Being Digital is becoming real - Part 1

Every once in a while, you read something that is really quite prescient. And with the best of such things, the power of the prognostication only grows with time. So it is that writers such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells have long been credited for predicting scientific advances such as manned space flight, the development of submarines, air travel and even some asks of what we know today at the Web.

But I want to turn to a more recent author - Nicholas Negroponte (the founder of MIT's Media Lab) - which grew out of a series of mid-1990s articles he had written for Wired magazine. In the book Being Digital, Negroponte posited that anything that could be delivered digitally eventually would. And, in doing so, it would dramatically change the nature of the underlying business behind the existing delivery vehicles for that product or service.

Again and again over the last two decades, it's easy to see how Negroponte's prediction has come true. In music, the sale of physical CDs is vastly outstripped by online music sales. At-home movies are no longer primarily consumed by buying or renting physical videotapes or DVDs - they are increasingly being streamed by services such as YouTube, Xbox video, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

The sale of digital books has skyrocketed in the wake of Amazon's release of the Kindle and its online bookstore. And when was the last time you went into a travel agent to buy a physical plane ticket? Any one of dozens of leading online travel booking sites have played a huge role in supplanting travel agents for many customers. None of this is new - and I have talked about it before.

The really interesting thing - or at least what is catching my interest - is the growth in physical goods that can be "delivered digitally" through the use of 3D printing technologies. Innovative new 3D printers make it possible to use digital information about how to custom-manufacture something to recreate that thing. As discussed in this piece from a recent NPR broadcast on the subject, it could be something as simple as a toothbrush. Or it could be that hard-to-find part for a classic car you've been restoring - but can't find anywhere.

But 3D printers are, of course, relatively expensive at the moment. Prices are falling quickly, but I think there's a good chance that they will follow the model of the quick printing industry. In the late 1980s, the advent of what was then called "desktop publishing" software allowed even the smallest of publications to create publications on-screen, deliver them in a disc to be read by linotype printers - and then have print-ready pages spat out of large expensive machines. And a big business grew out of that need from - and the founders of companies such as Kinko's (which was acquired by FedEx in 2003 for $2.4 billion) did very well out of it.

In my next post, I'll look at how the growth of the 3D printing business could play out. In the meantime, here's something I'd love to see come out of a 3D printer some day!

A classic Austin Mini.

Happy summer.