Roland seems to pop up more and more. The most recent news being their new easy-to-use 3D scanner (press release). The specs aren’t bad (10″ x 16″; rotary and planar), the output files are good (STL/GSF/3DM), and the price of roughly US $12,000 isn’t completely out of reach. Nice.

Now if I were 3D challenged and lacking creativity (and ethics), I’d get one of these and kick out a 3DM. I’d load Rhino, import that and export as an IGES into a solid modeler like Pro/E. I’d convert the surface there to a solid and – assuming it doesn’t choke – shell it to a thin wall stock. From there it’s back out to any format that can fab a part in metal. Custom metalsmiths and jewellers, all your base are belong to us.

via Desktop Engineering

This will be part update and part food for thought. Wired has an article today called “Printing Organs on Demand” (link). I’ve posted about this topic previously (link 1 and link 2), but what struck me was the idea of “branded organs”.

Imagine you’re a run-of-the-mill person and you’re in the hospital to get a new liver. Does your insurance cover the certified so-so Brand X organ printer output, or does it cover, for example, the creation from a Philips SuperOrgantronic 6000? And let’s say that there are still occasions when people just get transplants. Would you accept a used printed organ if it was only Brand X?

Echoes of William Gibson’s future actors and their highend artificial eyes.

More industrial design interview goodness over on BW. This time it’s Ross Lovegrove. Read the interview (link) and look at the slideshow (link).

There’s an interesting Brand Channel article being carried on BusinessWeek titled ” Virtual Packaging Lacks Sense“. Couple clips from it here:

On Reputation:

E-commerce is largely driven — and largely limited — by the trust consumers are willing to place in it. Unlike bricks-and-mortar commerce, e-commerce has yet to win the confidence of consumers; it is still struggling to build trust, a weaker form of confidence.

On Consumer Behavior:

Early predictions were that e-commerce would appeal more to our rational natures than to our emotions. …{snip}… But several years ago, a study found that those consumers who do make online purchases are more impulsive than those who do not buy online, that they are less averse to risk (more trusting), and are less brand and price conscious. This expression of trust has an emotional basis, and although it may also be reasonable, it is not completely rational.

On Retail vs E-tail:

Observes Meyers, “There is a certain amount of adventure and change of pace in going shopping, vis-Ã -vis sitting in front of a computer screen.”

Nice piece. There’s also mention of the Gap’s website providing a virtual mannequin and improving the interactivity and sense of adventure mentioned in one of the clips. I recall hearing about it and others a long time ago, but haven’t kept up with them. I’ll need to check out their site and some others to see what the state of the art looks like. When I find something neat I’ll post it here.

Over the weekend my host’s server died and with it my website. So of course they had to bring another server online and restore from backup. Fortunately, I backed up my files right before the crash (and navigated the restoration process with the help of Turtle Meat’s “Fragments” how-to webpage – thanks, mon). I don’t think I lost any blog entries, but I did lose comments on a recent entry about Umbria tracking my posts.

The gist of that lost conversation was that Umbria had previously gotten the attention of a few of us (I knew they sounded familiar) back in June when BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker posted a Blogspotting entry about them.

Which brings me back to the current circumstances. Having been the on-again/off-again target of amateur hacks looking to cut their teeth on outdated and vulnerable code, it reminds me that should a website say something a corporate entity doesn’t like (e.g. “Burger King’s got the worst onion rings I’ve ever had”), they can’t even employ the services of a hacker to wipe files (not that a corporation would ever do anything illegal). Because assuming, say, I don’t back them up, and assuming my host didn’t back them up, there’s a good chance some netbot has already archived my post. In fact, that was going to be an option in the event I’d lost more than I did.

So two lessons (re)learned. First, back up your files frequently. Second, once it’s posted there’s no erasing it.