The Economist has a great survey this week on the future of manufacturing with some really interesting articles on short-run digital manufacturing, labor arbitrage opportunities (potentially moving manufacturing back from China), and collaborative manufacturing in the age of collaborative consumption.

Overall as with their recent interest 3D printing, these guys seem very bullish on the future of additive manufacturing technologies such as FDM and SLA. One interesting fact mentioned a few times is that the percentage of ...

First let me get this out of the way though: I love Kickstarter. As content, it is a geek's version of InStyle magazine— something you can mindlessly browse in front of the television while "trying on" the various projects you might buy into. What's more, at $300M of capital committed thus far, there is no way that it is not a fantastic platform for artisans and other types of makers.

Having said that, it bothers me that everyone seems hell ...

The Stacks, they are a pain. If you've never heard the term, it is in reference to the walled gardens controlled by Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Credit goes to sci-fi author/futurist Bruce Sterling who used it in his closing SXSW keynote this year. Here it is from the horse's mouth:

"[There's] a new phenomena that I like to call the Stacks [vertically integrated social media]. And we've got five of them -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, ...