Everyone loves the Nexus 7. It's the "right size." It's "like butter." Even the Apple loyalists are questioning whether the broken nose syndrome that can come from precariously balancing a 10 inch 1.5 lb tablet on your chest late at night is worth it in the face of this little waif.

For me though, there is no clearer sign that the Nexus 7 (like the much crappier Kindle Fire before it) belongs to a new class of device: the disposable vending machine for digital content. Worth it from a software perspective only if you are ok consuming content from the hard wired app stores that each of the platform players provide. They give up the gross margin on the hardware and you give up: usability, control, and general purpose-ness for the sake of consuming content like you never have before.

Sure you can install Android Market (er, Google Play) apps. And sure you can even replace the launcher— if you are interested in getting back into the brain damage of the typical Android spring board experience. But this is not the experience of the mainstream user paying $200-250 for what seems like a "deal." And the deal? Paying for the placement of a vending machine right in your lap— one that sells you cokes while you can read up on your tweet stream.

As far as I am concerned, the main thing the Nexus 7 proves is that the e-reader form factor can be extended for checking email, playing games, and the occasional web surfing experience. But this is much more of a wake up call for Amazon (who hopes to own the category of e-readers++) than Apple who might be just fine waiting to launch a 7 inch tablet until price pressure forces them to.

I like my Nexus 7 (unlike my Kindle Fire). But primarily as an e-reader. As a vending machine, I prefer the kind where I stick quarters in...

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 finished parts coming out of additive machines (where you deposit or solidify a powder/polymer/etc in a sort of 3D inkjet process) is up to 20-28% for final use parts as opposed to prototype use case which have been the main purview of these manufacturing techniques for a couple of decades now. From prosthetic limbs to airplane parts it turns out that increasingly the benefits of the accuracy of a computer model when combined with the precision of a finely controlled 3D printer is finding its way into mainstream products.

Despite the success of the fantastic entrepreneurs at companies like Makerbot, the mainstream use case is still elusive. At HP we used to wonder whether 3D fabrication through additive techniques would follow the inkjet distribution model (one in every home) or the service provider one (which remains one of the few growth areas in conventional ink on paper printing). The arguments for the latter are clear: more expensive machinery amortized over greater demand that can be kept in better shape by trained operators. But then again such was the argument for mainframes and minicomputers before the advent of the PC.

One thing I do wish they'd covered in the survey was the advances in subtractive manufacturing technologies because of digital design and the dropping costs of computation in general. Though modern forms of milling may be less sexy than the Star Trek replicator fantasies induced by the promise of 3D printing, the fine folks at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms have all but convinced me of the relevance of subtractive techniques especially when it comes to near term hobbyist applications. I'll have more to say about those (and specifically about custom electronics) in posts to come.

The final point I'll mention from the survey is how generally optimistic and "lean forward" the promise of bringing the advantages of computing into the physical world through these new (or recently re-factored) manufacturing techniques is. Compared to the recent "SoLoMo" malaise (brilliantly covered by Alexis Madrigal in the Atlantic this week), it is a breath of fresh air.

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 bent on describing Kickstarter as the next step in the evolution of funding for new ventures, or more specifically, in referring to it as the next step in crowdfunding.

To me Kickstarter seems a lot more like Groupon in its essence. To see why it is worth considering Groupon not as the juggernaut for local business marketing that it seems to be but as a clever financing instrument for putting money in the hands of cash-strapped small businesses. Looked at from this perspective here is what Groupon is: a small business loan financed by consumers and collateralized by the future goods/services/etc. provided by the business. As the loan originator, Groupon has historically taken a monster commission (though that may be changing).

Similarly, Kickstarter is a loan to the maker financed by his customers and collateralized by the promise of future goods/services/etc. It is brilliant in its execution, relying on the power of the network to aggregate the lenders across geography in a way that ought to provide Kickstarter with more scale and network effects that Groupon has ever had (due to its local dependency). It is clever in how it price discriminates based on sponsorship "level" allowing consumers the ability to self select into buckets of passion for a particular product (the Medicis of 15th century Renaissance Italy would be proud).

But here is the key bit: when I "fund" the Pebble watch, I am in no way funding the project in the traditional equity finance model. That is, I don't get the right to a piece of the future cash flows of the business in the same way that I would if I were to find a company to invest in on AngelList. It may be semantics here (after all, "I just loaned money to X" sounds much less cool) but in an era when so many of the funding models for new ventures are truly being democratized, distinguishing between equity products and credit products might be worthwhile.

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, Apple and Microsoft. The future of the stacks is basically to take over the Internet and render it irrelevant. They're not hostile to the Internet -- they're just [looking after] their own situation. And they all think they'll be the one Stack... and render the others irrelevant.

While I whole heartedly agree with his characterization of the Stacks's intent, I am not sure they are all equally bad or competent at locking everyone else out. Witness the greatest offender: Apple. For me iTunes is so broken these days that its core functionality has been completely unbundled by better alternatives. I get my music from Spotify or Pandora. I listen to podcasts via iCatcher. In both cases the network has enabled a different kind of design center which allows third parties to beat the native apps on the Stack.

In some cases you truly are stuck on the Stack. I use iCloud (which is in most ways terrible) because it backs up my iDevices in a way nothing else can. I also use iCloud to sync my bookmarks and photos. I could use Chrome and rely on Google's Stack to sync my bookmarks but I don't because it is not "better enough" than what is native to the Stack (Safari). However I'd gladly use something to sync my photos if— like iPhoto— it could sync natively the photos taken from all of my devices.

In case it is not clear, I love the concept of the Stacks. I just think we ought to get a lot more granular about the places in the different Stacks that are still viable attack surfaces for the creativity of third parties. These may change quickly as the Stacks grow and extend into popular use cases but one thing that can't be denied is that the folks that exploit the openings (Dropbox, Evernote, Instapaper as examples) create tons of value along the way.