cahier spécial technologie du N° du 2 juin 2012) explique qu'utiliser un modèle « open source » à la conception des équipements médicaux promet d'accroître la sécurité et l'innovation. Basés aujourd'hui sur des systèmes ultra-propriétaires, les équipements médicaux, défibrillateurs, pompes à insulines sont parfois soumis à des défaillances bien plus graves qu'un simple plantage d'ordinateur. Sans parler des tentations des hackers de prouver la vulnérabilité de ces systèmes au piratage.

Les idées de réindustrialisation, de made in France, de démondialisation se développent sur le constat d'une mutation profonde de l'économie mondiale. Mais les politiques publiques adéquates restent à inventer : l'enjeu n'est pas simplement de subventionner des projets ou de superposer de nouveaux outils, il s'agit de construire de nouvelles relations entre les territoires, leurs populations, les entreprises et les acteurs financiers. L'économie est désormais un enjeu démocratique.

MakerBot Industries, creators of the Replicator 3D printer that hit stores this past January have just upgraded their award-winning printer. The Replicator 2 has increased resolution, can print larger objects, and sports a stylish new look. And the new printer is only one way MakerBot is making a serious bid to become a major competitor in the growing 3D printing market. Just days ago the company announced the grand opening of their first retail store, located in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan.